Back in July, Melanie and I went on an awesome camping trip with Marc to Montana De Oro State Park, near San Luis Obispo, CA. The park has a normal campground, but we opted for one of the “environmental” campsites. Instead of being packed together in a typical campground loop, the four environmental sites are spread throughout the park. Our particular site involved parking at the bottom of a hill and hiking 1/2 mile up a dirt road. Once there the site had a very clean pit toilet, a nice picnic table, and plenty of space to spread out. It also had a sweeping 360-degree view of the ocean and surrounding hills. Notably absent from the view were other people; unless you were looking through binoculars, you couldn’t see anyone else. We literally had a whole hill to ourselves. It was wonderful!

We camped for two nights, spending a lot of time soaking in the view and enjoying nature. We also went for a great hike along the coast on land owned by PG&E for the adjacent Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. (Pleasant name, eh?) The PG&E folks were very nice; they simply asked that we signed in and out and agreed to stay on the trail unless we wanted to get shot at. Sounds like a good deal to me! The rugged coastline is amazingly beautiful. None of my pictures do justice to the place, which really must be experienced in person.

We also found time to entertain ourselves with kites. See the photo gallery for a play-by-play account. While we mainly fed on the mountain of food we packed up the hill from our cars, we also headed over to Los Osos for a great burger at a little place called Sylvester’s. If you like a good burger and are in the area, you’ll love this place.

Overall the trip was a blast; I came home wishing I could spend more time out in nature enjoying the beauty of it all. It also renewed my interest in backpacking; I’d really like to do a big backpacking trip one of these days. I think it would be a great experience.

Click on the picture above for the full gallery.

I see a lot of cars during my daily commute, and lately I’ve been noticing a trend: “smart” cars are popping up everywhere. At first it was kind of cute in a “reminds me of Germany” sort of way, but the little buggers are multiplying. Now I’m starting to wonder why the heck all these tiny European city cars are suddenly sharing San Diego’s freeways with lifted F-150s and 18-wheelers.

Are they cheap? Well, the base smart starts at $13,590. The cabriolet, a popular choice here in San Diego, costs $16,590. That’s kinda cheap, but the way more practical Honda Fit and Toyota Yaris start at $13,950 and $11,550 respectively. So for the same price as a real car, you get a tiny two-seater with a thimble for a trunk. What a way to save!

Fuel economy is just okay… fueleconomy.gov says the smart coupe gets 33/41/36 city/highway/combined MPG. The Fit gets 28/34/31 and the Yaris gets 29/36/32. Sure, the smart is marginally more efficient, until you want to take two friends with you to the bar and the third guy has to drive his Silverado.

After the novelty wears off it can’t be fun to drive. With a 0-to-60 time of 12.8 seconds, a top speed of 90 MPH, and a jerky, laggy automated manual transmission, how fun can it be? Not to mention the dread experienced by the driver when the grill of a Peterbilt is looming in the rear view mirror.

So why do I see so many? After checking out all the facts, I can only come to one conclusion: The smart car is a fashion accessory. In image-conscious San Diego where it’s cool to look “green” and drive something that instantly grabs people’s attention, the smart is a perfect fit. It’s for the same freaks who paid $5000 over MSRP for the New Beetle back in 1998 and waited in line for 12 hours to get the first iPhone in 2007. Some people just love the attention they can’t get without spending money on something that says, “Look at me!” It’s the equivalent of wearing a steak neck-tie so the dog will like you. Or getting fake boobs so men will like you. But hey, if you’re hoping to catch somebody’s eye at a stoplight, gas station, or parking lot, have at it! Just remember, it may be cool now, but in a couple of years you’re not going to feel so smart.

My cable company recently raised their rates. Suddenly the variety of services they’d managed to sell us was costing almost $150/month! Sure, that got us a lot (digital high-definition (HD) cable with HD digital video recorder (DVR), high-speed internet, and telephone) but $1800/year is an outrageous amount of money to be forking over. In the name of frugality, we decided to take a good hard look at what services we actually use and cut out what we didn’t. Here’s our requirements:

• DVR – We really enjoy being able to watch TV on our schedule, not the networks’.
• “Basic Cable” – All those extra channels occasionally had interesting programs, but we seldom watched them.
• Netflix Watch Instantly – This is a great way to catch up on older shows and movies without waiting for DVDs in the mail. We actually purchased the $99 Roku Netflix Player and loved it, but it would be nice not to have the extra box in the TV stand.
• Internet TV – There are a bunch of ways to watch stuff online, including Hulu (which is great if you don’t mind short commercials), Youtube, podcasts, etc. (I’m sure astute readers can think of some other good ways that I won’t mention here.)

