Network Construction / Holiday Choir Show / Jaci's Challenge
Hello, 2009! I've been strangely busy lately. Ever since my brother came back from graduating college two weeks ago, we've been busy cranking through everything he brought home. He has a lot of computer stuff and so all of it needs to be gone through and a home found. He's got like 20 hard drives and they're all stuffed with data of all kinds. The organizational effort is so large, that we went out and bought a 1.5 TB hard drive the other day so he can begin to organize all that data. 1.5 TB is about 1,300 GB, so this is more data capacity in one drive than I've ever seen.
Alongside that effort, my dad has been getting us going on a major network upgrade. For Christmas, we gave him the guts of a PC case I bought on eBay and told him that after we bought the parts to make it work, this new computer will become our second media center PC and go upstairs in the theater room with the projector. Ever since then, we've been slowly buying inexpensive PC components to get the machine going. We got the motherboard, some RAM, whatever else. Cheap cheap cheap. As of now, the whole machine is only costing us around $200 and it's almost as good as our first media center PC, Scotty. This new machine will be called "Bones", in keeping with our Star Trek crew naming convention. Blame that on my dad. He likes him some old school Trek.
So anyway, to make this new system work with the other one, we need to add a third computer to the network. This third computer will be a file server which will be on 24/7/365 and do nothing but host a file share on the network. As Scotty and Bones are turned on and used, they'll link up to the server (Which we're calling "Nexus" at the moment because no one can come up with anything better) and stream video files over our gigabit-speed Ethernet network. To do that, we had to string more network cable through the walls. We now even have one that runs downstairs by following a strange path through the walls into the garage and then into the crawl space under the house. I had to get down there and feed the cable, and let me tell you people, crawl spaces suck. I took two showers after that. Yuck.
Over the weekend, one of my college friends, Matt, got me out to see his choir perform in downtown Portland. Because of our December snow storms, they had to move their holiday performance to January. It was quite a show! Afterward, we had dinner in this quaint little grill (Which we agreed was nearly definable as a dive) and caught up on a bunch of stuff. This Friday, we're all getting together for a night of board games. It's kind of become a tradition over the last six months to have a game night every couple weeks over at Matt and Cassandra's place. This week will be special because Ian, one of my college roommates, has moved to Portland from central Oregon and will be around to play games with us! I haven't seen Ian since graduation, so this will be unreal. It's almost like the whole gang is slowly getting back together person by person. This Friday will be quite a trip.
I'm also gonna make a quick note about something else that I'm ridiculously excited about but I probably am not allowed to say too much about. Jacalyn has challenged herself--probably as a New Year's resolution--to begin upon the path of improving her weight. Because she doesn't really have many people around her who could truly level with her about her progress, I've become her entire support group (Even though I'm 400 miles west of her). Every Saturday, we'll have a weigh-in much like on that "Biggest Loser" TV show and we'll go over how she's doing with photographs and everything. Also, at certain milestones, we have devised a few incentives as motivations. When she reaches her first milestone, I've agreed to swing out to Boise and spend some time with her. When this is all done, she's going to look amazing. It's so exciting to be on the ground floor of her efforts. I hope I can give her the right incentives to motivate her to keep going!
Alongside that effort, my dad has been getting us going on a major network upgrade. For Christmas, we gave him the guts of a PC case I bought on eBay and told him that after we bought the parts to make it work, this new computer will become our second media center PC and go upstairs in the theater room with the projector. Ever since then, we've been slowly buying inexpensive PC components to get the machine going. We got the motherboard, some RAM, whatever else. Cheap cheap cheap. As of now, the whole machine is only costing us around $200 and it's almost as good as our first media center PC, Scotty. This new machine will be called "Bones", in keeping with our Star Trek crew naming convention. Blame that on my dad. He likes him some old school Trek.
So anyway, to make this new system work with the other one, we need to add a third computer to the network. This third computer will be a file server which will be on 24/7/365 and do nothing but host a file share on the network. As Scotty and Bones are turned on and used, they'll link up to the server (Which we're calling "Nexus" at the moment because no one can come up with anything better) and stream video files over our gigabit-speed Ethernet network. To do that, we had to string more network cable through the walls. We now even have one that runs downstairs by following a strange path through the walls into the garage and then into the crawl space under the house. I had to get down there and feed the cable, and let me tell you people, crawl spaces suck. I took two showers after that. Yuck.
Over the weekend, one of my college friends, Matt, got me out to see his choir perform in downtown Portland. Because of our December snow storms, they had to move their holiday performance to January. It was quite a show! Afterward, we had dinner in this quaint little grill (Which we agreed was nearly definable as a dive) and caught up on a bunch of stuff. This Friday, we're all getting together for a night of board games. It's kind of become a tradition over the last six months to have a game night every couple weeks over at Matt and Cassandra's place. This week will be special because Ian, one of my college roommates, has moved to Portland from central Oregon and will be around to play games with us! I haven't seen Ian since graduation, so this will be unreal. It's almost like the whole gang is slowly getting back together person by person. This Friday will be quite a trip.
I'm also gonna make a quick note about something else that I'm ridiculously excited about but I probably am not allowed to say too much about. Jacalyn has challenged herself--probably as a New Year's resolution--to begin upon the path of improving her weight. Because she doesn't really have many people around her who could truly level with her about her progress, I've become her entire support group (Even though I'm 400 miles west of her). Every Saturday, we'll have a weigh-in much like on that "Biggest Loser" TV show and we'll go over how she's doing with photographs and everything. Also, at certain milestones, we have devised a few incentives as motivations. When she reaches her first milestone, I've agreed to swing out to Boise and spend some time with her. When this is all done, she's going to look amazing. It's so exciting to be on the ground floor of her efforts. I hope I can give her the right incentives to motivate her to keep going!