I push all the buttons around here.

I finally get to be a geek on my blog! I’ve always asked questions or generalized my geekyness. In a way it made me a blogging leach/bum. I constantly glean from others, never supplying anything of value in return. Well, NO MORE. I finally have something I’m proud to share.

When I finally (last December) got my first iPod, I couldn’t take my eyes off Apple. I just fell in love with the… well… sexiness of the device. Back when Apple made the jump to Intel, I made the jump to Apple and bought my first Mac. I went low end, purchasing a Mac Mini. The only tweaking I did to the setup was the memory. 512MB just wasn’t enough for me so I bumped it up to 1GB. I have to say Apple didn’t disappoint. As I dove deeper and deeper into the intricacies of how OS X functions, works, and thinks my love for Apple continued to flourish. However, my mini mostly sat unused, unloved, and unappreciated. It was merely a novelty.

All Intel Macs come with this nifty program called Front Row. It’s very much a media center application. It takes over the desktop, and allows you to scroll through your music, movies, photos, and even has a built in DVD player. Since my apartment was tiny, one of my PC’s sat right next to my television and it could already do all these things for me. Front Row, like the mini, was a novelty.

Fast forward a few months. I have moved on up to a much bigger apartment and have kept my living room very Zen and PC free (except for the laptop ). Once I discovered that I was going to miss being able to watch archived movies, I finally had a reason to use the mini.

The next few blog posts are going to document my journey into setting up a true media center for my home.

Why am I so proud of this? Because I did it the hard way. I haven’t Googled it, but I bet there are thousands of people who have done this already. I didn’t cheat. Sure I Googled when I was stuck, but was looking for answers to specific questions. I never read any kind of how to on this topic.

The posts that follow are my own right of passage on this journey. It’s my sincerest desire that this humble offering is at least interesting, if not helpful. It’s my own way of finally giving something back to a community that has given so much to me.