Rolling back to MythDora because of Charlie Brown

Vista Media Center has been great, except for some issues that don't bother others but me:
- It runs on Windows Vista
- I have to do an ugly hack to get guide information for subchannels.

More importantly, it doesn't give me the flexibility to do compression. I'm using a 120 GB drive, and OTA digital TV takes lots of space. BlueRay might be important down the line, but I'm watching on a SD television, I don't have a blue-ray drive, or any movie discs. The fact that I'm using a Media Center remote works out well too, but I think I can get by with it working. Oh, and ` GB of RAM was inadequate at times... watching that circle just go around and around got old. RAM is cheap, but I wasn't ready to get more RAM.

So, the straw that broke the camels back was my mom-in-laws request to record the "Great Pumpkin" episode of Charlie Brown. I accidentally recorded an hour of weather and news, because the guide information for the subchannel of ABC Broadcast Television was the same. (My fault, I should have checked... but I was busy... that's why I built a DVR...)

I hate to take some thing that is working well, and kill it, but hey... I wasn't a real Vista Fan anyway and I want to use this Schedules Direct subscription, and I wanted to run Linux, and Media Portal is still in their nearly-infinite 1.0 release candidate... blah blah.

I'm mostly concerned about getting an Internet connection to the TV. The supposedly-final straw that tipped me over to Vista was support for a wireless G card that I had. I'm going to stick a wireless b card in and see if that works after I install.

Twitter and Facebook

Facebook is cool, but I really hate the adverts. Again, I got some program that puts Twitter Updates on Facebook, and then some program that updates Twitter, so I don't have to be on Twitter or Facebook to make a status update. Sigh... that way, I can keep working! Right now, that program is TwitterBar. I don't actually have anyone "following" me on Twitter, so I'm not using an application like TwitterFox to keep up with my friends.

The real deal is that I'm just not into spending "time" on Facebook, and I feel bad, because there's lots of people who have made genuine attempts to keep up with me, and play games and stuff, and a I have a list of requests a mile long. They come to my e-mail box, and that's great, but I'm wondering if I should just block the applications. I'm thinking no, but I hate having this reminder of stuff that I've ignored, but not hit the button to "ignore". Bah, I think I'll just poke/hit/give a flower to/wave every single one of them, just to be nice.

Of course, everyone who's my friend on Facebook can read this, since I link my WordPress blog to Facebook too. I hadn't updated in a while, so I guess everyone who wants to know what is really up can find out. Yay!

Twitter and Facebook

Facebook is cool, but I really hate the adverts. Again, I got some program that puts Twitter Updates on Facebook, and then some program that updates Twitter, so I don't have to be on Twitter or Facebook to make a status update. Sigh... that way, I can keep working! Right now, that program is TwitterBar. I don't actually have anyone "following" me on Twitter, so I'm not using an application like TwitterFox to keep up with my friends.

The real deal is that I'm just not into spending "time" on Facebook, and I feel bad, because there's lots of people who have made genuine attempts to keep up with me, and play games and stuff, and a I have a list of requests a mile long. They come to my e-mail box, and that's great, but I'm wondering if I should just block the applications. I'm thinking no, but I hate having this reminder of stuff that I've ignored, but not hit the button to "ignore". Bah, I think I'll just poke/hit/give a flower to/wave every single one of them, just to be nice.

Of course, everyone who's my friend on Facebook can read this, since I link my WordPress blog to Facebook too. I hadn't updated in a while, so I guess everyone who wants to know what is really up can find out. Yay!

I'm from Kokomo!

Random group on Facebook. One of my childhood playmates invited me.

Funnily enough, I was just telling a co-worker about the "Steer" and the "Stump".

Cleaning up

I deleted all my notes in Facebook. It was just a blog import, and I have that little WordPress application. I doubt anyone will miss it.

I formatted my drive an installed Fedora 9. Windows Vista is annoying, and I'm probably not going to keep playing Warhammer Online. Maybe I'll start up World of Warcraft again. That supposedly runs well in Linux. I don't know what I'll end up doing with my media player situation, but I backed up all my ripped mp3 files to my ClarkConnect box. Maybe I'll do some kind of transcode to ogg, or just move them to the Vista Media Center.

