Not sure what to get your better half this Valentine’s Day? I hear you. Stand-by gifts like chocolate or roses are all so, uh, overdone. I always feel like it’s some sort of relationship tollbooth I have to pay in order to move on towards spring.
Here’s your flowers, honey, and your obligatory sappy card that I signed all by myself.
Yeah. I’m not afraid to say it: Greeting cards are perfunctory.
Windows Media Center has saved me this year though. A few years ago, I saw how it plays these amazing slideshows on a TV with music in the background, I was hooked. We we’re tired of looking at our digital pictures on the little screen on the camera, which is usually what we did.
Media Center’s slideshow does slow pans and zooms on the photos it’s showing. These slow movements give an added presence to the experience.
In my house, my Media Center PC is hooked up to our television, so slideshows are played in the big screen, but even on a monitor or laptop screen, the experience is great. When we visit my parents, I often bring my laptop and set it up on the counter and my parents drink coffee and watch pictures of the kids and repeatedly ask me when I am going to cut my hair.
(Media Center hasn’t helped me with that last part, but some battles we must fight on our own).
Here’s how I create the ultimate Photo Slideshow Valentine for my wife.
1. I open Windows Photo Gallery. It gives me a view of all the photos on my PC without me having to go in and out of folders. I go in and begin tagging photos I want in the show with a “vday” tag. I start in the 1990s with a handsome young graduate student with bad taste in sweaters…
…up through two years in the Peace Corps, a series of moves around the country, multiple dogs and finally, two great kiddos, a house in the suburbs and me, a graying, longer-haired version of that first photo, with slightly better taste in sweaters. Any pic I add the vday tag to will show up in my slideshow.
2. Using Media Center, I head into Music and create a Valentine’s Day playlist. I have a Zune pass, so I’m able to find most of the songs that I want that I don’t already have on my PC.
3. When gift-time rolls around, we’ll settle in on the couch, and I’ll pickup the remote, start my ValentinesDay playlist, then move to My Pictures, select <tags>, and then the vday tag I created earlier.
Then I select Play Slideshow and let the dulcet tones of Elvis and Bon Jovi work their magic as we take a photographic cruise down memory lane.
I won’t lie to you either. After the slideshow, I’m going to give her the sappy card and some chocolates. I’m not crazy. I better cover all my bases, just in case we watch the slideshow and she says “that’s nice now where’s my candy?”
It could happen.But somehow, after watching the slideshow, I don’t think the chocolate and the card is going to feel so perfunctory.
Yeah. I said it. Perfunctory. Not any more.
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More on Media Center and Slideshows here. 
