Things that would be awesome (if they actually worked as advertised)

1. Solar powered house with battery. I saw this article in the Provo Daily Herald. I would love to have a solar powered house, but solar cells are expensive and current batteries are a pain to use.
2. Scooba. I love Roomba; I wish the Scooba were equally awesome, then I would never have to mop my floors again.
3. Health care co-ops. I would love to have insurance that wasn't tied to my husband's current job. Traditionally, they change it right before one of my kids is born, and with #4 on the way, I'm waiting for the change. But a co-op where it was a not-for-profit insurance would be nice. I'm not sure I want the government running things, but a credit union version of insurance I could go for.
   

Watching mythtv on a windows laptop

I am finally watching my mythtv recordings on my windows laptop. I have been wanting to do this for a long time, but there were some problems, mostly the mythtv windows clients were in beta and since the switch to digital, they did not handle streaming hd well. The solution is MythWeb and streaming flash.

MythWeb is a web browser front for Mythtv. I had to install mythplugins using sudo apt-get install mythplugins , (I am running ubuntu intrepid ibex on the Mythtv box) then it pretty much installed itself. MythWeb will allow you to download the complete show as well, but I really had no desire to wait for 2 gigs of "Antiques Roadshow" on WiFi. Anyway, the latest version of MythWeb has an experimental flash converter that seems to work pretty well. It encodes the show to flash on the fly and you can watch it. It was a little jerky on occasion (not sure whose fault that it is), but it is very watchable. I've heard the flash encoder does not skip commercials, but since 90% of what I watch is PBS, it doesn't matter to me.

So now, I can relax and use my eee to watch my shows.