I didn't back up my photos... tragic. I think I got them all up on flickr (which I also recently linked to facebook). If not, I'll comb through my mom-in-law's digital archive again, and my saved flash cards, and download everything from Flickr. Then I'll delete the dupes and crappy photos. Then I'll actually organize them and post them up to Flickr in clean sets. I wonder how hard it is to delete your entire photostream?

gimp-print-cups and a new gateway

Well, that gimp-print thing didn't work. I couldn't find a new printer in the admin tool. Oh well. maybe a reboot will fix it...

What's that? one of the newtwork cards stopped working? Grr... the only thing worse than defective hardware is hardware that works intermittently. Sometimes I really miss my Apple hardware.

Fortunatly the box that has two 10/100 connections hasn't been torn down... I take that, then set it up and re-copy my music to it, and my world of warcraft isntallation. I notice increased transfer speed. This box has a 2.8 GHz P4 a gig of DDR2 ram, and a 160 GB SATA hard drive. 10 MB/sec... Sigh, I'll take it.

Then I move on to trying the same failure of gimp-print, and an internet search leads me to try gimp-print-cups.
[root@gateway ~]# apt-get install gimp-print-cups
Reading Package Lists...
Building Dependency Tree...
The following NEW packages will be installed:
gimp-print-cups
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 removed and 53 not upgraded.
Need to get 24.5MB of archives.
After unpacking 30.8MB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 ftp://rh.apt.clarkconnect.com System/os gimp-print-cups 4.2.7-2 [24.5MB]
Fetched 24.5MB in 45s (543kB/s)
Committing changes...
Preparing... ##################################################
gimp-print-cups ##################################################
Done.

Holy Cow! That works, but there's a bunch of printers, none of which have any differentiation. They're all Epson R300 something-or-other-gimp-print. But, I picked the first one, and the test page printed... but the sheet of paper fed through crooked :(.

Anyway. Looks like I'm good to go, other than needing for ClarkConnect to be based on a newer release of RHEL.

gimp-print FTW! seriously...

Check the timestamp between this post and the last one. I'm not completely dumb. That's good to know.

Reading Package Lists...
Building Dependency Tree...
E: Couldn't find package gutenprint
[root@gateway ~]# apt-get install gimp-print
Reading Package Lists...
Building Dependency Tree...
The following NEW packages will be installed:
gimp-print
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 removed and 52 not upgraded.
Need to get 2459kB of archives.
After unpacking 4306kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 ftp://rh.apt.clarkconnect.com System/os gimp-print 4.2.7-2 [2459kB]
Fetched 2459kB in 8s (277kB/s)
Committing changes...
Preparing... ##################################################
gimp-print ##################################################
Done.

ClarkConnect, round 2

So, I fried a router... meh. I built a replacement. I also nabbed a gigabit switch for $20. Unfortunately, the hardware I tried to use for the router failed, and I had to use a "real machine" that only had 10/100 network bits in it.

I got the old hardware back up and running, and I also got some other parts together and ended up building a "home server" with ClarkConnect. Right now, it has two GigE cards (which is ridiculous, I know, since my incoming broadband is less than 10 Mbit) and a 30 GB laptop hard drive. Maybe some day, I'll grab that little chenbro case and 4 terabyte drives that everyone is using for their custom WHS installs.

The machine is running off of the motherboard from a Compaq machine that I got from the Weldy's 1.2 GHz Athlon and two sticks of 256 MB RAM. That combined with the laptop hard drive, and the gigabit nics being PCI probably contributed to the paltry backup speed of around 6.5 Megabytes per second. Oh well, I got my 11 GB of ripped CDs off of my comptuer, and I built a machine that can act as some sort of backup server.

Of course, I'll need to add space, that 30 GB laptop drive is full, because I added the installer for World of Warcraft and some patches to it as well. That'll be another adventure.

