2 Bit Hacker

Another year, another post for the holidays, whichever ones you might choose to celebrate. I’ve been claiming Pastafarianism for most of this year, which prescribes a simple Holiday season. I really ought to pick up a copy of the holy book one of these days.

Anyway, I’ve got my desktop PC up and running again with a shiny new power supply. Hopefully this one will last for a while. Delia’s desktop’s video card started having fits when we hooked it up to a DVI monitor. I had similar issues with another card back when I first built this system, so I think it may have been a flaw in that line of cards. We picked up a new one at Best Buy, so it’s all happy again.

What with the new expansion pack and all, we’ve decided to take up WoW again. I figure with Jason playing and a few other friends on there, it’ll be a good way to waste away some winter nights. I’m looking to avoid all the stupid guild drama crap this time around though. So far it’s been pretty fun. A lot has changed since we stopped playing, so it’s kind of fun to discover all the little new things.

Not a whole lot going on otherwise. Thinking of having a New Year’s Eve party here. Slowly working on getting my stuff out of the second bedroom so Delia can use it as a massage room. She still needs to get in a bunch of practice hours before she can get her state certification back, so I figured having a place to practice would help.

Gaming, Personal holiday, pc, wow

Not a terribly exciting T-Day this year. I have the week off from work, planned on just rearranging some stuff in the apartment and relaxing, but instead I came down with a nasty cold on Monday. Delia caught it on Tuesday, and so today we’re both in pretty sorry states.

We ended up going to Bugaboo Steakhouse for a decent turkey dinner. It’s only the second time I can remember going to a restaurant for Thanksgiving. It wasn’t bad, and I was a little surprised with how many people were there.

Afterward we came back to the apartment, were in the door about 5 minutes when the fire alarm started going off. Shuffled back outside into the cold. Turns out that something on the first floor trigger the alarm, though that’s all the detail we got.

Since then, we’ve just been watching Bond films on TV. Delia has to wake up at some inhumane hour to go into work to open on Black Friday. Not a whole lot going on the rest of the weekend, then it’s back to work as usual on Monday.

Personal holiday

Not a lot going on at the moment, and I feel like typing, so it’s time for another general life update. Things are generally going pretty well, though there are a few annoyances at the moment, like the busted TV. My current plan is to get it repaired again and then sell it and buy something non-LG. There’s a Sony Bravia 40″ that’s not terribly unreasonable, but it’s a good chunk of change, so I’m not really sure what I’m going to do. I’ve got a stack of old electronics to sell off too. I should get on that and put the money toward the new set.

My birthday is coming up next week. Delia already got me my big present, a few months back, an Amazon Kindle e-reader, which I’ve been using almost continuously for my nightly reading. There’s nothing else I really want at the moment, but I’ve tagged a few things on my want list for good measure. Thinking about picking up Soul Calibur IV if I don’t get it otherwise.

I was also thinking of dragging Delia down to Easthampton, to go wandering around on Mount Tom. Haven’t been down there since I lived there with my mom when I was like 7. We’ll see how the weather goes.

Oh, and I finally got my home storage server/gateway up and running. Seems to be doing pretty well, though with 512MB it’s a little under powered in memory, but otherwise it’s doing the job nicely. Also picked up a Netflix Player, which is a pretty slick device. The movie selection on Netflix’s streaming service still isn’t that great, but they do have a pretty good selection of TV shows and documentaries, which is nice.

That’s about it for now, I guess. I’ll try and think of something interesting to write.

Personal birthday, netflix, tv

One more reason not to be doing any more long road trips: herniated disc. You may remember about 3 years ago I suffered from a herniated disc in my lower back which put pressure on a nerve to my left leg causing pain when walking or sitting. It ended up putting me in bed for about a month while the disc material was absorbed. Well, after my road trip to Ohio the disc herniated again. Not as bad this time, thankfully, but it still knocked me out of work for 2 and a half weeks, just returning to work today. No longer really painful, but at this point the left side of my left leg feels numb, as if it’s gone to sleep.

I’m just glad that it got better in time for the holidays. And it serves as a reminder that I really need to lose weight, or this’ll just keep happening.

Personal spine

Once again, it’s been awhile since I’ve written anything to my blag, but since Hindenburg is up and running again and I just upgraded WordPress, I suppose I should actually write something.

Work is going well, with the next couple of months looking to be pretty busy. I’ll be traveling to Virginia next week to rework our servers there. It’s the first time I’ve been to a datacenter other than Boston, so it should be pretty interesting. Sounds like I’ll also be going to Chicago and San Jose, but I don’t know the details on that quite yet.

