An update
I'm way out in the middle of nowhere. I'm just here until the end of the month to see my girlfriend, then I'll be going to going back to Cali.
Before I got out here, I exchanged a large pile of cash for a new uber sexy MacBook Pro. My word this is a fancy beast, I have the low-end Macbook pro right now I have the standard 512M of RAM but I'll must likely up that when I get to Cali. I'm still working on hacking up the front row remote to make it more functional (though I must say front row is pretty cool, but I would love to be able to use VLC to view videos instead of QuickTime). Right now I'm using iRed lite, which seems to be working pretty good, but I need to get better at apple script to really start hacking it.