Also, I've never gotten the print server working on ClarkConnect. It is one of the few reasons I'm tempted to try out Amahi, just because I know Fedora better than RHEL, and that I know if I plug in my printer in Fedora, it will work. I posted a little help request on the ClarkConnect Forums:

http://www.clarkconnect.com/forums/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=111094&an=0&page=0#Post111094

I'm guessing I just need to get gutenprint installed, but I don't really know how. Probably something easy like ssh-ing into the box and typing "apt-get install gutenprint". Maybe I should just try that. LOL. I really don't want to have to get out my usb print server. It is just one more thing that I need to plug into the wall.

Ripping CDs in Windows Media Player - Music Brainz?

Hmm... I ripped a *lot* of CDs this week. Windows Media Player did a great job. However, I've got a handful of CDs that didn't have track information available. Some discs simply could not be identified. Some errored out, some ripped but with "unknown" artist/album/track info.

I'm probably going to see if I can give Banshee a chance with Music Brainz on those discs. I doubt I'll re-rip my whole collection, but I suppose that's one step closer to freedom. Does anyone know how MusicBrains actually works?

I found my earpiece in the driveway...

I think I'm going to have to start using Twitter if I keep writing short posts... Isn't there some sort of Facebook/Twitter mashup? Oh, I'd like to use TwitterFox on my PortableApps version of FireFox too. I guess I had better get to it.

As i turns out, the missing rubber piece of my headphones was in the driveway... I found it when I pulled in from work this evening. Yay!

Motorola S9 Bluetooth Headphones Earbud Covers

Well, I really like my Moto S9 bluetooth headphones, but since I ordered them from some back-alley shop in California, I only got the set of earbud covers that came on them. I think that was worth a $60-70 savings, LOL.

Anyway, I used them at the gym, wore them to work, and in the middle of the day, when I took them off, I noticed they were gone. I cried. Then I searched the Internet to find a replacement. I didn't find any. Today, I looked a little more desperately, as it kind of hurt my ear to have them on without the bud cover. I found some but they cost, like, $10.

Sigh... I might just try some foam covers from other earbuds... Anyone know good alternatives? Hit me up.

36 World of Warcraft Accounts

Geez, I thought I had a problem when I wanted to decide whether to suspend my single account to try another game.

http://videogames.yahoo.com/feature/gamer-juggles-over-30-warcraft-characters/1255554

Some guy has 36 accounts that he plays simultaneously. Maybe that's a good excuse for me to get that 30-inch monitor...

TuffMail and Horde

Just in case anyone wondered. Horde is better than Alliance in World of Warcraft. kthxbye.

Oh, and I was alerted to an article on OS News about an interview with the Lead Developer of Horde. I'm using TuffMail for my mail and I'm really happy with their implementation of Horde. I normally use a client, but I'm finding the AJAX interface to work great.

I could write lots about TuffMail, and I might... but I'm working on a few things at once right now. Maybe later, or maybe I'll just come back to this. I've got a piece of paper in my wallet that I used to do my pro/con evaluation. Sort of the "idea on a napkin" thing, except I never go to Starbucks. I'd like to make that piece of paper go away.

Then there's the Team Leader at my client site. He's a mac guy, but he doesn't know anything about Mac yet. So, he asks questions to the guy that sits next to me. I try to stay out of it. But, in recent weeks he's been trying out MobileMe.

I really, really wanted to chime in and say that there's no reason to pay for all that, just because you use a Mac. But those guys have money to waste, so I'll just let them. I don't so I just use less sexy alternatives.

So, here's what happened with my mail... I went to Purdue University, got IMAP, and need it for e-mail. POP is inadequate. I need server-side filters. I like to switch computers, and clients, and all sorts of good crazy super-sexy stuff to use my e-mail. Webmail is cool, but I prefer a desktop client.

When I left Purdue, I wanted IMAP, but I picked some free provider. They failed on something important that I won't mention here. I got hooked up with FastMail, and they were doing cool stuff.

Then FastMail slowed down on adding features that were important to me, and were promised for the future. It didn't bother me much, because nobody else had them. I tried others and kept coming back.

