Microsoft offers peek at Media Center Extender devices (Mary Jo Foley, Sept 6).

Evidently there are other people like me who don't have an Xbox 360 or Media Center Edition PC but would like to watch videos from their PCs on their TVs.

I just kludged together a workable solution for watching PC video on my medium-size HDTV. I copied totaltraining.com WPF and Blend training videos from the Temporary Internet Files folder and burned them to a read-write DVD using the myDVD utility that came with Roxio Easy Media Creator 9.

Although some test videos look grainy (AVI files from a digital camcorder), these WMV training videos look especially sharp played on an Oppo upconverting DVD player connected to the HDMI connector.

Rarely do these ideas work out as well for me in reality as in theory. I got the inspiration for this from a guy named Charlie who works on the Media Center Extender devices team.

For the first time in my life, at least since age 6, I am without television service. I moved into a new place and will only be here about six months because they are going to renovate all apartments next year and everyone must move out to a newly renovated unit or somewhere else for a few months with the option of moving back in.

Even with a talented, skillful, friendly, hard-working crew of four professional movers who did the packing, loading and moving for me, moving was an experience I didn't want to do again for several years, but of course the new place didn't tell me there was to be this mandatory moving-out scheduled for next year until after I was fully committed to moving in. But it's a nice older place with a deck that faces a park and walking/biking trail, so overall I'm happier here now that the move is done. Thanks, Access Gentle Movers. If there's any way humanly possible, I'm going to try to make just one more move instead of two.

I'm a bit tired from the stress, but am on my mandatory 100-day break as a contractor from Microsoft, so the moving couldn't have come at a better time. It's a good time to read up on WPF (to get the concepts) and watch video training (to see specific examples done while explained by the presenter).  ¶ 11:40 AM