The chairs are here!

Earlier this Sunday afternoon I got a phone call from a local delivery company. "We just picked up your chairs from the store since they are closed on Mondays. And I noticed that you live nearby. Do you want me to deliver them today?" Gee, let me think about that for a microsecond. YES! So they delivered the front row (three chairs) on a Sunday afternoon. How cool is that?

The chairs are black leather Berkline "Matinee" recliners. The front row contains three seats arranged in a curve. The back row will have a total of four seats with only the outer two being angled towards the screen. We did not get any add-ons: the recliners are manual, the cupholders are not lighted, and there are no "butt kickers".

I don't know if we will have time to watch anything tonight, but we have a Netflix movie arriving tomorrow, The Queen, and should be able to enjoy our new seats tomorrow evening.

Home Networking Nightmare

Our previous house was built when the typical household had at most one computer. Being in the technology industry we had a decent collection of computers, each of which needed to be connected to the Internet. So shortly after we moved in I borrowed my brother and father for a weekend and we wired the house up for ethernet. Nearly every room got its own Ethernet jack, and some of the rooms received multiple connections. Along with Ethernet we wired rooms for telephone and cable. All wiring was "home run" back to a central point underneath the basement stairs and terminated in either a patch panel or (for telephone) a 66 block. Since I was making all the decisions on equipment I made sure that the installation made sense.

Our current home was built to order, and they provided the option of wiring the house for telephone, Ethernet, and cable. So this time I opted to pay someone else to do the dirty work. Unfortunately that means I get what they like rather than what I like. All connections were terminated in a central location in the basement, but not in to any sort of patch panel. Ethernet and telephone are all Category 6 wiring, terminated with a 8P8C modular connector (sometimes mistakenly called RJ-45), bundled and tie wrapped together, and placed in a GE "Smart Connection Center" box. Cable connections were terminated with an F-connector and also bundled together in to the same box. This box can't possibly live up to its name as it is one of the worst designs for networking that I have ever seen. Perhaps it works well for telephone, but for Ethernet it is worse than useless. It is about 3 inches deep and requires special inserts to mount just about anything inside the box. These inserts are impossible to find, even in the information age. The box came with one insert to do telephone distribution. Since I use ooma I have to do some rewiring to get the ooma dial tone distributed throughout the house while still grabbing the DSL signal from AT&T.

The connections were terminated to reach this box and no farther. There is no room in the box for a patch panel, and not even enough room for my switch. No patch panel means no labels. The only way to label the circuits is on the outside of the wire itself, which means tracking down the right cable is time consuming and difficult. All my equipment (router, DSL box, ooma box, server) is on a cabinet placed below the connection center with cables running up to it. There's no hope of closing the door to the connection center: even if I did route all my extra cables through the bottom of the box the switch simply wont fit with the door closed. The switch can't be placed with the rest of the equipment because the circuits won't reach.

To make matters worse, the terminations were done very poorly. The circuit to my office did not work when we moved in, due to poor termination. So the sub-contractor came out to repair the circuit, and re-terminated both ends. In the basement this made the wire even shorter. But rather than alert me to the fact that the wire no longer reached my switch, he simply plugged it back in and left the switch to dangle by this too-short connection (see the picture). I have since propped the switch up on some spools of tape. This is a complete disaster and a nightmare to troubleshoot or change.

So my next project is to rip all that out and redo it. I already have a wall-mount rack and a used Cisco 2924 switch to mount in the rack. I will buy a 24-port keystone patch panel and a whole bunch of Cat 5e modular couplers and F-connector couplers to put in the panel. All existing connections will be wired in to the patch panel, clearly labeled, then patched in to wherever they need to go. This should end the nightmare. I will post a followup (with before and after pictures) when I finish.

