2 Bit Hacker

So, I’m living on my own again, and I think it’s time to make some changes. First off, this apartment is too big for me, and too expensive to live in alone. So, I intend to move. My goal is to move by the end of February, thus maximizing the amount of time I have to recoup the cost of the lease break fee over the year. Lease break is one months rent, so $1,435. If I break end of February, that’s only 2 months into the lease, so I have 10 months to recovery the cost in order for it to make sense not to ride out the lease, so I need to find a lease that’s at least $143.50 less per month.

I’ve been considering Manchester Place, as it is literally right next door to work. Their lowest cost 1 bedroom unit is $1,155/month, a savings of $280/mo. And that’s not counting the reduction in driving, as I’d only need to use the Prius on the weekends.

Also considering some other cost cutting measures, dropping television service, the TiVo subscription, GameFly, dropping Netflix to the 1 disc plan, and such.

That’s a yearly savings of $5,304, which I intend to throw towards a down payment on a townhouse once my next lease is up. The Comcast doesn’t drop to zero as I intend to keep my own Internet access, although I could possibly just leech off of the connection at work. The location is only a couple of blocks from the CO as well, so DSL is a strong possibility.

We shall see. I intend to make some phone calls tomorrow. There’s also a townhouse rental place on the north end of the city that looks interesting.

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.

Looks like a lot of work has been done on the LJ-XP plugin for WordPress, so I figured I’d give it a shot again. If people on LiveJournal are wondering why I haven’t posted anything other than Twitter things in a long time, it’s partially because the crossposting plugin broke when I did a WordPress upgrade a while back, and I never bothered to do anything about it.

I decided to turn off comments on the LJ posts this time though, but you can log into my WordPress with OpenID, for which LiveJournal acts as a provider, so hopefully that will work out.

During Thursday’s ice storm I decided to power down my FreeBSD box at home, which acts as my router and file server. Unfortunately, it didn’t want to boot back up afterwards, and since it didn’t have a monitor on it, I couldn’t really debug it. This prodded me into finally moving my cable modem/router set up from the corner of the home office to the front closet. This led to the problem of how to get connectivity to the stuff in the entertainment center.

In the past I had used a Linksys WRT54g running dd-wrt, configured to be a wireless client and acting as a bridge, but for streaming video and gaming I don’t really like using wireless. I had replaced the wireless bridge with a long piece of cable running around the living room and into the office, but that would have been really ugly to run into the closet. So, over the weekend I decided to pick up a Linksys PLK300, a pair of Powerline AV adapters, one with a built-in 4 port switch. Brought them home, plugged them in, and it just worked. I’m somewhat impressed, I was expecting some sort of issue, since I have one of them plugged into the surge protection side of a UPS.

So now in the front closet I have the cable coming into the apartment to a 2-way splitter (previously a 2-way then a 4-way, which may have been causing some of my signal issues) then into my cable modem, which connects to one side of my FreeBSD router/file server, which then connects to a WRT54g running dd-wrt, which provides wireless connectivity, then the single port powerline adapter plugs into that. Then in the entertainment center, it’s just the XBox 360 and TiVo connected to the powerline adapter with the 4-port switch.

Overall I freed up a 5-port switch, an 8-port switch, a bunch of Cat5, and some space in the office.

Next, I think I’m going to reconfigure the WRT to do some VLANs, trunking them into my FreeBSD box, and put my Fonera and DynWiFi Meraki on their own VLAN.

I’ve been playing a fair amount of video games lately, most recently Fable 2 and Fallout 3, both on the XBox 360, with some Castle Crashers mixed in. I also picked up Soul Calibur IV a while back, but that’s more fun to play with other people, and people don’t visit my apartment all that often.

Fable 2 is good, but I found the main storyline to be way too short. Sure, there are plenty of side quests to do, and some obscure achievements to unlock, but it doesn’t feel like the content is all that rich. I’ve played through the main story twice now, in order to try once as good and once as evil, and it just doesn’t feel all that varied. I’ll keep poking at it though, as it’s easier to just let it collect dust for a bit between playings in order to build up cash, since you keep earning in-game while not actively playing. Not a bad game, but I somewhat wish I had rented it instead of buying, though Delia appears to enjoy it.

Fallout 3 on the other hand feels much much larger. I’ve been playing on and off for a couple of weeks, and haven’t finished the main storyline yet. There’s just so much to go out and explore that I find myself wandering around the Wasteland instead of trying to advance the story. At least once I skipped part of the story due to exploring, which I was surprised to find the game allowed. The combat system is a little weak, as it lacks the target lock that a lot of the other FPS games I’ve played on the console have had, and aiming is fidgety. The V.A.T.S. combat stuff makes up for this though, making it so you don’t have to aim on your own, though it does slow down combat, but it also conserves ammo; a precious commodity in the Wastes. I’m considering buying this so I can get on to the next game in my GameFly queue. It’s a great game, and there’s already downloadable content on the way for it.

I’ve also been thinking about fixing up my home PC and picking up World of Warcraft now that the second expansion is out. Jason still plays, and apparently the end-game dynamic has changed a lot since I stopped playing. I just don’t want to get sucked into it again and get wrapped up in all the guild drama. We shall see. At the very least I need a new power supply, and I might need a new motherboard, which would pretty much require a new CPU as well. Tech Report just put out a new system guide, which is tempting me to just buy a whole new system again. We shall see…

Upgraded my WordPress installation to the new 2.7 version. So far the new admin interface seems much nicer than the last one, though I’m still a fan of the original. Other than that, nothing really seems all that different. I fully expect to continue doing patches every time I go to post anyway, but at least now I have a small shell script that takes care of that for me, including backing up the old WP and database.

Also trying out a new theme, called iNove, which so far I’m pretty happy with. The widget column is slightly wider than in the old theme, which lets me use a slightly fancier GamerTag, and it’s overall pretty plain and simple. I’ll keep it around for a bit and see how it goes.

I’m also trying out the Textile2 plugin for WordPress. I’ve used Textile in the past with MoveableType and other CMS software, and like the markup it uses. So if you notice any weird markup looking stuff, it’s because I’m getting used to it again and probably messed up the syntax.

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.