People really shouldn't leave me at home alone (Jamie's watching musical in Dallas this afternoon and boys are coming back from balloon-watching in Albuquerque) behind I get lonesome and sad and actually go to Walmart after church for entertainment - and there's no telling what I'll buy.
Today's haul was a "couch mouse" for the new stand-up desk at the office, so I can scroll on my pants (it sounds dirty but really, it's not), the new Star Wars Blu-Rays for the herd (we srated watching Episode I before they left and by the time we got to the pod race we'd all decided that standard def on the study TV just was not cutting it), and the proverbial missing links for the home theater.
When we put in the home theater room when we built the house, we included two Cat 5e and two coax runs all the way from the wiring closet - surely that's be plenty, right? But for some reason I can't seem to connect the right cables to hook the movie room's Blu-Ray player to the router in the wiring closet so it can access the Internet and get to the Netflix and Amazon Instant Video features that I have available in the study and in our bedroom (which use a Roku, I have to point out) and which I use a lot. And because I was expecting I could, the new Blu-Ray player I got doesn't have wifi - I figured I wouldn't need it. And because the wiring closet is pretty much on the opposite end of the house, the wireless signal couldn't get to the movie room anyway, and the last time I tried to fix this problem I couldn't find a signal extender, nor did the wifi USB device for the Blu-Ray player actually work.
Well, with electronics, just wait a few weeks and they'll come out with the right gadgets to fix anything. Today our local Walmart had a Netgear Universal WiFi Range Extender, with a 4 port WiFi adapter. I plugged it in in Grayson's room, and it got a good connection to the new Cisco router I put in this summer using the WPS button. I then plugged the Universal Wireless Internet Adapter
into the Blu-Ray player in the movie room, and again hit the WPS button and it picked up the extender signal. I then turned on the projector and ran the setup and damned if the thing didn't fire up and connect on the very first try. Never had that happen before. I started up Netflix and Amazon, and both ran just fine. The audio didn't work at first, but I discovered it didn't work with a DVD either - the old "TV & DVD" setting on the receiver was the culprit, and I found and corrected it. I then sat down to watch the next episode of Bones on Amazon and a Star Trek animated episode ("Jihad") on Netflix just to test things out. It's just weird going from a ten inch iPad screen or 40" study TV screen to a six-foot projected image. I feel like I've just had an inappropriate relationship with Emily Deschanel because I've seen details in her face that nobody but her husband ought to see. (The Star Trek was animated, but I still feel oddly closer to William Shatner).
I still can't believe it worked - and I'm now downloading and streaming wirelessly over about 100' in what looks to me to be high-def, and I did it by myself (granted it took seven years). That's important because the screen in the movie room dwarfs everything else in the house, and the audio setup is better than anywhere else - even the study - with the six speakers positioned where they should be. So if we really want to watch a streaming movie, we have a good place to do it. At one point I was even doing it while using the same wi-fi network to watch the Eagles and Giants games on DirecTV Sunday Ticket on the iPad - which just got scary. That's way too much media content to have in your hands.