So here we have $150/mo. and $99 invested to watch TV with no quick way to watch the last category. So what to do? There are a variety of “Media Extender” solutions out there (IE Apple TV), but they don’t meet all of our requirements. In order to do all this stuff, we need an all-out Media Center PC with TV tuner card. While I do like Apple products, part of the goal here is “cheap”. A decent refurbished Mac Mini costs $500, which is too much for this project. Plus in order to watch Netflix Instant programming you need Windows. This means Windows Media Center.

So here’s the goal: Build a Windows Media Center PC that will pay for itself in less than a year. By canceling unnecessary cable services and returning the Roku Netflix player, we’ll have saved $579 in that time. If we come in under this goal, that’s money in our pockets. So did we do it? Hells yes! Here’s how:

• Computer – Dell Inspiron 530s. This is Dell’s “economy” model in a slim case that’s perfect for our TV stand. By going to the Dell Outlet and using a 15% off coupon, we managed to snag a refurbished model for $289 (+$44 for tax/shipping) that included Windows Vista Home Premium SP1, an Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2200 (2.2 GHz) processor, 2GB RAM, 500GB hard-drive, and a DVD burner. This same system would have cost $579 new.
• TV Tuner – AverMedia AverTV Combo PCI-E. This is a low-profile PCI-Express 1x TV tuner that fits in the Inspiron 530s’ slim case. It it capable of receiving analog cable/TV as well as ATSC (over-the-air) and QAM (cable) HDTV. It includes a nice IR receiver and remote that has buttons for all of Windows Media Center’s primary functions. I paid $94.99 with free shipping on Amazon. (Note that the card has TWO cable inputs, and if you want to receive both analog and QAM cable you’ll need a splitter to hook up both.)
• Wireless Keyboard/Mouse – Adesso 2.4 GHz RF Wireless Mini Keyboard with Optical Trackball. Finding a keyboard and mouse that works well from the sofa isn’t easy, but this Adesso model is awesome. The ergonomics are perfect for holding it in your lap, and I love the layout of the trackball, scroll wheel, and buttons. Once you grab hold it makes perfect sense. Also nice is that wireless reception is excellent even with the receiver plugged into the back of the computer. I paid $64.24 with free shipping on Amazon.

So there you have it! $333 + $94.99 + $64.24 = $492.23, well under the $579 budget. We also used some Amazon gift cards on the keyboard and TV tuner, which brought our out-of-pocket cost down quite a bit. Of course there were some extras, like an DVI to VGA cable, 3.5mm audio cable, and Cable TV splitter, but I had this stuff already.

So what does all of this allow us to do? Everything we’d hoped for! Windows Vista Media Center with the TV Pack works like a champ. For a Microsoft product, the software is intuitive, full-featured, and easy to use. It has a built-in cable guide with search, great DVR functionality, and the network HD channels look great. I also installed MyNetflix, which is a really nice plugin for Windows Media Center that does everything the Roku box did and more. We can also surf the web and play PC games from the comfort of our sofa. I’m quite pleased with the setup; it’s better than what we previously had and our monthly expenditures have dropped. What more can you ask for?

So maybe all this isn’t ultra-frugal. It’s a bit like saving money by buying caviar in bulk. But it’s a heck of a lot of fun, and we are saving some money, especially if this setup works well for a few years. So grab yer popcorn and head on over to my place for some “frugal” TV bliss!

You may notice a new “Gallery” tab at the top of the Seansense main page. I’ve installed Gallery on the Seansense website, which is an open-source web-based photo album. It integrates nicely with WordPress and will be used in the future for all of my photos. You can access the gallery using the aforementioned tab or by navigating to gallery.seansense.net.

I’ve finished migrating all of the albums referenced in posts on this site to the new gallery. I still have more older galleries to migrate over from the MobileMe (formerly .Mac) Web Gallery and other places.

