Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Morning Coffee 133

• I've been off for two weeks, so getting back into "the swing" of things will probably take a day or two - both at work and on my blog. Hope everyone had a happy holiday season.
• I ended the year with 245 blog posts, which wasn't quite as many as either of my first two years blogging, but was much more than I had been writing for the last two years.
• It was a Zune Xmas in the Pierson house. I got a pink Zune for my wife, and my mother and father got Zunes for each other. I got to load them all up with content for Xmas morning. Maybe I'm just used to WMP, but I'm not a huge fan of the Zune software. Yes, it's very pretty but it's missing some fairly basic features like automatic down-sampling lossless music. On the other hand, the on-device experience rocks and my wife is using her Zune regularly. I've got a trip to England coming up in April, and I'm thinking about getting one of the new 80GB ones for the trip.
• They lost any chance of playing for the national championship, but USC sure looked like a champion yesterday. Seems appropriate for this crazy college football season that if Ohio State doesn't win big, pretty much all the other BCS bowl winners with a legitimate argument to be #1.
• The Caps beat the eastern-conference leading Senators yesterday for the third time this season and the second time in four days. They have 13 points in the last ten games and 10-5-4 since Boudreau took over as coach. If they keep that pace up, they would likely make the playoffs - that would be quite a feat given their horrific start.
• Speaking of hockey, I watched most of the Winter Classic yesterday, including the game-winning shootout goal by the Anointed One. It was really strange but cool to watch a hockey game between snowflakes. I agree with Scott Burnside's take that these outdoor games are good for the league, but shouldn't be a regular part of the season.
• I finished Portal yesterday - that's a fantastic game. I also got Mass Effect, so now I need to decide which to take on first: that or Half-Life 2.
• A few months ago, I was thinking about using HomePlug for home networking but decided to upgrade my wireless network instead. But recently I've started streaming movies from my loft computer to my Xbox, and the wireless network isn't always up to the task. I could run CAT5, but there's already an unused coax cable running up to the loft and I wondered if I could just use that? I discovered the Multimedia over Coax Alliance, but none of their certified products appear to be available. Those products have to share the home coax network with the cable company, but I can dedicate my coax cable. Anyone know a way to use coax to bridge CAT5 networks? Even something DIY?