Maybe God was a procrastinator.

In classic Diego mode, I spent most of the weekend doing what I do best - embarking on weird little adventures in my limited little world. This weekend, I was consumed to the idea that damnit, I'm going to turn my mac mini into a little media center.

But of course, I wasn't really going to do it the correct way, which was to spend hundreds of dollars getting a server, extra storage space, software for recording Tv shows onto the hard drive, a LCD with a HDMI connector, or a Dolby surround sound. Nope, just hooking it up to my Mom's 34 inch Analog TV using a 20 dollar DVI to Video adapter.

So the results are a little mixed right now. It's still not completely user friendly - reading text off the TV is like trying to read fine print through vaseline glasses. It's doable, but certainly not fun. The bluetooth mouse I had laying around (yes, I do have mice laying around. It's something I do.) works fine with the bluetooth that's built into the mac mini, and I can connect to the internet using airport, but I'm still limited to punching in text onto the onscreen keyboard. I'm going to remedy that soon with a boothtooth keyboard, which after rebates should be around 18 bucks.

But it's nice having all the photos in one place, and I have my mac use the photos folder as a screensaver, so it goes into screensaver mode after 3 minutes of idle and all the thousands (yes, thousands!) of photos I've taken gets a second viewing for the whole family. In addition, the video clips and the music collection is now more accessible, so that's cool.

Most of all, it's great to have iTunes as a central app. I couldn't imagine forking out 299 for Apple's iTV which is coming out next year, but my 50 dollar solution seems to be working out just fine. By the way, I do most of my work on the iBook, which is partially why I thought the Mac mini could get a day job. I can still have it run apps in the background, which is great too.

Well, weekend's over at any rate. Back to work.