I like my coffee in the morning. I like cereal, toast and a piece of fruit, at least during the weekdays.  But most of all, I like my media to be mobile around the house. It goes where my UMPC goes.

What better time to engage mobile media than during the morning meal. As I sit down to nourish my mind with the goings on in the world I prop up my UMPC. I pop open IE and “check my vitals” (def: To check your email, myspace, facebook, blog, and/or any daily essential websites). Meanwhile I’ll stream tunes to my UMPC from my media library on my home server (currently a Windows XP machine) via Windows Media Connect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_Connect). Other times I may watch a show I recorded earlier using Media Center.

This was easy to setup. Windows Media Player 11 (WMP) has media sharing built in.

·         I simply open WMP on my home server, click Library and select Media Sharing.  I then follow the prompts to expose my media on the network.

·         On my UMPC I open WMP and tap Library and select Media Sharing.

·         The last step is to make sure my UMPC is given permission to connect to the Home Server’s media… so back to the Home Server, Open WMP, click Library and select Media Sharing and look for the name of the UMPC in the list of found devices to share media to.

Now that I've exposed this media and given permission to my UMPC device I'm free to play whatever media I've exposed. What’s also cool about this technology is that there are TVs that also make use of it (that is, if you don’t have an Xbox to act as a Media Extender).

I’m wondering if others find this usage to be common.