I’ve spent the weekend doing… absolutely nothing. The past week has been so busy that it’s nice to just lay in bed and do nothing. Got the laptop about where I want it, I think; could have spent some time working out the CSS issues with the site, but didn’t even feel like straining my brain that much. Next week, and the week after, I’ll be in Forsyth attending Defensive Tactics Instructor class. Not really looking forward to that… not so much the class as driving to Forsyth and staying away from home for two weeks. That, and getting my butt kicked; the class is supposed to be physically intensive, and I’m not exactly the world’s most physical guy.

The tactical team seems to be in death-spiral. Early this year, after my promotion, I was told I would be team leader, with my Captain as team commander. I was supposed to run the day-to-day while he attended to the big picture. Then we were told we couldn’t get overtime for training, and the Captain became more of an absentee landlord, and interest in the team has been waning. Top it off with the creation of a “HEAT Unit”, an intensive-patrol kind of targeted enforcement unit that will be doing a lot of the things that the tactical unit was supposed to do, and morale dropped. I find myself with little time to attend to the tactical team, and was told last week that I’m supposed to run the HEAT unit as well. I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves with another feel-good initiative that hasn’t been as thought out as it’s creators thought it was. But, it’s the flavor of the week right now, so it’s getting the attention. I need to consider the long-term and where it- and the tactical team- will be this time next year.

Anyway. I’ll be taking the new laptop with me to Forsyth, and if I can work out internet access, I’ll update occassionally.

Came home from work to find a door tag from FedEx stating they’d tried to deliver the laptop, but no one was home. Gateway’s order status page miraculously says “Delivered” and gives a tracking number. Good timing. I went and picked it up from the Fed Ex depot, but was too tired to really play with it- long, long day on the range. Today I cleaned off the junk applications (no thank you, AOL) and installed all the other software I use regularly… re-did the start menu… picked up the Student version of Office 2003 (a good deal, as far as Micro$oft goes). Tabletpcbuzz.com regulars had problems with the tablet pen on this model; I haven’t run across any huge problems so far. Gateway is supposed to replace the pens in November, anyway.

In other news, a co-worker may be buying the truck from me… if he does, that gets me out of a monthly payment and insurance payment on a vehicle I drive once a month and gives me enough cash to pay off a credit card and this laptop. I should know by the end of the week.

No progress on the novel… no time lately.

After being told I was approved for financing for a laptop through Gateway (as mentioned in last entry), I got a letter saying the credit had been denied, then was told by Gateway that no, the order is fine; although their “Order Status” page still says “Order Processing”. Today I received my Gateway credit card as per the order. Well. We’ll see if the laptop arrives Friday as scheduled, and if I get a bill. Heh.

Wasn’t able to work on the formatting of the photo album, as bluehost’s FTP server was down all day Sunday. It appears to be up right now, but I’m sitting in my office waiting for tonight’s Citizen Law Enforcement Academy, that I’m co-ordinating, to start. So it looks like it’ll wait until the weekend.

Talk about a long, unproductive week. Part of my duties are to perform background checks on new employee applications. I had planned on spending this past week catching up on the little things I’d been putting off while I was busy with the Citizen’s Law Enforcement Academy and week-long Field Training Officer class. Last thursday, I had ten applications dropped on my desk- so much for my slack week. Background checks take some time, as I’ve got to make contact with references and old employers as well as dig into criminal and driver’s histories, as well as law enforcement history. So, I spent the entire week doing that, as well as other things that crossed my desk, instead of what I’d had planned. Fine, except that Thursday I found out- we don’t have any openings. I just wasted my entire week.

Then there’s the current salary/budget controversy. Over the summer, the county hired a consultant to do a salary study, comparing what each employee did as part of his job and what he was paid for it with similar jobs and pay rates at comparable agencies. As every county employee suspected, the study said we were grossly underpaid for the job we do. The county commissioners said ok, we’ll accept their salary recommendations- but that means we can’t increase your budgets for personnel and equipment. That puts us in a tight spot, as we have to roughly double the size of the Sheriff’s Office in the next five years. The other unhappy point was that while everyone will go up to the new minimum pay for their position, those folks on probation- as new hires, or newly promoted- will have to wait until their anniversary date to receive their raise. On the plus side of that, they’ll go up to their midpoint rather than the minimum. In my case, that could be quite a substantial jump. So, considering my anniversary for Sergeant will be the end of February, I think I can live with waiting.

