Projects galore this weekend

I’m one of those guys who is constantly doing something, even when I’m not doing anything. This weekend has been (mostly) nice and relaxing because I’ve been able to loaf around and get some work done on some of the “projects” that have been hovering in the background.

Today my Dad and I set up an HD-Antenna in the attic and ran some cable down through the wall to the TV room, and then I made and ran some new network cable around so that I could set up my newly revamped Media Center (now running Vista) down next to our TV.

So far so good. Over the next week or so I’d like to feed in the basic cable to the machine and start loading my gazillion DVDs onto the new Hard Drive so I never have to go hunting for a lost disc again. It also still needs to be plugged in to the TV—right now I have it going through a regular computer monitor—but I think that might just be a matter of buying a 10-foot DVI cable.

I also think I’ve figured out why my gaming rig hasn’t been going in to sleep mode recently. Actually, I don’t really know why, but I think I might have found out how to get it to sleep again. It was a two-step process: first I set the computer so that the mouse and keyboard were no longer set to wake the machine from sleep, and then I changed Vista from the “balanced” setting to the “energy saver” setting.

Realistically that didn’t do anything except reset the whole “sleep mode” part of Vista, and this time the computer has stayed asleep for a good 10 minutes already. Impressive.

Now I’ve got to do some more damage to The Wal-Mart Effect, which has been a really interesting read so far. As best as I can tell, Wal-Mart started out by making things more efficient (a good thing), but has since passed into the realm of forcing manufacturers to lower the quality of their goods (a bad thing), because there are no more inefficiencies to take out of the system.

I’m not a Wal-Mart shopper. I don’t think I’ve bought anything at Wal-Mart in the past four years, and I don’t plan to in the near future. But it’s very interesting to read about how the megasupermonster-retailer is changing our economy.