Moral-Flexibility.Net

What suprised me most during my brief stint as a cable installer was that there was no wire fishing involved in the process (and while I understand the reasoning, ie it is labour intensive and presents liability issues) rather “stapling along the baseboard” is the proscribed method.

This is an “extreme” example, as for anything this extensive you’re going to wrap a cable around the outside of the house and drill out from the second floor room.

The problem here of course is the customer just assumes you’re going to fish the wire through the walls and keep things perty.

Nuh-uh.

(and to be clear, this is NOT my video)

Sure, I’ve always done things bass-ackwards. We’ve had a perimeter surveillance system for the past three years, but only recently did I actually get around to installing the more common and conventional alarm system.

Now generally speaking getting a security system installed these days is a snap. Make the call and some guy will show up in a marked van, will attach a large number of wireless devices to your walls, window and door frames with double sided tape and be gone fairly quickly. The cost of the alarm hardware (plus a nice markup for the security company) is included in the $30/month monitoring fee.

Just two problems here. I’m not big on wireless, and I’m not keen on paying thousands of dollars amortized over three years. Other than that it sounds great, no?

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Ok, so I promised pictures but I’m sure you guys have seen enough of the “Stuff screwed to a board” pictures so heres a diagram of the television distribution system presently installed in my home.

It’s important to note that I am not using all of it. The SATV integration features are for future expansion as is the run for the cable modem that I do not have.

At this point however I don’t think there is a whole lot else I need do to call this one complete.

Thoughts? Did I forget something?

Ok, so my first stab at a low-tech home media distribution project has met with success.

We presently have two sources of entertainment in the house (and in fact the home media server can amuse two of us at once).

UPnP - Universal Plug’n'Play - Using MediaTomb I can presently watch any videos hosted on the server from the comfort of our living room via the PS3. We’ve already discussed that one so I’ll move on to the new adddition.

MeTV (Channel 73) - A small widget converts the VGA output from our media server into a composite feed which is then modulated and inserted on channel 73. The media player has a playlist from which it randomly selects movies and television episodes when not “specifically” directed to play something we want to see.

Any TV in the house can tune into this program and it has no impact on the streamed video being viewed by the PS3 in the living room. (the video is occasionally slightly “jumpy” although I am given to understand this is a problem with Ubuntu 9.04 and hopefully will be cleared up soon).

At present movie selection for this channel can only be accomplished using remote desktop from either of the laptops, but I’m curious to see what other options are out there.

In the meantime I’ll try to get some pictures online to spice these dry entries up a bit.

It didn’t work at all the last time I tried.

This time I mostly followed some online directions for installing a bare-bones Ubuntu media server running MediaTomb and modified things only slightly to get a result that more closely matched my requirements.

It worked (the third time I tried actually).

I celebrated my success by watching Without a Clue streamed to my PS3 directly from the new media server I had just finished configuring (plus I had time to kill while copying everything over - who knew 100gig took a while to copy).

Instructions are saved for posterity below the cut (more for my reference than yours).

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The most recent upgrade of my surveillance system was a surplused DVR unit which has rendered my home-built DVR largely superfluous, I’ve been considering using it as the basis for a home media distribution system but have been having some issues figuring out how I’ll be organizing this.

I’ve decided that I will install Mediatomb on the computer (once we’ve covered a period of time running both DVR systems to make sure the new one is reliable) allowing for streaming video for UPnP devices on our home network, but for the televisions NOT equipped with UPnP I’ll be adding a cludge to allow us to access a library of movies and music from any TV in the house.

The plan is to make use of remote desktop features of Ubuntu, playing movies or music on the “server” will allow me to pipe the monitor (and audio) feed along another custom channel (like our surveillance system feed) and thus any TV in the house can whatever media is selected.

Truly MeTV. It won’t be as user friendly as I would like and will rely heavily on laptops/desktops to get the movie/music started, but once it’s rolling it should be easy enough to enjoy, no?

Someone have a better idea? I’m all ears.

So, as usual I’ve done my homework and read everything I can find on the subject, I’m conversant with the array of mortgage products and I think I have the major players lending guidelines figured out.

I have some numbers in my head, but I want some sort of official confirmation.

I call the mortgage broker recommended by my Mom, turns out the mortgage broker is now working for one of the big five banks. No biggie, I’m not ready to apply for financing yet, so I warn her that this is a meeting to discuss hypotheticals and to confirm my numbers, we’re not interested in proceeding further than that at this time.

No problem. We’ll see.

The day arrives and we attend the bank branch for our meeting. We’re kept waiting 15 minutes (for no readily apparent reason) and as we settle ourselves into a spartan office we’re asked for our bank cards.

Me:“Oh, we’re not customers of Mega-Uber-Bank. We’re more like financial mercenaries, dealing with a variety of Financial Institutions.”
Mortgage Guy:“We do reward customer loyalty…”
Me:“I already receive completely free banking through my credit union, lets move on to the mortgage.”

Now. I had given advance warning that this was to be a hypothetical discussion as to mortgage size, bridge financing and all sorts of other little housy related stuff.

MG:“I’ll just need to get your authorization to check….”
Me: “No. I’m not prepared to generate more inquiries on our credit reports, I can tell you our credit scores and we can proceed on that basis.”
MG:“It’s not really a credit hit, we use Transunion which is hardly used for credit reports”
Me:“True. Just little companies like yours, American Express, MBNA and a few other wee financial outfits. No, no credit check. Sorry.”

The conversation proceeded from there, I told him our credit scores and gave him our current obligations, agreed that lying was singularly pointless and further agreed that this was a hypothetical number crunch as there was no file created.

In the end we had my numbers confirmed (although I had overestimated the available equity in our present home, failing to consider 80% LTV would be the max they would advance).

Ok, so now we have our ballpark, it’s time to prep our place for sale.

I have to preface this with the statement that Lisa and I are more than a little risk averse. We are conservative in every aspect of our financial lives.

When we bought our current house we crunched the numbers, and figured out our maximum “affordable” price. We figured this was the number we could afford if we were both reduced to minimum wage jobs AND would still leave us off the “house poor” category.

Sound pessimistic? Yeah, probably, but that’s the way we roll.

Now, recently we had agreed amongst ourselves to explore the housing market and see if we could find something a little larger that we could occupy for years and years and that would address some concerns we have with our current home. My participation was a little reluctant as I love our current home and am loathe to pay closing costs and realtor fees.

The ceiling on cost was expanded for this exercise, although all calculations were made based on our present mortgage expense (changing our present accelerated bi-weekly extra to principal mortgage payment for an identically priced single monthly non-accelerated non-extra to principal mortgage payment) which increased the ceiling on purchase price approximately 100K from our present home.

Seem logical?

At the end of the day our mortgage payments would remain the same, but we’d be paying for 10 years more than with our current house (which presently has 12 years in payments left at the current rate).

Ok, so the basics had been thought out, next I needed professional verification or “proof of concept” to set my mind at ease. This meant meeting with a mortgage salesman, er…professional.

Today involved a lot of wires. Corrected one problem involving the telco system, relocated the entire television distribution system halfway across the basement and then relocated all the old wiring to the new location (thankfully I had left plenty of slack when I made the temporary arrangement) and then crimped, stripped and drilled like mad.

The final product is pretty slick. All the stuff tucked nicely out of the way and next to main electrical service, everything in the house wired to the nines so I don’t really see much need for expansion (although we have some room for it with one extension for both the telephone and television unused).

I’m proud of the finished result, but I am glad it’s done.