In the interest of saving $99/year I decided not to renew my MobileMe account. The main thing I used it for was the gallery; I never used the e-mail, syncing, or web-based stuff. The 20GB online storage is nice as it’s well integrated with OS X, but my web host gives me 600GB disk space. I’d like to make my domains, web hosting, and ISP the only things I spend money on for internet, because with these things I can do just about anything I want to. All the extra paid internet services are just money down the drain.

I’m also looking at various other ways to save and consolidate. Mel is starting an unpaid internship this fall so we’re going to be on one income for a while. More on that later.

Here’s the video from our Hawaii vacation…

Melanie and I save up all year to take one annual “big vacation”, and this year we decided to go to the Big Island of Hawaii for a week. This was our third trip to Hawaii together (we’ve also been to Kauai and Maui). What can I say? The place is addictive! The fact that we had a free ticket thanks to frequent flier miles sealed the deal.

We stayed in an awesome condo at the Fairway Villas in the Waikoloa Resort area north of Kailua-Kona. This turned out to be an excellent location, as just 20 miles south in Kona the weather was not nearly as nice and suffered more from the vog. The area also had some awesome beaches, our favorite being Waialea Bay just up the road. The sand was nice, the water calm, and the snorkeling excellent. We liked it so much we’d get up early in the morning just to be among the first to arrive. One morning we had it all to ourselves for a while. Paradise!

We also went on a helicopter ride from Hilo over the volcano. We opted for the “doors off” flight, which was wonderful if not a little windy and cold. It made for some excellent photos and video and was quite exhilarating.

The big island certainly is big; it’s over 220 miles to drive all the way around. We did a lot of driving and saw a lot while we were there, but really we just scratched the surface. There was a ton of stuff we didn’t do, and we had such a nice time there that I wouldn’t hesitate to go back and do the rest.

Click the image above for the photo gallery.

A video is coming soon!

Every so often I’ll hear a song and immediately picture in my head what (I think) could make a great music video. Now that I have the right tools to actually do something about this, I decided to give it a go. After a fair amount of daydreaming, a couple weekend evenings playing around in the garage with Mel and a bunch of editing, this is the result.

The song is “Discipline” from Nine Inch Nail’s new album “The Slip”, which I wrote about previously. As I mentioned, the album is licensed under Creative Commons, which encourages this kind of use. I think the whole Creative Commons thing is awesome, and I think it’s great that NIN are paving the way in rethinking how music is distributed and licensed in the 21st century.

Over the last few weeks we’ve been doing a minor remodel of our kitchen. Since kitchens can be an endless money pit, and we don’t have endless money to throw at it, we decided to keep things simple: Fresh paint and new appliances. What a difference! It’s looking great, but we still have more to go. The blinds we ordered haven’t arrived yet, and the original refrigerator we bought didn’t fit! It was too wide by about 1/2″. Of course the model that will fit is more expensive and had to be special-ordered. It’ll be about three more weeks before it arrives, but fortunately we have our old fridge out in the garage.

Overall we’re quite pleased. We really hated the old kitchen; the colors were blah and the appliances were old and nasty. This relatively minor upgrade on the crazy kitchen economic scale is well worth it.

Click on the image above for the full gallery.

Have I mentioned that Les Stroud, host of the Discovery Channel’s Survivorman, is my hero? If you’ve never seen the show, the premise is that Les spends seven days in the wilderness with only the clothes on his back, his cameras, a pocket knife, and a few very basic supplies. He has no film crew with him; he films and narrates the whole thing himself.

It’s a pretty amazing thing to survive for seven days in the extreme places he goes, but it’s even more extraordinary to do a wonderful job of filming the whole thing. He always manages to capture the beauty of his surroundings, as well as the difficulty presented by trying to survive them.

His program is about as real of a survival show as you can get. Sure, he has a safety team not too far behind him and a radio to contact them if things go wrong, but he (and the network) would have to be nuts not to. He gives the viewer real survival advice, not the typical eating gross things and secretly spending nights in a hotel like those other survival shows.

In fact, his show is so good that it has recently helped save some people’s lives. Here are a couple examples:

• Tips from TV show helped Manitoba snowmobiler survive for five days in wilderness
• Found: Couple Stranded In Snow For 12 Days

To a tip of the hat to you, Mr. Stroud, for a job well done! Here’s looking forward to Season 3 of Survivorman.

Amazing animations… rather entrancing. Found on Digg.

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