Amazingly enough, my home state – a state that has been home to some of the most crooked politicians this side of Chicago and never met a program it couldn’t waste state money on – closed out the fiscal year with a small surplus.  No easy feat in this economy, with a large number of states cutting back services, closing offices regularly, or (in the case of California) issuing IOUs.  Obviously there will be more challenges ahead, but it’s actually a bit comforting that our politicians made it through the past year somewhat responsibly.  I am shocked.

Manchin Says New Budget Year Most Challenging

In a news bulletin across the AP wire that should shock absolutely no one, Morgantown is still the fastest growing town in West Virginia during the previous eight year period.  Between July 1, 2000 and July 1, 2008, Morgantown added neary 3,000 new residents by Census estimates and becomes the 4th largest city in West Virginia, passing Wheeling.

Morgantown leads WVa city growth over past 8 years

(And in an ongoing testimonial to the strength of traditional media, the AP writer forgets to list the actual population estimate.)

Not that I’m a big fan of strip or surface mining, but the eco-nuts getting arrested in our state lately have sunk to a new level of attention-whoring.  They’ve opened a contest to revise our nickname and the “Mountaineer” as the WVU mascot.

Yes, mountaintop removal is a terrible way to mine coal that leaves a huge scar on the state.  Using stupid, low-brow, groan inducing publicity stunts is a distraction from solving the actual problem.

Idiots.

I’ve always liked the idea of having my PCs hooked up to a TV, and following the advent of XP Media Center and MythTV home brewed DVRs became more of a reality.  Sadly, I’m too cheap to go out and buy a machine with enough processing power & tuner cards to make it work right.

I mentioned previously that I had taken an old teaser-ad Toshiba notebook that was dying under Windows XP and partitioned the back half of the drive to run PCLinuxOS.  That old laptop has an S-video cable out, which isn’t a great signal to go out to an HDTV but is better than nothing.  The rebirth of a working OS combined with (a) VLC Media Player, (b) the S-video, and (c) a good set of speakers hooked to the laptop makes for a fairly decent playback of video files on the big screen.  (I don’t have the conversion cable to RCA split the sound into the TV speaker, but the old PC speakers are more than adequate for output.)  I’ve also got a switch box behind the cabinet that allows for a LAN hook-in. In the end I don’t have TV signal in, but with a Net connected device I can access streams and files.

While it’s not as pretty as a Media Center PC hookup, the setup works pretty well.  The .avi files of shows we play comes across without obvious pixelation and blockiness, and while I could send across an HD stream of the video I doubt the S-cable would render it properly anyway.  (Our TV is older, so there’s only one HDMI hoopup and no serial connection for a monitor.)  Online sites like Hulu also play just fine through this rag-tag setup.

I’d love to be able to build the entertainment system exactly how it should be set up, but there’s only so much I can acquire at any one time.  Besides, coming up with a homebrew solution is both fun in the planning stage and satisfying when the final solution comes together.  And in the end we have a quite watchable product that allows us to enjoy programming we couldn’t otherwise have during the summer doldrums.

North Korea nukes. Iranian election manipulations.  Iraq security.  Honduran coups.  Argentinian elections.  Israel and Palestine.  Afghanistan & Pakistan.  Russia and Georgia.  Worldwide recession.  Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. Manuel Zelaya. Hugo Chavez.  Kim Jong-il.  The Castro brothers.

Barry, I hope you’re ready.