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We’d like to thank you all for being part of our lives & we hope everyone had a blessed Christmas & is excitedly looking forward to the New Year, as we are!

Alyssa’s 4th Birthday Party:

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Our Pumpkin Patch Trip:

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Creating “Jack the 3rd”:

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Bonfire at Nana’s:

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Halloween:

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Thanksgiving at Grandma’s:

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Thanks again to all those who helped create these wonderful memories with us, this year & for those that are across the miles, we’re grateful for you, as well, for continuing to be close to our hearts.

Why a Media Closet?

We have a fair number of electronic components: Xbox, Wii, Playstation, Mac Mini a receiver and until recently a cable box. We used to store these at the bottom of our TV stand but it looked rather cluttered, and if you ever look behind the TV was a cable nightmare. Jeanette always used to ask me if all those cables were REALLY necessary and sadly they were. Every now and then I’d try to organize them, but it didn’t help a ton and as soon as I wanted to swap out a device, I had to undo and redo everything. So the short answer is to get rid of the clutter. Here are what our TVs look like now.

There is a single HDMI cable running to the tv along with an infrared repeater which is barely visible.  The bonus is it also allows me to easily get to everything instead of having to squeeze behind the TV. We also keep our cable modem, router, switches and UPS in the closet so it cleans up our computer room quite a bit. Due to it’s placement we’re also able to run multiple TVs off of it.

Placement

The placement of the media close is very important. At a minimum, it needs to be behind or beside the wall you plan on placing your TV. If you don’t place the TV on an external wall, it’s much easier to work it in. In our case, we wanted our bedroom TV to also be hooked up to it, so we have the closet in between our living room and bedroom. As an unplanned bonus, the kids playroom, where their TV is kept, is above our living room, but their is attic space above this media closet. We haven’t done so yet, but we should be able to very easily hook the kids’ TV up to this closet as well.

Single Wire Hookup

Getting everything condensed down to a single HDMI cable running to the TV was a big goal with this. The way I did this was with an HDMI switcher box. The cable box (when we had it) went into one port, our Mac Mini into another and our receiver. The switcher lets us toggle between the three inputs and has a single HDMI cable as the output which runs to the TV. All the game consoles run to our receiver. Even though not all of them use HDMI output (Wii and Xbox), the receiver converts the signal and still sends the video in the HDMI output. The only downside is we have to have the receiver on when playing video games, which is ok. We don’t want to have it on just to watch TV though, which is why the HDMI switcher is necessary and we can’t just run everything through the receiver. The nice thing about our switcher is it automatically detects when a new device powers on and switches to it. When the device powers off, it switches to the next device. Since we’re down to just two devices, turning on and off our receiver acts as a toggle and we never have to manually switch it.

Hooking up Multiple TVs

I’m cheap and didn’t want to pay for a separate cable box for the bedroom TV, so I found a way to hook both TVs up to a single cable box (when we had cable). You can do this by just hooking up an HDMI switcher in reverse. So I took the wire coming out of the first HDMI switcher and hooked it up to the *output* slot of a second HDMI switcher. Then I plugged HDMI cables from our two TVs into two of the TV inputs. It actually works hooking it up in reverse like this, so when we’re watching a show, we can pause it in the living room, push the button to switch it, and resume it in the bedroom without missing a beat. Technically we can use all of our devices in the bedroom. We haven’t done it yet, but we can play XBOX back there if we want.

Beaming Infrared Signals Through Walls

This really isn’t that big of a problem. The Xbox, Playstation and Mac Mini don’t need infrared. The Wii has it’s Wii bar, which I had to set up on top of our TV like normal, so that just leaves our receiver which needs IR and the cable box when we had it. There are two great solutions for this. If you have a single remote that takes normal batteries, this IR extender is like magic! You just swap out one of the batteries in the remote and it works. We did this for a while until I bought a fancy remote that didn’t take normal batteries. Now we use this. Basically you just tape one of those connectors onto the hookup on each device and then run a very small pickup line to the living room and it relays the signal. The pickup is tiny and taped to the bottom of our TV. As long as the tape holds, it’s not even noticeable.

Ventilation

Something I was very paranoid about is making sure this closet didn’t get too hot. It’s probably overkill, but there are three things I did to try to address this:

1. Have a shelf that opens up into the living room. We don’t have a wall-mounted TV in the living room currently, but plan to eventually. The idea with this shelf was it could be a place to set electronic components if we ever needed line of sight (such as Kinect). If nothing else we can put decorations there. The closet is dark when the light is off so seeing into it isn’t a problem. This provides a nice open space for air to escape.