The straws that broke the camels back was the address book and the web interface. I didn't mind the web client interface at FastMail looking like something some developer hacked together to support features of their custom-built web service. I just used a client. The address book was similarly abysmal. But, I really used e-mail to receive, rather than send, and I could remember or look up the addresses that I needed.

I decided those things were important, and I switched to TuffMail. I'm happy. I can give up the features that FastMail had that are cool.

So, here we go, I'm just going to copy my notes somewhat. I might have to clean up this post later:

Exclusive FastMail positives: proxy servers, file space / picture gallery.

Exclusive TuffMail positives: web clients, managesieve

Negatives on FastMail: Enhanced Account required for all features, have to log in to manage server-side filters, address book

Negatives on TuffMail: No real a la carte options, just more of everything, no integrated file space,

Some stuff is kind of a wash, or doesn't really matter, like saving searches as virtual folders, plus-mail addressing, sub-domain addressing, labels and custom IMAP flags.

The thing that bothers me the most about FastMail is just that they spend effort to recreate something that works well already with their web interface, and then slowly develop extra features that don't matter to me, rather than the ones I want. People are screaming for a better web interface in the forums, and they could just run Horde, and that could run along side their custom interface.

TuffMail does simple things consistently. And, at the end of the day, e-mail is simple. We stack things on top of it, and combine things with it to make it more than e-mail, but they don't need to be part of the core e-mail service. More importantly, adding those things to the core service don't add value that I need to pay for. Twenty bucks a year isn't much, but it is less than forty. That's really why I switched. I wasn't willing to pay for extra stuff just to get the few features I wanted but never came.

Oh, and GMail has great IMAP... but I don't want my stuff to belong to google.

+ Proxy Servers:

New Apple Notebooks

Okay, so Tuesday came and went, and Apple launched new MacBooks and MacBook Pros. I feel good about selling my machine, but I don't think I'll be getting a new one any time soon. Gots no money for that.

I wonder if that's why everyone who inquired about buying my Airport Base Station and wireless cards has been slow about getting back to me. Who knows.

I do miss using OS X, and my bluetooth mouse is kind of just sitting around, but I'll rectify those issues soon. I kind of gave up on running OS X on PC hardware, if I wanted to cripple my machine, I could just run Linux on the desktop. Sigh.

At least the 17-inch MacBook Pro might be available more cheaply in the used category soon. I'm pretty sure that's where I'm going to aim with my next notebook.

Until then, I've got a 1 GHz Duron Compaq laptop with 512 MB of RAM. It works. I can't really ask for much more than that.

Negative Political Stuff

Yesterday, in the mail, I got a letter from a relative, basically regurgitating negative stuff about Barack Obama that has circulated on the Internet. Mostly, it is stuff about Islam and world terrorism and such. Nothing positive about his opponent.

WWJD? Is it really worth the stamp? Honestly, you can send that to my e-mail box, so I can just delete it. No need to waste the paper. We do like the relative, so there isn't any hard feelings or anything. However, lots of people misunderstand free speech. It doesn't mean that you can say whatever you want. It means that the government can't prosecute you for speaking out against it. Sigh...

My wife challenged me to write a rebuttal letter of some sort. I did write up a little something a while back, when my mom-in-law asked my thoughts on Obama and being black, and government expereience and such. It was a pretty good discussion.

I'm really torn about how propaganda influences peoples vote though. The Electoral College does plenty to negate individual influence anyway, but lots of people are voting on complete misinformation. It makes me sad.

If I bother to refute the letter, I'll probably post it up on the "blog of doom" right here.

Working out is hard work.

Today, I upped repetitions and weights at the gym. I was doing 8 sets, basically to exhaustion. We do weights *before* cardio and 9 and 10 really hurt. Holly wasn't feeling well today, but she hung tough and we did do cardio on bikes. Not much time today, since we're on our usual late schedule in the AM.

I managed to get some music on my phone and use the bluetooth headsets the past couple of days... It almost makes the workout tolerable. I'll need to make a playlist of the hardest hitting songs I can think of, hoping that will at least drive me work harder.

