Back in 2001 Leonard Maltin approached Dick Cook at the Disney studio with an idea to reach back into the studio archives and release old Disney material on DVD.

The plan went forward and the end result was a series of extremely limited edition DVD releases sold under the name Disney Treasures. There have been nine ‘waves’ of Treasures releases over the past nine years totaling 30 SKUs in all.

A lot of the material in the Treasures series had never been released to the home video market before so this was a pretty big deal for fans of Disney history. These aren’t feature films either – they’re full of things like restored Disney shorts, wartime propaganda films, Mickey Mouse Club content, and made-for-TV clips about space travel in the 1950s. It’s aimed squarely at the adult collector – not their children.

The scarcity of the discs has really helped them keep their value on the resale market, and if you had the time or patience to track them all down it would cost you at least $800. Some of the edition sizes on the releases have been as small as 30,000, so if you didn’t pick them up within the first few days then getting fleeced on eBay was your best bet.

I’ve never had much of an interest in anything that Disney does outside of their theme park operations, so I only have one Treasures set – the Disneyland set from the first wave.

D23 members can now pre-order a 54-disc re-release of the Treasures series for $500. This set is even more limited – just 3,000 copies are being made. As large and expensive as it may be, it oddly doesn’t include three of the previous releases – “Elfego Baca and The Swamp Fox,” and the first and second seasons of Zorro.

It’s still an excellent value, and I have no doubt that flipping it on eBay will be an easy and lucrative proposition. So I ordered it. I don’t intend to hang on to the discs for very long, if you know what I’m saying…

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Watching downloaded videos over a network on an Xbox 360 or PS3 is doable, but clunky. You also have to make sure those videos are in a format that either machine will accept for playback, or set up some kind of transcoding solution that steals cpu cycles from your desktop machine. Kind of a drag.

So I’ve been looking into the possibility of setting up a HTPC. While I definitely don’t need one, it seems like a fun idea and might be a neat project to tinker around with. It looks like the ultra-customizable XBMC and its Boxee offshoot are the best options out there, and Lifehacker helpfully pointed out hardware that’ll run XBMC for a mere $200.

Just look at the Aeon skin. That beautiful open-source UI (!) tops just about anything you’re likely to see from Tivo, FIOS, U-Verse, or any other major media provider.

I had the hardware in my cart at NewEgg, all ready to pull the trigger. Then I had a thought, did some research, and gave up on the whole idea. XBMC has zero ATSC TV tuner support. No DVR functionality at all! It’s not even on the roadmap.

That means that any TV shows you’d watch through it would need to be downloaded torrents. I don’t mind downloading an episode here or there to catch a missed recording, but I shouldn’t have to sacrifice a/v quality to do it on a permanent basis for the sake of convenience…and I shouldn’t have to open myself up to receiving an ISP nastygram either!

Boxee has dedicated hardware coming out next month that may right this wrong, but they’re not talking specs yet.

So for now XBMC remains a ‘neat’ rather than ‘useful’ curiosity. Maybe Boxee will shake things up next month. We’ll see.

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The recent time change means it gets lighter earlier in the morning which means Kate wakes up earlier. That, combined with her getting older, means that she now wakes up anywhere between 6:30 and 7:30…vs her previous ‘like clockwork’ awakenings at 8:30.

Twice now I’ve been woken up – just 15 minutes or so before my alarm goes off – to Kate on the baby monitor going “DAD.” Then I fall back asleep and 20 seconds later – “DADA.” Then I fall asleep again and “DAD.” 20 more seconds of silence – “DAD!” Then as the sleep wears away she starts to get a little more urgent. “DA-DAAAA” If I wait too long she gets a little cryey too.

So I drag myself out of bed, skip breakfast, and walk into her room to find her smiling her big baby smile with her arms up in the air for me to pick her up. Tammy gets a precious 30 more minutes of sleep while I change Kate’s diaper and take her downstairs to start her day.

It is both a happy and a frustrating way for me to wake up.

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