Today marked Sophia's last day in the infant class – as of tomorrow, she has been officially moved to the toddler class.

Everything was going well with HTPC One until I got to the HDMI output; I was getting video but no audio through the HDMI connection. After sloshing through the Linux/Ubuntu forums over the course of a week, compiling driver sets and entering arcane Linux commands, I finally realized what the problem was – the stupid video card does not have native HDMI audio. It will send audio through the HDMI connection, but I have to connect the motherboard to the video card via an S/PDIF connection, which the motherboard does not have. Bollocks!

Seeing as how everything else is working perfectly fine, I just connected HTPC One to our living room TV via a VGA cable and an audio cable running from the rear headphone/speaker jack to the TV. The picture quality over the VGA connection is a little soft, but it gets the job done. I'm going to start looking for two new video cards that can output video AND audio natively over an HDMI connection; our trip to Denver put the search for the video cards on hold, but I'm once again free to start looking. When I finally buy them (and they get here), HTPC One will be complete and I can finally clone the drive over to HTPC Two.

The only thing more annoying than a telemarketer calling my cell phone is an automated telemarketer that constantly calls my cell phone. Here are the two biggest offenders right now:

• Tom with Home Protection — I find this one particularly annoying, mainly because the first time these losers called I thought I was talking to a real person for the first 15 seconds. When I gave it a response that didn't match up with its programming, the system paused for a few seconds trying to decipher what I said before saying something like, "I'm sorry, could you repeat that?" That's when I figured out it wasn't a real person.

  Since this thing calls me several times a week (from several different numbers), I've been able to piece together a fairly decent transcript:

  Hi, This is Tom with Home Protection. How are you today?

  The system pauses to wait for a response; it's programmed with several different human-sounding responses based on what you tell it, like "Oh, that's great" or "Sorry to hear that".

  We're actually looking for an advertising home in your area. Would you be interested in receiving a free GE wireless home security system in exchange for putting a small security sign in your yard?

  Again, the system pauses to wait for response. If you say something that sound like "yes", it connects you to a live person who's job is to collect your information; if you say anything that sound like "no", it will continue to hound you, sometimes even talking over you. Here are some examples if you say no...

  OK, my job is just to make sure you are interested in learning more, but I'll have a specialist call you back and give you all the details. Then you can decide for yourself if it is a good fit for you and your family. I just need to verify that you own the home you're living in – is this correct?
  Like I'd said, you can decide for yourself if it is a good fit after talking with our specialist. There's no obligation to do anything. Now, do you own the home you're living in?

  If at any point during this "conversation" you don't respond, the system will start saying "Hello?" or "Are you still there?" If you say something that it doesn't recognize, it will respond back with something like "I'm sorry, can you repeat that?"

  I have been connected to the live operator and asked to be removed from their list; the only thing that accomplished was that I got hung up on. A few times I've tested to see what sort of responses Tom is programmed to answer to. If you ask him who he is or what company he works for, he'll respond back with the "Tom from Home Protection" bit. If you ask him how he's doing, he'll say that he's doing fine. I once found an empty conference room and just started babbling to him, but he only responded with the "Can you repeat that?" message before he hung up on me.

  I've filed several complaints with the FTC, but so far that doesn't seem to have done much good. I block the numbers "Tom" calls from, but eventually they'll just switch to a different number and I'm back to hanging up on him and blocking another number.

• Rachel with Cardholder Services — this isn't quite as annoying as Tom since it doesn't pretend to be a real person, but it does call me more often than he does. I can't recall as much of the script as I can with Tom, but here's what I do remember:

  Hello, this is Rachel from Cardholder Services. There are no problems with your credit card account, but it's important that you act fast in order to reduce your interest rates. Please consider this your final notice.

  Final notice my ass. You're given the option to press a number to be removed from the calling list or to speak to a representative. I've tried both; pressing the number to automatically remove myself has produced no result since I pressed it like 2 months ago and asking the representative to remove me from the list resulted in (you can probably guess) a hangup. And not a semi-polite hangup – no, I swear that the guy called me a jerkoff as he was disconnecting the call. As with Tom, several complaints have been filed with the FTC since I'm on the Do Not Call Registry and I try blocking the numbers as they call from new ones.

I had almost lost all hope, but today I came across an FTC news release from December of 2011 that referenced legal action being taken against companies making "robocalls for clients selling credit card interest rate reduction programs, extended automobile warranties, and home security systems." Sounds like it might be related to Tom and Rachel, but I can't be sure. If it is, I hope there's a public beating involved so I can take out some of my anger.

Enough of the hardware has arrived (the computers, the RAM and the wireless cards) that I was able to start work on getting one of the HTPCs up and running yesterday. I unpacked the two Optiplex 745s and hauled one up to my desk to begin the conversion process. I popped the case cover off and upgraded the RAM (2GB of Elpida PC2-6400U-666 DDR2) and installed the wireless card (Rosewill RNX-N150PC PCI card). The RAM was easy enough, but I have a minor complaint about the Rosewill card – it comes with two height brackets, one full-height (default) and the other low-profile. Since I have a SFF machine, I needed to switch brackets. Well, the screw holes for the low-profile bracket don't quite match, so the screws ended up being a little wonky. I also managed to lose a nice little chunk of knuckle skin trying to get the card seated properly, but Dell's SFF design had as much to do with it as the Rosewill card. In any case, I got everything in there, plugged the machine in and booted into the Ubuntu installer from a USB thumb drive (I didn't even bother booting into whatever Dell installed on it, which I think was Windows XP Home). Ubuntu didn't recognize the Rosewill wireless card, so I had to end up using a wired connection to do the install and download the updates. Since I started kinda late, I just let the installer run overnight.

About an hour ago I finally had enough time to check on the installation, which had completed and was waiting for me to reboot. The wireless card still wasn't working, so I decided to tackle that issue first. Some generous soul on the Ubuntu forums posted a great walk-through for getting the wireless card working on Ubuntu 11.04, which also works with Ubuntu 11.10, although there are two things I'd like to point out: (1) the link for the drivers in the walk-through no longer works, so anyone who's looking for them can find them by using this link or by navigating the Rosewill site themselves and (2) it's no longer necessary to follow the instructions in the README file in the driver directory. Anyway, after doing all those terminal commands and rebooting, I was able to see and connect to our wireless network. Yippee!

With that out of the way, it's time to start installing and configuring XBMC, Once the rest of the hardware arrives, I'll finish getting everything configured properly on HTPC One. And thanks to the magic of hard drive cloning software, I'll just drop a copy of HTPC One's hard drive onto HTPC Two and have two fully functional and identically configured HTPCs.