I haven't really been keeping track of weights or time. I'd like to get a mobile program, but I'm finding that if I can remember the weights that I use on most machines, and I just do cardio until I run out of time before I have to head to work. If anyone has a suggestion for workout tracking, weight-loss, or food intake programs for Windows Moble. (or any other platform, I'm open to switching, or using multiple devices) hit me up.

Mobile WordPress

Just wanted to write a post to say how great Mobile Wordpres is... at least on my work computer... a spare browser window allows me to type my random thoughts with minimal disruption.

I think I'll just use that for my phone, rather than being concerned about not having an iphone, or using some "compatible" client. Generic interfaces FTW.

GIMP Portable 2.6.1 has been released

GIMP Portable 2.6.1 has been released.

Now I can make LOLcats pictures at work, without installing software on my desktop computer. Excellent! Windows Paint was really killing me.

[caption id="attachment_182" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Julie offers her sippie cup to Keifer"][/caption]

Facebook RSS Feeds

Okay, score one for the "open-platform" team. I just subscribed to some feeds from Facebook. So, if you're wondering why I never seem to care about your stuff, it is because I'm never *on* Facebook. I post from my blog, and I read my e-mail.

Now, I can see what everyone is doing, because i *do* read my RSS feeds.

Oh, and I hate ads, a lot.

Baked Potato

I had baked potatoes for dinner. I had a long, hard day of lawn maintenance, swing-set adjusting, grocery shopping, and corralling our son into bed. I loaded up with chicken, broccoli, onions, butter, sour cream and barbecue sauce.

Awesome. Just needed to post that. I forgot how cheap and fulfilling those are.

Windows Media Player as a CD Ripper

Windows Media Player 11 is a great CD ripper. I have a tower with 4 optical drives, and I'm just casually feeding it CDs, with the settings on "rip to mp3 and eject".

Why am I not doing it on Linux, with say, Banshee, and using ogg?

Sigh. My media center and phone are Windows-based. And the minimal configuration necessary is a big help. Banshee did a great job, except when it couldn't find album info. Which would be weird, because I'd end up just opening up Sound Juicer and it would find the album info. But I had a hard time getting them both into the same tagging and directory structure. And then there's the whole "downloading and installing patent-encumbered media formats" thing on Fedora. Some day, I'll just pick up that mp3 player that plays .ogg files and syncs with Banshee, and supports my bluetooth headset that I saw at the computer geeks disount outlet, but won't use because my phone is super-powerful.

Oh, and my CD collection is really dated, LOL. Secular music from the 90's. I spent all my paper-route money on CDs in middle-school / highschool. It has been fun going through it, but sheesh. I should just smash it all with a hammer or something.

What I miss about Mac...

Okay, so, I sold my PowerBook. It was a bit long in the tooth, and I have some other things I could use the money for. Incidentally, I decommissioned my Airport Extreme which is a fabulous router, minus the proprietary configuration interface. Then, I fried the router I replaced it with... an old wired-only Linksys.

It is a bit funny, because I grabbed it out of a drawer, and grabbed the power adapter to my spare DSL modem, rather than the power adapter to the router. A few minutes later, while fishing wires from under the table, I hear a hiss, then a pop, and see smoke. Oh well, that router was crap anyway. Unfortunately, the death was a bit untimely. I don't have anything to replace it with. I guess with my airport, it always seemed obvious which power adapter went with what. Apple saves you from being dumb.

Windows Vista's default Aero interface is relatively ugly. I'm sure you can hack it into a more pleasing aesthetic, and then there's that whole "eye of the beholder" thing with beauty, but, meh... I think I actually like my usual Gnome desktop better. Actually, all I miss is the compiz bling that got copied from Mac OS X, namely expose and the dock... The dock recently got patented, so maybe I'll have to actually use a Mac to get it now. LOL.

I sold my PowerBook

I sold my PowerBook G4. Get this. I met the guy in front of the Apple Store. Heh. So, the really funny part is... now that I am "mac-less" I don't want to use the Apple Airport Extreme. There's not much reason for me to feel this way, since I can still use it.

