Soul Searchings

I have just discovered this new utility that is awesome. Let me start by presenting the problem that I had. When I’m over at Elaine’s place (which is most of the time), we are pretty much always just in her room. We have tons of TV shows and movies on tapes, CDs, DVDs, and on the computer that we watch on either the computer monitor or the bedroom TV… but she does not have cable in her room. So when I want to watch something on TV, such as Canucks games, I can’t… unless I go to the living room and her mom isn’t watching TV, but she usually is. I tried thinking of ways to be able to watch TV in her room… perhaps pulling a really long coaxial cable, or buying a remote signal beamer thing, but never got around to doing either.

There weren’t any live video streams on the Internet for hockey games either, only audio… so then I thought, why don’t I make my own stream? Well, okay, I lied… I didn’t really think that.

At home, I have an ATI All-In-Wonder video card in my computer, which has a TV tuner built in… so in the past few years, anytime I’ve wanted to watch TV at home, I’ve been watching on my 21" Dell Trinitron P1110 that I bought from DFSDirect several years ago for under $400 shipped, which was a great deal. DFSDirect is Dell’s outlet for their off-lease products. I haven’t had any real issues with this monitor, and as long as it continues to work, I’m fully satisfied with it and don’t have a real need to get Dell’s 24" 2405FPW LCD or the recently released monster, the Dell 30" 3007FPW LCD.

Whatever the case, several days ago, I came across this product called Beyond TV. The short of it is if you install Beyond TV on a computer with a TV tuner card and a good Internet connection, that computer can then be your own personal TV streamer. It was a little tricky to get going, but… it works!

So now, I can watch TV on any computer, as long as it has a decent Internet connection. In fact, I’m at work right now and am watching the Olympics on my laptop. =)

What Beyond TV does is it takes your TV input feed, encodes it to a Windows Media (or MPG2) stream on the fly and allows a remote computer to connect to the stream through a web interface. I can remotely change the stream to any channel that I want to watch. It takes a few seconds for the change to take effect, but… hey, no complaints here. This utility is for when you have something specific on TV you want to watch, not for channel surfing. I’ve set it to encode at 400kbps and with my Telus connection at home and Shaw connections at Elaine’s house and at work, the stream is perfectly stable. The quality obviously isn’t super, but it is definitely watchable.

With this, I will definitely be able to watch more Canucks games now. =)

So it’s Valentine’s Day today. I’m working the graveyard shift again, but I’m almost finished for the day and I’m feeling just fine. Been getting enough sleep the last few days, and yesterday was my one day break. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t exactly get the day off… instead I worked from about 11am until 6pm, slept for a few hours, then came right back to work at midnight.

This year, I sprung $142.50 on roses for Elaine from some shop at Crystal Mall, and it didn’t phase me too much… for several reasons. One, I didn’t exactly have much time to comparison shop, and from years past, even a regular dozen roses would easily cost half that much, so I thought I might as well go full tilt and get an elaborate bouquet. Two, I’ve spent more on a bouquet a few years ago… like over two hundred bucks, but it was big… stood like three feet tall. Three, I would have had to work three days before to pay for this, but now it’s half a day.

I bought tickets for the Russell Peters’ February 19th show a few weeks ago because Elaine had wanted to go to his last engagement here, and when I found out he was coming back, I decided to take her to it. The tickets double nicely as both an anniversary/Valentine’s Day gift. =P I ended up with some very interesting seats… the two seats in row 1 of the right Dress Circle. I kept searching different combinations, and the best seats left in the Orchestra section was around row 19, and then I found those Dress Circle tickets. I didn’t know if they would be good tickets or not, but I decided to take the chance and bought them on the spot.

Anyways, I’m going to finish up my shift… hope you all have a great Valentine’s Day. =)

It’s 5:45am and I’m doing the graveyard shift for the third consecutive day, and will be doing it for another two days before I get a reprieve. Right now, I’m all alone here. How I envy all of you sleeping soundly in your beds at this very moment. I feel so incredibly tired and sleepy, and definitely too mentally incapacitated to do any work that requires even the slightest inkling of thought. I am supposed to be here until 8am, but will be leaving shortly… but not to go sleep, but instead to drive my dad to the airport. He’s going to Fort St. John for another ice carving competition. But after that… when the rest of you are getting up and going to work, it’ll be my turn to sleep!

The circumstances are definitely different, but this sleeping cycle actually reminds me of the summer after grade 10. Those were some great times. Almost every single night, we’d be hanging out until the wee hours of the morning and going to bed with the sun shining and then waking up late in the afternoon. This was the time of our lives where it was all about enjoying ourselves and not being burdened with work and responsibilities. How I miss those times. Can you believe it’s already been 8 years?

It’s amazing how life can change so fast. Never could I have imagined from even two months ago that things would be as they are.

The current time is a little past two in the morning, and I’m sitting here at my workstation manning the graveyard shift on this first day of 24/7 monitoring of the infrastructure for our new product which launched just yesterday. So far, it’s been pretty slow - only a handful of people have actually downloaded our software. Hopefully, the user base will continuously grow to a point where this 24/7 monitoring will actually become meaningful. There’s actually two others here in the office for this midnight shift that lasts until 8am, so I’m not completely alone.

Honestly, there’s really not all that much for me to do here right now, so it’s a little difficult to find constructive ways to pass the time. I’m also slated to work this same shift for at least the next three days as well, so my sleep schedule is definitely going to go way out of whack. Oh yeah, I’m also supposed to go work at my old job later today as well. That’s going to be fun. I think very shortly, I’m going to need to break away from my old job completely. Even though I am not sure of my job stability here at the new company, I don’t think I can go back to working a primary regular job for eleven bucks an hour. All I know is I’ve worked more in these past two months than I ever imagined I would have - over 60 hours in just this past week. I haven’t had a day off in over a month now. The money is great though, so I’m not going to complain too much.