Home Theater is nearly done

Our home theater is almost complete. The cabinets were built and the entire space was repainted a little over a week ago. The projector has been mounted to the ceiling. The equipment is in the rack. The speakers are placed in the cabinet and everything is wired up. The screen arrived last week and is now up on the wall. The acoustic panels are on order and should arrive shortly. The curtain to cover the window is also on order and we expect it to arrive some time in December. The only thing we still need to make it a usable space are the chairs. I've included a picture from earlier this month, taken just after the cabinets and the painting was finished, but before the screen was installed. It will have to do until I can get some more recent photos taken.

I called the chair company two weeks ago and asked what the status was. I was informed that the front row chairs is ready to be shipped but they are holding them until the back row chairs arrive, which might not be until Christmas. Well, this was simply not acceptable. So I requested that the front row be shipped immediately and they can send us the back row later. Right now the three chairs for the front row are on a truck somewhere on their way to the store. I don't expect to get them until next week.

But we are far enough along on everything else that we can watch movies. And that is exactly what we did. We dragged some old chairs in from the other room and set them in front of the screen. Two nights ago we had our official "first movie viewing" in our new home theater. The choice of movie was easy: we chose the just-released Star Trek.

I am extremely happy—ecstatic even—with how everything has come together. I made good choices for my audio and video components. The image quality is absolutely outstanding for a DVD. The audio quality is equally fantastic, even without acoustic panels in the room. This is going to be a very popular room in our house.

Useful website

Here's a useful website.

Finally Back in the Saddle

I was finally able to do some riding over the past few days. 12 miles on Thursday. Today I chose a new route and managed 22 miles. I really liked today's route and will probably do it again. More than half of it was on 2-lane roads. Although they are sometimes heavily traveled the traffic (on a Sunday afternoon) was manageable. The route is a large loop that first heads north then turns west. On the south leg it crosses part of Lake Allatoona, then turns east and takes me through town before returning me to my home. Lots of climbing (for me anyway) but the hills weren't too steep. Well, there was one that was almost too steep, but I managed to make it. Parts of this route I have never seen before, either on a bike or in a car. So it was only natural that I missed a turn. I was looking for the street and was expecting to see a traffic light at the intersection. As a consequence I blew right by it. I went an extra 2 miles (at least) before coming across a major highway that I wasn't supposed to encounter. I did a U-turn and headed back to find the right road. It added about 4 miles to my trip, but that's supposed to be part of the adventure.

Unfortunately it was on my detour that I encountered The Rude Driver. This stretch of road was 4 lanes: two in each direction. Traffic was light enough that cars had no trouble using the second lane to get by me. As always I was riding as close to the right shoulder as conditions allowed. Then I heard a very loud horn. It easily lasted 10 seconds. This was no "beep beep", this was solid blaring horn for a long time and was the sound of one very irate driver. I was apparently the source of his irritation. I looked over my shoulder and saw a red pickup behind me with plenty of room to his left to get around. The shoulder opened up to a right turn lane so I moved a bit further right to clear the lane. As he pulled past me he gestured to me with a motion that was clear he thought I should be on the sidewalk. Well I wanted to say "Too bad! I am a vehicle and I have every right to use the roadways. It is unsafe and perhaps even illegal for me to ride on the sidewalk." Unfortunately I did not have the opportunity to actually say that, and I doubt it would have made any difference anyway. So I rode on. Next time maybe I should just "take the lane".

Rain, Rain, Go Away

You think I would learn, but I guess I have to make the same mistake many times over before reality finally sinks in. I haven't ridden since a week ago Sunday when I was on the Silver Comet trail. Why have I not been riding? Because of the rain. But it hasn't been raining every day. That's where I keep making mistakes. By now I should know to ride any day the weather is dry, because the next day it will rain again. Yesterday is a perfect example. We had a break between weather systems, and conditions were sunny and pleasant. But I didn't ride. Why? I don't know. Lazy, tired, schedule, procrastination, not sure. Today it is raining again and this will probably continue until tomorrow. On the good-weather days, something else always seems to keep me off the bike.