However, there is one fundamental flaw witht the device, which is otherwise great. I can't configure it with a web browser. I actually have to use a utility that comes with every Mac, and can be installed on Windows (thank goodness).

The device rocks, other than not having a gigabit hub built in. So, I'm torn. I love having a print server, and wireless access point, and router, and dhcp server in one device. But, I hate that I have to attach a hub to get more than one wired connection. This is fundamentally how I feel about apple devices, I love the simplicity, but I hate that I can't tinker. I guess I could just buy a gigabit hub and stop whining...

What if the revolution comes, and all my machines are running Linux? I can even use the print server in Linux, but I can't configure the router... and then there's that whole I-can't-turn-off-dhcp-without-some-hackish-trick thing. Yeah, it is silly...

I guess there's one thing keeping me on it for now. I have a Linksys wired router with a 10/100 switch built-in, but no wireless. I need wireless so that the Media Center box can access the Internet for scheduling info. I do have a wireless-B device that can be an access point or wireless adapter or bridge. It can even do DHCP as well. Hmm... I could just use that... Oh, and I have a couple of USB print servers that I could attatch too.

Clearly, the Aiport should stay, rather than hooking up three devices to replace it... or... I could just use ClarkConnect, get the print server and wireless working on it, and not be so anal. Or, I could just buy a wireless router, and then run Amahi on a spare box. Again... this is a silly choice. It works now, I shouldn't even be thinking about this.

All because I sold my PowerBook. Nice.

T-Mobile Shadow Update

Today, at work, I'm going to work on making my T-Mobile Shadow experience better. In between tasks, and generally filling time as I can, while doing work, of course. So, it is going slow. (I'm starting this post at about 10:00 AM. I've been at it off and on for an hour, inbetween reading training material, reviewing trouble tickets, dodging funny pictures sent to me by my colleagues and such.

For those of you, like my Aunt Staci, who says that I make "boring" posts. This one will probably be boring. Fair warning and all that...

So, music... I've purchased a set of Motorola S9 stereo bluetooth headphones. They're great, and I was going to use them with my Apple PowerBook, but I need Leopard for stereo sound, rather than the simple headset/microphone profile. I'm selling my PowerBook anyway... not specifically for that reason, Mostly because I don't want to pay for the battery upgrade, memory upgrade, and Leopard upgrade, but I digress... The bluetooth headphones work great with the phone, and I'd like to use them when I work out in the mornings before work.

I loaded a few songs from my PowerBook onto the phone, using a memory card that we've bought. They were encoded in AAC (.m4a, like on iTunes/iPod/iPhone) and they worked fine in the Windows Media Player. I haven't ripped all of my CDs, but I wanted to make sure that if for some reason, I go nuts and use Apple as my primary system, that I could use my ripped tracks on the phone. Seems to be fine.

Incidentally, I'm probably going to stick with Windows Media Center and just deal with the OTA subchannel nonsense or maybe go with Media Portal or some other free replacement on our DVR box. It's working very well, and syncing playlists and such seems like it will be great with our phones. Sigh... I've given up freedom for convenience, so I guess I deserve neither. I'll learn my lesson and come crawling later, I'm sure.

I'm also going to try to get my phone updated, and I guess I need to call in to customer service and grab those spare extra capacity batteries that are supposed to be free, but couldn't be sent to customers subscribed for less than thirty days... Sigh.

I'm also going to try to install moBlog, and see if I can try to use my camera phone and post directly to my blog, making some of those life moments more publically available. Maybe then I can justify having this fancy toy, rather than simply saying my wife needs to keep a schedule with her, and I just got one too.

We'll see how it all goes. Good luck to me.

Okay... went to lunch, came back... lunch was just awful, food-wise. My PC is getting re-imaged at 1:30, and I've got training to finish up. moBlog just didn't work right for me. I couldn't get it to work, and I gave up. I do wonder why Wordpress.com has a mobile client for iPhone, and not for Windows Mobile, but there's no real guesswork. Announcing a client on iPhone is bigger news...

I did manage to get the T-Mobile update installed. Avril Lavigne and Dave Matthews Band now emenate from my phone... very nice indeed. There's some better text input stuff too.

