Back at work after Memorial Day weekend, it’s beautiful out and I want to get out of here, so I’m killing some time by doing a quick general life update.
The holiday weekend was good. On Saturday I went to a cookout at the house of one of my coworkers. It was a good time, though I ended up having to leaver earlier than I would have liked in order to get Jason back in town in time for a family event.
Sunday had a new first for me, a family event at my home! In the past my apartments have always been too small or too unpresentable to have people over, so it was nice to finally have my mom, one of my stepbrothers and his family over for a cookout. The weather was great, and it seems like everyone had a good time. Bailey was a little freaked out about all the people, but was okay with the kids.
Life in generally has been going pretty well. I hit 30k miles on the Prius last week and purchased a new set of tires, Goodyear Assurance Fuel Max. We’ll see if they actually make any difference on the fuel mileage. I’m still on track to hit my savings goal to hopefully get a house next year. Also decided to switch banks. I don’t really have any complaints with TD Bank, but their online services have somewhat stagnated. A lot of places now let you set up e-mail or SMS alarms on limits or events, and they’ve shown no improvement to their services in the past 4 years or so. Opened up a couple of new accounts at Bellwether and will probably be transitioning over there in the next month.
With the nicer weather, I’ve been giving more thought to taking a real vacation this summer, but I have no idea what to do. I was thinking it would be cool to get a few people together to rent a house somewhere for a week. Not sure who would be interested or where to go, but I think it’d be fun.
In the process of making some changes to my home network in an effort to reduce the amount of power I use for always-on equipment in the apartment. Or at least that’s what I tell people, actually I’m just in it for the gadgets.
Current network is my cable modem, connected to my home storage server/router, which is then connected to a WRT54g which is just being used as a switch and 802.11b/g access point. From there we have my desktop PC, and an Ethernet over powerline bridge to my entertainment center with the XBox 360 and the TiVo HD.
So the plan is to rip out the storage server (a Dell Dimension E521) and the WRT54g, replacing them with an Apple Airport Extreme with an external drive array. This also upgrades my wireless to 802.11n and my wired stuff to gigabit. Eventually, it’ll look something like this:
I picked up the Airport Extreme last night, planning to install it this weekend to take over routing and wireless. I figure I’ll keep the storage server around until I figure out what I want to do for an external drive array off the Airport. I’d like to get a drobo, but they’re still somewhat pricey to me. It is the simplest to maintain solution though.
I’d also like to keep a FreeBSD box on my network so I have something I can shell in to. Somewhat looking at the MSI Wind PC as a low power BSD box. I could mount storage from the Airport and just boot from a CF card (which the Wind PC supports, apparently) to keep power consumption down.
Of course, all of this means spending more money and adding to my pile of computer stuff I don’t use, which already contains a mini-ITX motherboard that I could use for a low-power BSD box, though it would mean buying a power supply and IDE/CF adapter, which would probably add up to most of the cost of the Wind PC and be less powerful. So I’m not sure which path I’m going to take.
I should probably just be happy with what I have and save my money, but what fun is that?
