Woke up this morning to no email. Sorta odd, turned out Bethel's router was messed up again. Haven't heard a cause yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if generator testing let sasser loose again. Heard the UMN CS network has some probably unrelated problems, which could be not so fun. Good luck to them. Church was at Salem, which if you can't guess what the subject was you've probably got someone disappointed in you now. After that was trying to figure out what my family's plans were for the day, which took like 3 phone calls to get from "we don't know" to "nothing". Oh well. Sat around for the afternoon doing pretty much nothing. Probably should have cleaned the house, but that would be work. I'll have to do that tomorrow or something. Despite the weather I didn't even notice the heat. Normally during the day my house has stayed relatively cool (under 80) even on the hottest days. Anyways, I stumbled across this thing called Akimbo which is basically a STB that plugs into your ethernet network and downloads video on demand. They use WMV to store stuff, supposedly pretty good quality. 1.5Mbps max means that cable modem allows effectively streaming too. The thing even has an internal HD to store 200 hours of encoding. It's too bad they only have S-Video output and not component. They seem to have plans to allow others to produce boxes for ti though, which could mean improvement there. The content is the only thing lacking. They seem to allow pretty much anyone to submit content, which is cool and makes sense for VOD since it doesn't cost them much at all unless their customers want it but it does increase the content base easily (basically free distribution to their customers). IFilm is cool if it's still how I remember it. It'll be interesting to see what happens with CinemaNow and their integration. If they add more stuff even better. I'll have to watch for reviews once it goes production. Hopefully NetFlix will follow through on their VOD idea too and give it some competition. Anyways, headed over to my grandma's place late afternoon to meet my family for dinner and to celebrate Mother's Day. Turns out it started storming pretty nicely and sirens were going off everything. I could have gotten some cool pictures on the way over if I hadn't been driving or I had decided to act like the average american driver. I think I did get some good ones at my grandma's place though - I should pull those off the camera soon. Didn't stay around there too long as my sister had to get back to school to work on some project or something. On the way back across the cities there was a lot of cool lightning. I like lightning (except when it hits any component of the power grid). Of course then it started heating up inside too. That's the one drawback I've found at my place - doesn't get warm during the day, but does in the evenings. Fortunately at this time of year I can just open up a window and turn on and exhaust fan. Plus sitting in the basement listening to music since it's cooler there. :)