2 Bit Hacker

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.

Happy holidays to everyone and all that. Delia and I just got back from her aunt’s house after eating far too much tasty food. I’m now the proud owner of a number of shirts courtesy of Delia’s family, a few more t-shirts, a neat mug, and PixelBlocks from Delia (in addition to the EV mode kit and floor mats for the Prius she already gave me on the solstice,) and a Garmin nüvi 250W from my dad.

Over the weekend Delia and I got the new TV hooked up, and it’s looking good. I also decided to go ahead and get the Xbox 360, and I’m rather glad I did, as the TiVo HD turned out to be dead on arrival. For some reason it was stuck in a reboot cycle and couldn’t get past it’s initial welcome screen. TiVo support was pretty cool about it and are doing an advanced ship RMA on it, so hopefully I’ll have that soon. The Xbox has been filling the time we would have normally spent watching TV, so it works out, I suppose. For games, we picked up Assassin’s Creed for me, DDR and Katamari for Delia.

Unfortunately my bad luck with new devices has extended to the Garmin my dad sent me. It powers up then complains that it has no maps and is therefore useless. Garmin’s online support is equally useless it seems, as they try to load pages from RFC1918 private address space, or try to redirect you to hosts that don’t exist in the DNS. Their phone support is, of course, closed for the holiday. Hopefully tomorrow will be more fruitful.

All in all though, I’m happy. I still think Delia spent too much on me, and I feel bad that I didn’t get her more, which seems to happen every year.

It’s that time again, when I get bored waiting for Delia to get out of work and I don’t feel like doing anything productive, when I decide it’s time to update ye olde weblog. As usual, I don’t think much is really going on in my life, I continue to work, my left leg is still weird from my last back problem, my car is still running good, though the mileage is hurting in the cold.

One somewhat interesting thing is that I finally broke down and ordered a shiny new HDTV last week. It’s an LG 37LB5D, which is a 37″ widescreen LCD at full 1080p resolution. To go with it, I also ordered a TiVo HD so I’ll have some HD content to watch. They should both arrive tomorrow, at which point I’ll get to have fun getting CableCARDs from Comcast. Oh yeah, and if anyone out there is interested in a used 27″ Sony WEGA tube, let me know. It’s too big to really go anywhere else in my apartment.

The new TV has also got me thinking about picking up an Xbox 360. I haven’t really been doing a lot of console gaming lately, but it looks like there are some decent new games out there, and the whole online thing looks interesting. I think Delia wants one too, though I’m not sure why. Maybe I’ll just get the PS2 hooked up again, and if we actually use it, I’ll get the newer thing.

Other than that, not a lot going on. Some people have asked what I want for the upcoming holiday, so I’ve started tagging some things as “want” on my del.icio.us. Nothing terribly fancy. I’m trying to get the apartment cleaned up and presentable so that people can actually come over. If that project gets complete soon, maybe we’ll have some people over for a holiday party of some sort.

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.

So, another birthday come and gone. Nothing terribly eventful this year. Delia gave me a tool bag along with an RJ-45 crimper and a Cat5 stripper, so I can finally make my own cables without having to use tools at work. She also picked up a business card holder for my desk at work, and some additional coasters for the apartment.

I’ve also been on a bit of a spending spree lately, picking up some new shoes from Zappos (online shoe buying is so much easier than offline), a new mouse and laptop AC/DC adapter from Woot, and a new 2007 Toyota Prius which should arrive on Monday or Tuesday.

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.

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 occaisional late night when a server decides to act up. Apparently I’ve been assigned to more of a projects roll than a maintainence 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 rathered liked in Merrimack. Unforunately, 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.