2. A louvered door. The door to this closet is slotted so air can freely flow in and out.

3. A vent in the closet and an air intake. Every time the A/C or heater kicks in, it blows in fresh air, but since there’s also a return vent in here, it sucks out the old air as well.

Two Other Random Tips

1. Make sure you build the closet big enough. You want enough room to be able to walk in here and work comfortably. Ours is 3.5′ wide and 5′ long. I wouldn’t go any narrower.

2. Put everything on one wall! You need room to walk in here so don’t put shelves on both sides and keep all your power, cable, network, phone, speaker and other hookups on the same wall as your devices or an adjacent one, NOT the other side. You don’t want a spiderweb of cables in here.

It has been a year so far and I’m still very happy with the setup. It keeps everything looking clean, lets me easily hook up all the devices without having to worry about keeping the cables neat, gives me storage space for all the extra cables and computer parts and gives us a nice place to keep our DVDs, while making it super easy to have our TVs hooked up to everything we want. Definitely something to consider when building a house.

Most TV shows are also available online somewhere, but are scattered around between Hulu.com, TV.com, ABC.com, NBC.com, etc so finding them is a pain and watching them on a computer is no fun. Boxee takes care of these problems. It has a database of TV shows so you just pick which ones you like to watch and it finds them regardless of where they are online and plays them on your TV in full-screen mode. It alerts you when new episodes are available and the whole process becomes fairly mindless, you just pick what you want to watch.

There is an iPhone app available that we use for our remote control, however this November, they are releasing the Boxee Box for $199. We plan on switching over to this instead of using a computer and using the remote that comes with it. There are no subscription fees, so the savings on the cable bill will very quickly cover the up front cost.

We also signed up for Netflix at the same time we shut off cable. For $11 a month we get 2 blu-rays per week plus access to stream all their online content. Netflix integrates nicely into boxee so we can seamlessly switch over to it. Netflix doesn’t have a ton of good movies online to stream, but one thing they do have a great collection of is tv shows. We’ve been watching The Office from season 1 commercial free for the past few weeks. They also have many HBO and Showtime shows, and we’ve been watching Dexter lately. There are a few other pros and cons.

Pros:

It’s free – The Boxee application is free and there are no subscription costs

Netflix integration – We tend to use netflix a lot more than we would otherwise since it runs within boxee and very convenient to get to.

Everything is available on demand – Pretty much the same as with a DVR other than you don’t have to decide in advance to record anything.

Greater storage – There are usually several months worth of past episodes available for every show, no need to record anything or worry about your queue getting full.

Limited commercials – A 30 minute show tends to have about 2 minutes worth of commercials instead of 8.

Switching between content is seamless – There’s no longer a barrier between playing a tv show, vs playing a podcast, youtube video, Ted talks, mp3 on my hard drive, a vimeo feed, etc. This has opened up the doors to a lot of new content we wouldn’t have watched before. For example we have Pandora running most of the day now because it’s much more convienient.

Social aspects – If you add friends to boxee you can recommend shows and have it show up for them and vice-versa.

Cons:

1 day behind – Shows are usually not put online until the day after they air, so you’re always 1 day behind.

No live content – We don’t like sports, but this would not work for someone who did. Of course you could always hook up an HD antenna.

Not everything is available – Almost everything is, but Discovery channel in particular I miss. Many of the Disney and Nickelodeon shows also aren’t available online, but Netflix does have older episodes available for streaming.

Overall we’re very happy with it so far. If I was a sports fan or Lost was still on the air and I had to worry about others talking about it the next day, I don’t know if this would have been do-able, but neither of these are a problem for us anymore. After getting use to it, I do think it’s a better way to watch TV, and saving $90 a month is a nice bonus.

We arrived in Flagstaff around 5pm and figured we’d eat some dinner and have plenty of time to see the Grand Canyon, but failed to account for two things. #1 Arizona doesn’t observe daylight savings so the sun sets an hour earlier than we were thinking and #2 I takes nearly 2 hours to drive to the Grand Canyon from Flagstaff. Our hotel has some nerve putting “Grand Canyon” in it’s name. We figured it was a 10 minute drive.

