I got my TV tuner card moved over to Athena, the Linux box yesterday.  So today, I installed MythTV on it; either because I was bored, high or both.  It's actually pretty cool, although there were a couple of drawbacks for me.  The first is that Athena only has an Athlon 550 processor, so it's not too fast.  The second and bigger one though is that I don't have cable tv right now and don't know where my antenna is to use regular tv.  I might look for it later and try that out.  But for anyone looking for a PVR box who doesn't mind using Linux, I would recommend it.

I found an add-on for PHP-Nuke called GoogleTap that creates pretty urls.  It looks pretty promising so far.  I'm going to install it later, but it looks a bit complicated and I'm way too doped up on pain pills at the moment to do anything that complex.  I'll report later with my success or failure and my thoughts about the whole ordeal.

I went to the doctor a little bit ago.  They took out my stitches.  It turns out they're not going to have to burn away any of my flesh because it went back down.  But, while I was there, the doctor cut out a bunch of dead skin and scab.  I decided they leave the exam room door open while they do it so the patients don't start screaming obscenities at the doctor like I almost did.  It hurt a lot.  I ended up taking twice as much Lortab as I have been to kill it.  Now I'm too high to go to work this afternoon, but at least it doesn't hurt so bad.  Still hurts though. 

I'm still a little amazed at how much pain medicine they've given me.  Originally, it was 40 Lortab 7.5s with a refill.  I'm halfway through the second bottle.  The doctor asked if I needed more and I told him I needed something that wouldn't give me nausea so bad.  So he gave me a prescription for 40 Darvocet 100s... with a refill.  I just hope they won't mess with my head too bad.

On a pleasant note, I've got Homestar's OS and drivers and such reinstalled.  I haven't gotten to the applications yet, except for PowerDVD.  But, I did get a driver installed that I apparently hadn't installed before.  Apparently the builtin Windows XP bluetooth support sucks.  I installed the Dell driver this time and it's actually working with the bluetooth headset I have.  It's really neat.  Hopefully, by the end of tomorrow, I'll have everything back to normal.

Some bad things got installed on the laptop, so I had a choice.  I could spend several hours getting it all cleaned off and working right again, or I could just do a format and reinstall that I'd been thinking about anyway.  I've decided to go with the latter option.  I think I've got everything backed up now, so it's time to start reinstalling windows.  Now I'll finally be rid of some of the crap that Dell installed on it before I got it.  (There's always a bright side.)

On the subject of projects though, I also going to have the time to finally move our Customer Service register over to the POS system I developed about two years ago.  To explain why I haven't done it before now, the first 6 months we didn't want to have them both moved so we could ensure the POS system kept going.  Also, the whole thing is based on code written in RPG2 originally for the IBM System 36.  The bulk of the code we use was written in 1986 and 1988 and has just been patched to keep up with our needs (albeit poorly at times).  The other hurdle with the CS register is that they handle a lot of transactions that I didn't have to worry about on the regular regiters, so it means I have to write a lot of new code.  I also need to try and integrate it with some programs that were entirely seperate before.

In my opinion the whole system is one big disaster waiting to happen, but there isn't any budget for migrating to something else (although I have found some interesting alternatives).

Well, it looks like I'm finally going to have a chance to overhaul the Outdoor America Store website soon.  It's been needing it for awhile, but my other duties at work have been keeping me from it.  On the bright side of my little "accident", a lot of my non-IT related duties have been shifted back to other people for one reason or another so I'm going to have more time to do my functions as IT Manager.

I'm looking at probably moving the site to PHP-Nuke for ease of use. Right now, we're running on a custom front-end I wrote and a Miva shopping engine. The bad part of the front-end is that I never had a lot of time to flesh out the interface for updating it, so it's hard for other people to update the news on the site. It's nearly impossible for them to update much of anything else.

The Miva side is updated automagically from our database on our AS/400 using a bunch of perl code I wrote. Unfortunately, the data there isn't really set up to be used that way, so the organization of the online catalog is a bit lacking. I'm looking to replace the whole thing with OSCommerce which I can integrate with a PHP-Nuke frontend. Hopefully it'll be easier for others to help administer that way.

I just came across this article on Slashdot about a company that's using fiber optics to bring sunlight indoors to lower electricity bills and heat from incandescent lighting.  Sounds promosing so far to me, but it'll be 2007 or so before any of it hits the market.

I wonder if I'd be able to talk someone into getting something like this for my desk at work.  I work in a cave, which doesn't really bother me, but the only light source I have anywhere near my desk is a makeshift light fixture.  It used to be a shop light.  It really wouldn't be so dark, except my desk has been cubicled in by a bunch of tall file cabinets.  Not much light comes in over them.

I was talking to my grandmother on the phone the other day about one of my relatives that was coming into town. I couldn't remember exactly who he was, so I asked. This got us to the topic of our family reunion several years ago, which in turn reminded me about wanting to look into parts of my family tree. She told me that someone in the family had parts of the data already compiled for a family tree. I've decided to work on getting that information together for both sides of my family.

One of the biggest reasons I wanted to do this has to do with my last name. The way it's been explained to me, it's made up. My great-grandfather is rumored to have run off when he was younger after a fight where he thought the other guy might have died and changed his last name. I'd heard parts of the story before, but I got a much better explanation this evening. Most of that story was told by my great-grandmother and not my great-grandfather.

It also seems that while later on in life, his sister moved into the same city. Her last name was Kynes, but my grandmother wasn't sure if that was a married name or not. She's committed to helping me get some of this information together as well as getting the already compiled information from her side of the family. Now I just have to do a lot of digging and talking to people. It ought to be interesting.

I came across a website for a web-based Tech TV network. They have a show called Systm where two guys talk about a tech topic for 10-15 minutes. They've got two episodes now. The first one talked about "warspying", where you look for those wireless X10 cameras that we all used to get lots of popups about. The second though, talked about MythTV, an open source DVR program for Linux.

My second monitor for my desktop died today, so I had to steal the monitor off the Linux box I had running. I was thinking though about taking my TV tuner, which doesn't work under Windows Server 2003 anyway, and putting it in there to hook up to the TV. If only I still had cable TV.  I might go ahead and do it anyway just to play with it.