Day: February 4, 2009

While I do love the views and general atmosphere of the office we moved into, the room gets really bleeping cold. Cold enough that some days, such as today, my hands are halfway numb by the time I leave at the end of the day. So tonight when I got home, I grabbed a book, started our gas stove heating up the tea kettle and leaned up against the stove to read. My wife who was on the phone with one of the plumbers1 we’ve been talking to and moved me away from the stove because she thought I was standing too close.

Me being cold and a touch grouchy about being cold, told her I was doing it deliberately and told her to go back to her phone conversation.  I was just finally starting to feel warm again when she came back into the kitchen. Then she asked the plumber to hold on a second because her husband was on fire.

Yes, she said on fire. Woohoo! I’m sexy…. Wait, that was panic in her voice… I reached behind myself to feel at my shirt2 and what do you know there was FIRE. Fortunately my wife grabbed the sprayer from the sink and hosed me down. I didn’t get hurt at all, if you exclude my pride3 and what feels like a sunburn on a single fingertip. Though the shirt I had been wearing was ruined.

The really sad part? It was only about two seconds before she sprayed me down that I was finally feeling warm. *sigh*

1 Yes the faucet our bleeping, downstairs bathtub is still broken.
2 I agree in hindsight that was stupid, but my brain was having trouble processing the information her voice imparted on my ears.
3 Which suffered greatly from the experience.

I’ve been using the Hulu plugin now for a few days and it’s great but I do run into the occasional problem.  So I’ve been following the thread over at XBMC Forums about it as the plugin is under active development.  In a recent post to that thread, one of the developers said:

Please use the google addons.
Right now google addons is more in sync.

Sometimes I use my personal googlecode just to back stuff up, or sync it between my home computer and the one at work. Anytime I’m ready for you guys to try something out I’ll just stick it in the google addons svn & if it’s broken I’ll just revert it.

Which is a good tip as the thread has links to a wide variety of versions of the plugin scattered throughout its 45 pages.  Unfortunately the tip does not really clear things up in my particular case.  As I stated previously I’m using a copy of the plugin from xbmc-hulu. The developer who made the above comment is recommending people use the version of the plugin from xbmc-addons instead of his personal version at rwparris2-xbmc-plugins but makes no mention of the version at xbmc-hulu which shows that developer’s username as one of the project owners.

Bah.

I suppose I’ll just have to download the xbmc-addons version of the hulu plugin, try it out and compare it to the xbmc-hulu version.  As soon as I’ve had a moment to do so, I’ll post my results.

UPDATE: I’m not seeing any difference between the xbmc-addons & xbmc-hulu versions so far.  However after reading the thread on XBMC Forums, I did go through the trouble of configuring the plugin (under the XBox version -> Videos -> Plugins -> Hulu -> press the white button on your controller).  Setting a default video quality makes using the plugin much nicer (cuts out 2-3 button presses when trying to watch a specific video).  You can enter your Hulu account username/password but there doesn’t appear to be a benefit to doing so yet.

UPDATE2:Per the XBMC Forums, xbmc-hulu has been removed in favor the version available via XBMC SVN Repo Installer and the SVN Repo Installer pulls from xbmc-addons.

UPDATE: Per the XBMC-Hulu plugin release thread, there is no currently working version of the plugin.