To top it off, Kublai has been sick all weekend. He threw up about six times last night, and about as many today. He doesn’t seem ill otherwise. I tried giving him some Pepto-Bismol (1 tablespoon per 80 pounds every 8 hours is safe for dogs), but he’s smarter than he looks; and after about half a tablespoon had been squirted in his cheek with a large syringe, he just stopped swallowing. He’s been fine for the past couple of hours, so I’m going to skip his dinner tonight and see if he stops yarking. In the meantime, despite cleaning the carpet after every episode (why is it that dogs refuse to puke on linoleum tile, and instead seek out the hardest to reach piece of carpet they can find?), the house still smells faintly of dog vomit.

Ah, well. I took the plunge this week, as well, and ordered the replacement for the venerable Sony Vaio laptop on which I’ve penned most of these ‘blog entries. Don’t get me wrong, the laptop still works… but it’s a Pentium III 500 megahertz, 128 meg RAM, and 5 gig hard drive (barely) running XP Pro. For example, it took 3 minutes to start System Information just now. Add to that the fact that the battery is shot and won’t hold a charge, and I refuse to spend half the laptop’s value on a replacement, meaning I’m tethered to an outlet. Gateway’s CX200X convertable- laptop that doubles as a tablet PC- caught my eye and will be here on the 21st. My roommate found the same model at Best Buy and succumbed to it’s charms as well.

Some time ago, my roommate and I ripped every CD we owned into mp3’s and put them on a file server. Makes it easy to get to the music from anywhere in the house, and Ian got a networked mp3 player for his bedroom to listen to music at night. Now, with a 5.1 surround setup and a 57 inch rear projection HDTV in the den, that music was just itching to be played through the stereo. Itching, I tell you. In my quest for nifty-neat gadgets, I was envisioning having some of the nicer eye-candy winamp visualizations playing on the TV along with the music. Thus began the saga.

First, we attempted some of the networked mp3 players on the market that supported video. Most of them require some sort of server software to be running on the server; and, of course, they all conflict with each other. After Ian’s difficulties making the Roku Soundbridge M1000 and M2000 work with our wireless network (the setup is a joke… you have to telnet to the device), we decided to skip their high-def model; which is a pity, because it looked really nice. Next came the D-Link Media Lounge, which worked… after a fashion. It was really, really, really slow. It apparently didn’t cache anything, and with 5000 mp3s, going from one page of songs to the next took upwards of a minute.

Then we started looking at Media Center Extenders… hardware devices that connect to a PC running Microsoft’s Media Center. HP and Linksys are the only two on the market (other than an X-Box one); and they’re both basically identical and both actually made by Microsoft. Since we were upgrading the server closet, we went ahead and build a media center server to try this out. The Linksys connected fine and was much, much faster than the D-Link… but was saddled with Microsoft’s digital rights management restrictions. Certain things wouldn’t play, like certain file types and high-definition content. It also had problems with caching information… make a change to a playlist, and it might or might or might not update.

So, we took those parts from the media center server and purchased a Silverstone case- that matches the other stereo components- and rebuilt it as a home theater PC. Component video out to the TV, digital out to the stereo, and video and audio in from the satellite dish receiver to the PC. Theoretically, we’ve replaced the DVD player and VCR (and laserdisc player, which I haven’t used in two years… anyone want to buy it?) and gained mp3 playback, and can control it all with the remote.

But of course, it wasn’t that easy. First, the remote IR blaster that came with the Turtle Beach audio card wouldn’t work with Media Center. The Microsoft IR blaster works, so we went with that. Getting the picture configured correctly took a bit of doing, but we finally figured it out. Then there was the DVD playback- Microsoft doesn’t want you playing DVD video back to a TV device, only a monitor. WTF, over? What do you think people are going to be doing with a media center PC, anyway? A little third party program took care of DRM and region encoding issues, so now DVD’s played back with an exceptional picture. Now the problem was sound- Turtle Beach’s audio card would only let you choose 2 channel audio or forced 5.1 dolby digital through the optical out. Dolby DTS was right out. No, wait… Media Center uses whatever third party DVD player you have installed. In our case, it was Power DVD. Upgraded that freeware version, and voila… dolby digital acts like it’s supposed to, and DTS support is there.

So it was a long, drawn out pain in the ass; but I got what I was aiming for; plus digital video recording without having to pay the $700 Dish Network wants for a dvr/receiver. Only drawbacks to the DVR function are the video quality- because we don’t yet have a video in card that supports component video, but just acting as a digital vcr, that’s not a big deal for us- and being able to watch one show while recording another. That will require two dish receivers, and that’s something for another day.