It’s been awhile, so I figured I’d do one long post as to what’s been going on lately. To start with the most important news, Leslie and I are now engaged. We got engaged on Leap Day at Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur. Leslie didn’t find out that we were going until that day at lunch, and I surprised her with the ring and proposal at dinner. It took a lot of doing, but Leslie was actually shocked speechless. We highly recommend Post Ranch if you want the kind of trip where you don’t mind paying a premium for full service and an impressive location. (Thanks goes out to Scott for the suggestion.) Everything else kind of pales in comparison, but here are some other highlights:

Last November, Leslie and I went to Hong Kong and Tokyo for a couple of weeks. It was the first time I’d been to asia and the whole trip was a great experience. In Hong Kong, we got to meet up with my friend Helen who is currently working there for Ebay. It was really easy to get around Hong Kong on just English, which made it a nice way to ease into the trip, but the value of the US dollar really hurt sometimes. The Hong After 5 nights in Hong Kong, we stayed for 6 nights in Tokyo. It took some convincing to get Leslie to trust my subway navigation, but we got to see a lot of the city. If we did it again, the only thing that we’d do differently would be to see a lot more of the sights outside of Tokyo.

Lately, I’ve had a couple of different projects going. One of them was to build a hackintosh (a PC with mac os installed). I did a variation on the Ars Technica Hot Rod build from here, after a friend had good luck with it. The goal was to save money, so I got an older video card from the same friend and used some drives that I already had. After doing a bunch of reading on the insanely mac forums, I got virtually everything working. I still need to really decide if I want to keep using mac os full time, but I did go out and buy a copy of leopard.

The home office has also undergone a lot of renovations. In order to get Leslie moved in, I took out my old desk, pulled the closet out of the office, and finished the repainting of all of the walls. We now have a couple of ikea desks that fit a lot better together and I’m putting together some more ikea furniture for storage in the room. Its been a long project, but I think that it’ll look and work a lot better when it’s done.

I keep saying that I’m going to do more blogging, and then stuff comes up. As usual, it’s work. The company that I left the flix to work at is now called Skyfire and the two founders will be presenting a demo at DEMO on Tuesday. If you’re interested in what it looks like, a coworker put together a youtube video showing off some of what the product can do.

Personally, I’ve been working on the browser start page along with a bunch of other related and unrelated projects. As some of you know, we are still looking for a front end web engineer to work on many cool projects related to the phone start page and the main website, so if you know me and know of a person that might be interested, drop me an email.

I’ve been crazy busy with work and traveling (Hong Kong & Tokyo post coming soon), but I wanted to throw up a quick Happy Holidays post. For anyone interested, my holidays involved a few fun little items. On Sunday, Leslie, her roommate, and I went to The Village Pub for a holiday dinner. I will say that after watching a lot of episodes of Kitchen Nightmares (mostly, the BBC version), you see restaurants in a different way, but that just makes the restaurants that pull off a great experience that much better.

On Monday night, we opened presents and Leslie helped me finish up my xmas tree cupcake experiment. It has been awhile since I’ve done any interesting desserts, so it was fun to play around in the kitchen. For Christmas, we went to visit Leslie’s mom in the east bay. Thankfully, the family drama was kept to a minimum. The funniest event of the day was when shortly after we arrived, her mom started doing really really laud karaoke.

At some point, Leslie and I got seriously hooked on Naruto. So hooked that we had a weekend (Friday night to Sunday night) of watching about 35 episodes (I dare you to start watching the end of the Chunin exam and stop watching before the end of the Konoha Invasion arc). Anyway, I had downloaded a whole lot of fan subbed episodes and was just playing them on a TV using my laptop. This wasn’t a horrible solution, but it was far from optimal. After doing some reading, I realized that I could run xbox media center if I hacked my xbox. Since I assumed I was going to get an XBox 360 when Halo 3 came out, I figured I had nothing to lose.

The constraints on the project were that I didn’t want to purchase anything for the hacking (at some point, I bought an IR receiver for the xbox, but I decided that didn’t count). What I found out is that there were 2 ways to mod an xbox to run your own software: softmod or mod chip. Mod chips are fairly cheap and come in the solderable (the cheapest) and unsolderable (maybe $10-$15 more expensive), but I figured I’d try and softmod. Softmods have come a long way and are fairly easy. Most of them are buffer exploits that get installed as sounds or something else similar. The main problem is getting them onto the xbox. There are about 3 games that you can try and find that will (along with a suitable cable that you can buy or make from an xbox controller and a usb cable) allow you to use game save hacking to mod the xbox.

If you don’t want to try any of those, you can try and put the data on the hard drive yourself. The main problem is that the hard drive is locked until it receives an unlock command from the xbox and becomes locked again when it loses power. It’s possible to find the mod files and create a linux boot cd that will do the job for you if you get the hard drive unlocked. The “recommended” way to do this is to take the top off of the xbox near your computer, start the xbox, and at some point after you get to the main screen, disconnect the ATA cable from the hard drive (while it is still running) and connect the drive to an ata cable from your computer. At this point, you power up the computer and use the linux distribution to put the files on the drive.

It sounds kind of crazy and has a small chance of frying your hard drive, but I got it all to work and can now access and play all the media files off of any computer on the network. What’s nice about it is that it can understand all the IR commands if you get the xbox remote kit. It took a little while to find all of the files I needed, but it’s an easy enough project to complete in a weekend and you have a “free” media center pc without tivo functionality.

Let me start with a plug for the Newsgator service. Their idea is to have an integrated one login system with client software that works well on every major platform. I used NetNewsWire on my mac for a long time and then switched over to FeedDemon since my work machine and main home machine now run windows. All my news reading at work and home are completely integrated and I find I like using a client app better than a web app for some reason.

Anyway, after reading Scott’s post, I wondered how I should share links with people. With the last release, FeedDemon’s newsbin feature got online sync and feed urls. Therefore, I can now create a newsbin that people can subscribe to if they want.

Here’s the link if you want to read the random items that I thought people might find interesting: http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/svc/ClippingsRSS.aspx?uid=113427&fid=3421340