We skipped dinner and went straight to the canyon and arrived about an hour before sunset. We really had to rush to see what we could, but feel like we covered a good chunk of it considering. It would have been nice to spend an extra hour or two there. We finally ate dinner a little after 9 at what I assume is the only restaurant in the park. Took nearly 45 minutes for us all to get our food so it was pitch black out by the time we left. We pulled over on a turnout at one point to get out and look at the stars which was real nice. We had to leave the hazards on so our eyes couldn’t fully adjust but it was still pretty impressive. The drive out wasn’t much fun in the dark, but thankfully we made it back safely.

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We stayed at Excalibur because we thought the girls would get a kick out of staying in a castle and it was one of the cheaper options. During check in we were pulled out of line by the hotel staff (we assumed they were opening a new line) only to be given a pitch to come check out a timeshare for show tickets. Told them no and then had to start over in a 20 minute line to check in while parked in a space with a 15 minute limit. I had to take the girls to move the car while Jeanette finished waiting to check in. During our 2 day stay in Vegas we were stopped at least 20 more times for a timeshare pitch. The other MGM owned hotels were doing the same thing. They also called and left ads on the voicemail in our room every night that we couldn’t delete without listening to the whole thing, and couldn’t ignore because there’s a big red flashing light on the phone right next to the bed. They have no laundromat on site (or any of the big strip hotels). The only option they provide is to have them wash your laundry at $1.50 per pair of socks, $7 per shirt, etc. We could re-buy all of our clothes for less. I had to go to a Travellodge slightly off the strip to do laundry instead. We will never stay here or any of the hotels owned by MGM again (Mandalay Bay, Luxor, Excalibur, New York-New York, MGM Grand, Bellagio, CityCenter, Mirage Monte Carlo or Circus Circus).

Really though the whole strip was much worse than previous trips. Everything that use to be free was now excessively expensive:

Mandalay Bay didn’t have a free preview of the aquarium any more.
The free tram is now a paid monorail.
The people movers have been removed.
The free white tiger exhibit is now expensive.
The Mirage volcano goes off hourly instead of every 15 minutes.
The Treasure Island show is every hour and a half now and has switched from a battle with the British Navy to pole dancing on a boat with fireworks.
The awesome FOA Schwartz closed.
The 4 story Coca Cola store is now 2 stories to make room for an Outback Steakhouse in the top of the coke bottle.

We still tried to make the best of things and it had it’s moments of fun. Mostly because it seemed so big and amazing to the girls. I don’t think we’ll be back for a long time though.

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It wasn’t until about a day before we left I remembered hearing horror stories about people waiting in line all day and only going on 3 rides and I started to panic. Did some quick research and found we were going during the busiest two week period of the year. I didn’t have time to really plan things out like I’ve heard you should, but I did download a few iPhone apps that were suppose to help.

The only tip I knew was to go left when you first enter the park and go clockwise to avoid the crowds, which makes a surprisingly big difference. We’ve been doing this everywhere for years. I guess people are genetically mispositioned to go right. Otherwise we had no plan other than being opportunist and going with whatever wasn’t busy at the time. It worked out well, we did pretty much everything in both parks and with one exception didn’t really have to wait long. I think if we had a plan we would have felt obligated to stick to it and wouldn’t have worked out as well. I’m sure it would have also sucked all the fun out of it.

We all had a really good time and the girls got to meet all their favorite characters. The weather was real nice too. Much better than Disney World I’m sure.

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That night we headed down to Santa Monica to check out the pier and 3rd street promenade. It was pretty and made for some good people watching. We didn’t stay out too late because we wanted to make it to Disney first thing in the morning.

On Monday we went to Hollywood. Ate lunch at a place called uWink where you order and pay on computer kiosks at the table rather than dealing with a waiter (totally my idea from 5 years ago, though I’m told Ma Bell’s was similar but with phones). It was fun and the food was quite good. We played trivia games with all the other people at the restaurant while we waited. Afterward we checked out the Kodak and Chinese theaters and the walk of fame then cheesed it up at the wax museum.

Next we went to the Griffith Observatory which took way longer than it should have to get to. TomTom insisted it was at the top of a nearby hilltop neighborhood. After driving around an extremely tight twisting road for 20 minutes we finally asked a guy walking his dog who pointed us the right way. He said we were the 3rd car to ask him on this walk. It was a nice view from up there, but unfortunately the observatory itself is closed on Mondays so we didn’t get to go in. We could barely make out the Hollywood sign from there through the smog. We headed over to the Universal Citywalk for dinner which was a great place to end the night.

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