It is getting late in the year and soon riding will be made even more difficult by the weather. So I can't really afford to pass up these chances. I also plan to get a "trainer": a device that turns a regular bike in to a stationary bike. With a trainer I could at least get in a workout on days like today when the weather keeps me off the roads.

Home Theater Progress

Putting together a home theater is harder than I thought. I figured the hard part was getting all the right equipment installed and working. But it turns out, for me, that's the easy part. Deciding what the room should look like is proving to be a real chore. We talked to a cabinet maker. He measured the room and we discussed ideas. About a week later I drafted up (by hand) some plans for what I want the cabinets to look like. I sent him copies of the plans and dimensions of the things that need to fit in the cabinets (screen and speakers, primarily). And I have heard nothing. Meanwhile we had to decide on chairs and wall treatments, while continuing to discuss (in other words, repeatedly change our minds about) the appearance of the cabinets. We were kinda hoping that we could walk in to a home theater store, look at the theaters that they have in the showroom, perhaps look at a book of photos, and say "we want one that looks like that." But things aren't that simple.

We have been making progress, however. We finally ordered the chairs (which take 6 to 8 weeks to be delivered). They are Berkline "Matinee" chairs. We had to hunt around a bit but we ended up getting a good deal on the chairs. The projector arrived and we have already used it to watch a few movies (projected on the wall). I ordered the speakers, which should arrive this week. I also have the receiver (more on that later). I ordered an APC equipment rack that I just finished assembling tonight. It sits in the unfinished basement space behind the theater room and is waiting for shelves, power strip, and cable management stuff.

For future plans, I have located a surplus computer store in Atlanta and I will be visiting it (very soon I hope) to pick up whatever equipment I can. I need a computer to run the automation system, and I need an ethernet switch to put in the rack. I hope to pick up a rack-mounted keyboard and monitor as well. I have finally decided on a Blu-ray player: the Oppo BDP-83. The reviewers all rave about it and it appears to be well supported. I also want to try to pick up a used Sony 400-disc DVD changer from eBay. That will be enough to hold our DVDs and will provide the basis for hands-off movie selection.

After much debate and research on a suitable receiver I finally settled on the Integra 8.9. Although the amp is more powerful than I need (140 watts per channel for 7 channels) the deciding factor was the unit's ability to "upconvert" video to the full resolution used by the projector. Face it, when you project an image to be over 100" wide any little defect becomes pretty glaring. DVD resolution is fine for 40" or 50" TVs, but when you go to something this large it starts to suffer. All the movies we own are on DVD and I don't have plans to convert the whole library to Blu-ray. So it is important that we be able to play DVDs and have them look good. The Integra will convert the lower resolution (480 lines) of a DVD to the higher resolution (1080 lines) of the projector, and it does this using one of the best video processing chips in the industry -- the Silicon Optix Reon. And of course the receiver does an excellent job with the audio too.

The final piece to the puzzle is the automation system itself. There are several manufacturers for these "high end" automation systems, such as Control 4 and Crestron. But they are all very expensive, completely custom, and completely controlled by the vendor. The end-user can't make any changes to the system without paying someone to come out and "reprogram" the system. I think I would rather have a Pronto remote than be hamstrung like that. So I am still looking at a software solution call Cinemar. It is fully programmable by the end-user which gives me enough room to tweak and play to my heart's content. I still have concerns about it, however. There are no custom remotes for it, so the best "remote" ends up being a touch-screen tablet PC. That's a tad on the large & expensive side just for a remote (I'm investigating its support for the iTouch, which would be ideal). Also, Cinemar doesn't seem to have solid support for some of the components that I will be using, so I will have to do a lot of interface work. In that regard it is kind of the Linux of home automation. Except you have to pay for it.

Our goal is to have the theater done by Christmas. If we can come to a conclusion on how to decorate the room we have a good chance of hitting that goal.