Transitions

Our lives and our pursuit of happiness can take us on a wonderful life journey, which for me is now ready to help a different company grow and take their next step. I have taken the next step in my career and as of 9/24/12 , I have joined KnowledgeCentrix as their new Vice President, Data Center Services.  

For those of you that don't know KnowledgeCentrix, It is a full-service information systems consulting firm specializing in providing Managed and Professional Services to businesses needing help to support their I.T. organization.  Although they offer Cloud based services, they are not in the clouds, but their vision, and technical savvy certainly are.  As a quick example, these are some services that KnowledgeCentrix offers that you might have an immediate benefit from:

1. Cloud based (public or private) App hosting.  We have 3 physical data center locations offering you robust co-location options.
2. Onsite / Offsite Backup / DR recovery
3. SharePoint Hosted solutions with consulting for creating automated work flows.
4. Many others... Get in touch with me to learn more 

My time with PlanNet has been an incredible experience offering me wonderful projects to implement and great clients to work with, such as Toyota, Ingram Micro, Broadcom , Reliance Steel,  Herbalife, and the list goes on.  

My knowledge gain as well as input to each companies successful projects has lead me to this point of taking this next step.  I will be continuing to work with PlanNet as a partner on open projects.  

For those that are interested, please follow me on twitter @GardnerDarrell, or connect with me on linkedIn, If you haven't already done so.  I will still be giving back to the online community via my hosted linkedIn groups, twitter and still plan to continue speaking on similar subjects regarding Time Management, Data Center management, project / program management, and cloud initiatives.　　

Here is to your continued success,
Darrell Gardner

Media Extenders.... What is the best way to go??

I have been asked on 3 different occasions over the past 2 weeks, "What is the best Media Extender?".  That is a loaded question.   To be honest I am pretty swayed in this topic, as I believe that a media extender should be able to watch live television.  Many folks have Dish, or DirecTV which provide them with controller boxes at each television they want to watch TV.  This is not really a media extender, as it is not attached to the network to search for media content to play on your TV. 

For me, I prefer to have a media extender attached to Monitor that provides me with the most functionality and rich media content.  Which brings me to the opinion regarding the topic of this post...  Dlink, PopCorn, several others have devices that plug into the network and will search for content (.mov , .mpg, .mp3 ) files and be able to play them to the tv.  PS3, Xbox, and other Gaming consoles do this as well.  Xbox goes an extra step with their windows media extender that works with a computer running windows media Center Vista or windows 7.  If this computer has tuners, the Xbox has the ability to control the tuner and watch it on the extended TV, as well as record to the main computer.  The media guide is available as well as all of the other Rich content that the main computer can see.  Now the Xbox can be a media player on it's own, however the Windows Media extender allows it to run the same program that you see on the computer but on the Xbox. 

Main difference is do you want to be able to watch live TV or just stream recorded content?

With the pricing differences, you can do this with an XBOX arcade for much lower prices than standard network media players.  PLUS you get a gaming system. 

That's it for today.

Thanks

What it takes to have a home with a True Media Center

I have been using shared media in my home with tuner control since 2005. Shared media with a media player since 1999. The Industry has finally come to the forefront for families and houses to do this easily. In otherwords, you don't have to be a computer professional to achieve central media control for your home. I'll go through the process that I have created for my own home media center and you can glean from that what you will.

What this is:
The reason I'm doing this I have found many of my friends and family are starting the process of creating media centers for their collections and I am giving them the lessons learned from my experiences. I figured why not help anyone else that is looking into this process. So follow along and maybe we'll all learn from each other.

What this is NOT:
The end all to all potential configurations or setups for hosting media in your house! This is only how I have done it and I am sure there are other ways to do the same thing. This is how I have done it and feel it is very productive, and financially attainable. Very Subjective here... so if you have opinions, please keep them short and productive.