Saturday night, we went to the St. Paul Saints game and shivered our butts off while the Saints beat Sioux City 4 to 2. Between the sun going down and the breeze, it got WAY colder than the 76F it was during the day. As a result, I'm now the proud owner of a St. Paul Saints sweatshirt and managed to stay warm enough to have a good time.

The game itself was good, with the Saints coming from behind to win with 3 runs in a single inning. There were 2 broken bats, and a guy hanging from the right field fence who won a prize of some sort.

Overall, we really enjoyed ourselves and I'm looking forward to the rest of the games we have tickets to. As a bonus, you've just got to love a stadium where the guy who tried starting the wave was publicly chastised over the PA system for doing so. There are no waves at Midway. But there is a pig named Bud Squealig.

Bill Murray (one of the owners) wasn't there, though, from what I know to do his trainspotting, but "Train" got called out by enough other people when the train went outside the back fence that it was covered anyway.

You can check out my photos from the game.

Photo: marya

The new Dell HTPC that I bought arrived at the end of last week and is up and running. While overall it still has the overscan issue with cropping, the actual Media Center software compensates for it, meaning I don't have to hurry up and fix it to enjoy using the machine.

I've got it pumping DVI straight into the TV and audio into my Yamaha receiver. I'm just using stereo audio for right now because to go to 5.1 will require completely reconfiguring stuff, which isn't a huge priority. The Logitech remote keyboard and mouse are working great, but I'm probably going to pick up the MCE remote too. It really is set up well to work with nothing but arrow keys, Enter and Back.

I have to say, I like the setup so far, especially the actual Remote Desktop setup, which I'll be modifying to handle the newer configuration that lets you connect remotely without affecting the running session. That will allow the media interface to always be running while being able to administer it via the laptop. Nice.

It's already gotten more use than the Mac ever did. I grabbed a bunch of the 720p demo videos from Microsoft and the newly released high def open source movie Elephants Dream and they all look phenomenal on the 52" HDTV.

While I don't want to set scheduling expectations (I'm not committing to regular publishing of the podcast), I did want to at least see something published from yesterday's interviews, so I polished up the interview that wasn't obliterated by PowerGramo.

So, episode 3 is up on the podcast site for your listening. It's about 20 minutes of me talking to Mark Kistler (see previous article that sparked this conversation).

The image in this post is something I drew for my aquarium articles based on stuff in his books.

I have a problem. I now spend my day split between 2 laptops. Both have Fn and CTRL keys in the bottom left of the keyboard. One, a Dell has them as CTRL Fn. The other, my Averatec, has them as Fn CTRL. This is causing me to WAY too often hit the wrong one.

Were these any 2 other keys, I'd use one of the remapping tools to just swap them out. However, on laptops, the Fn key is at a lower level, since it controls things like LCD brightness, wireless power, etc. As such, you can't actually remap that one.

Does anyone know of a way that I could take care of this? It doesn't matter which one changes, I just want them the same.

OK. I had 2 phone interviews tonight. I set up the mic and headphones, Skype and PowerGramo to record the conversations. The first conversation went well and I exported the audio to another computer, listened to it and all was good. Then the second call happened.

Dave Gray and I had a fantastic 1.5 hour conversation about visual thinking, Flickr and lots of other good stuff. I then went to export the audio and start editing the next episode of TGTB.

And.

The file was empty. 1.5 hours of silence.

#$%^&*(%^&%$#$%^&^%$

I am completely dumbfounded as to how it happened. I didn't close any apps, move any equipment, or otherwise do anything to bring down the wrath of the gremlins.

This is really upsetting.