On the home front, I’ve got a couple of projects I’ve been working on, a NanoBSD based home router using a MiniITX board I’ve had sitting around for the past couple of years, and I recently purchased an inexpensive Dell system which I plan to use as a Home Theater PC running Ubuntu. I’m planning to rig it up to pull shows off of my TiVo and automatically transcode them into formats suitable for watching from my Treo or iPod. Should be pretty neat once I get it set up and running.

I’ve also been studying to get my amateur radio license. I’ve been taking practice tests on my Treo using EggsHam and am getting to the point of only getting 2 or 3 questions wrong per test. The next testing session in the area is on June 16^th, so I’m hoping to go down then, get my license, then head to the MIT Flea on the 17^th and maybe find a handheld transceiver.

Personal, Work exam, HTPC, router

As usual, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. For one reason or another I just don’t seem to feel I have enough going on that the world needs to know about. For some reason I feel like posting a general update at the moment, and so I shall.

My works is going along nicely. The new office space is rather nice, and it’s network is ticking along quite happily to itself. I’m enjoying the System Administrator position, although it does mean the occasional late night when a server decides to act up. Apparently I’ve been assigned to more of a projects roll than a maintenance roll, working on improving things and setting up new tools for internal use. In the near future I’ll be rolling out Cacti to replace our MRTG instances, and probably upgrading Nagios. All in all, rather good.

On the home front, we’re looking for a new one. The new landlords at the current location have decided to increase our rent while at the same time taking away our storage space in the basement (claiming it’s a fire hazard, while also saying they’re planning on pouring concrete down there, apparently.) So, Delia and I looked at a few townhouses, one of which we rather liked in Merrimack. Unfortunately, I don’t think my credit is going to be good enough at this time to swing a loan. The combination of lack of credit history and my inconsistent bills payments from last year (from the whole unemployment/PepBoys time period) don’t look so great to the banks.

So, it looks like we’ll be renting for a while longer. I’d like to get out of where we are though, and are currently leaning toward a complex in Bedford. While more expensive than the current location, it’s also quite a lot nicer, so I think it’ll be worth it. My plan is to rent for another year or two, keeping better documentation on my bill payments, so that when we go for the buying-a-place option again, I’ll have everything all put together to give to the loan people.

I’ve also been giving some thought to taking a stab at the HTPC project again. I’ve got all the hardware I need, it’s just a matter of throwing it together an making it work. With the recent upgrade to Delia’s PC, I even have my original motherboard and CPU back. I think I’m going to go with an external VGA< ->NTSC adapter this time around though, since I wasn’t very pleased with the TV-out support for my chipset under Linux, and I really want to use MythTV. Also not too sure about controlling the new cable box. My old box had a nice RS-232 port on the back which allowed for direct serial control. The new one does not, which means I’ll probably end up having to go with an IR blaster of some sort. We shall see.

Geek Stuff, Personal, Work house, HTPC

Not really a whole lot going on in my life, as usual, but I figured it’s been a while, so I’d toss together an update.

Work has been going well. Finally transitioned over to the system administration position. So far it hasn’t been anything overly exciting, a couple trips to the colo to swap out bad parts and I’ve been putting together a couple of new systems. I’m rather enjoying it, it makes me happy to be working with hardware again after spending so much time on the last coding project. I think this new position is going to be a good mix of hardware and coding, which I think will keep it from getting repetitive.

In other news, I finally ordered some new parts for a new computer for myself. My current system is getting a little on in years with it’s Athlon XP 2600+, 512MB of RAM, and GeForce 3 Ti 500. The new system will be an Athlon 64 X2 4600+, 2GB of RAM, and a GeForce 7900GT. Should be quite a step up, and I’m looking forward to playing some more modern games (suggestions welcome.) Not sure what I’m going to do with the old hardware yet. The chipset fan died last week, so I’ll need to replace that before doing anything with the motherboard, but it’s all still good hardware, so I should find some useful task to set it to.

I’m also trying the whole diet thing again (sounds familiar, right?) with watching what I eat and drinking more water. I’ve also been trying to get out and walk for a bit each day. I figure once I get into the habit of going for walks, I’ll start replacing walks with time at the gym a few times a week. I figure I’ve got a little over a month to get a bit more into shape so walking back and forth from the new office location won’t be a big deal. It just seems silly to drive a car to go a mile to work.

Geek Stuff, Personal, Work diet, pc