I think it is just time to sit down this evening and rip discs on the big box... WMA or MP3?

More time in the day, please... kthxbye.

Ugh... I've had a recent event that I won't discuss much further, but I basically didn't have time to do something that was necessary. Not a "sort of nice" thing, but something I really needed to do. I missed out.

Anwyay, my life will continue, so don't worry. This weekend was a little slower. Friday, we hit the grocery store, and I paid some bills and the baby-sitters. I also got a new "big" flat-panel monitor and sold a 19-inch CRT monitor to someone who needed it way more than me.

Saturday, I made sausage and eggs for the kids, and we kind of lazed about. Some laundry, which is a standard Saturday activity for me, and a little bit of tinkering. I've still got a stack of paperwork to go through that I intended to complete this weekend.

Sunday, we went to church at CHURCH52. A friend of mine from high-school is the Music Pastor there. My wife and I both grew up going to chruch, but we've really faded out on it. However, she, I and my mom have kind of been nagging each other to get back into it. I know our kids need it. LOL. We enjoyed it. I'd like to go back. I think my wife has a few issues with all the singing. I don't really have issues with it, but we definitely both grew up worshiping in a more "reserved" manner. Pray for me and my family as we come to terms with it all.

I didn't get around to actually installing Amahi, ClarkConnect, or Windows HomeServer. Maybe one night this week, but I honestly think it'll have to wait until the weekend. I did do a bit of research though, and in the back half of the weekend, I realized Amahi came out with new stuff based on Fedora 9. I'm really excited about what they're doing with it, but ClarkConnect has a proven track record with me, and a seemingly more "mature" web site.

Lunch time Monday progress report... that's what this feels like. Blogging is too hard again. I just don't do anything I want to blog about on a daily basis... I guess I can change what I do, or how I feel about it. That way, my Aunt Staci won't say my blog posts are "boring".

I guess I could get those pictures of my kids uploaded...

Amahi

So, I made a post about my backup solution/dilemma and mentioned Time Capsule, ClarkConnect, and other various solutions. I got a comment about trying Amahi.

I was skeptical, since I had passed over it before. However, I decided to go ahead and try out the beta. I haven't installed it on hardware yet, but some of the stuff looks really cool. One thing I'm really excited about is the installation procedure. Basically, you configure it by going through an online wizard, then you just run it on top of a base installation of Fedora. Hmm.. it looks like someone took a novel approach to what I've been thinking about doing for a long time... "Fedora Home Server" so to speak.

ClarkConnect runs on top of RHEL and for some reason, that makes me feel better. However, setting up stuff that isn't in the web-admin interface requires more time and effort than I'm willing to put in. having stuff like a firefly media server, PXE boot, and maybe a torrent box or something would definitely put this solution over the top, if it has some ready-made modules. If I were running a business, CC would be an easy choice. But I'm at home, with a limited time budget, and CC does the job, and I've used it, but I might be ready to entertain something a bit easier and flexible, even if it is in beta.

Heck... maybe I could "contribute" and help with the documentation or something. I'll blog about how it goes.

Evolution on Windows / openSUSE

Jeez, I go back to bed. Wake up, do stuff... show up at work and casually read some blogs... come across the planet SUSE feed, and see this:

Srinivasa Ragavan: Evolution 2.24 & Windows port

Just after I raved about how much I actually *like* Evolution. LOL. Nice. Maybe I'll give it a try. The weekend is coming. Oh, and openSUSE 11 did work on with my S3 unichrome setup. I used the KDE 4 live CD and installed, but then decided that KDE was pretty much equivalent to a face palm for me. However, if I don't solve my Fedora 9 issues, I might just roll over to GNOME on openSUSE.

Unichrome... Fedora... FAIL

Anyone remember this whole Fedora thing? It used to rock, because it was the leading edge stuff from RedHat. Now it just makes my eyes bleed. I get an old socket 478 P4 chip and grab a motherboard that has PCI express and DDR 2. Awesome.

Then I install Fedora 9 from optical media... the screen goes all wonky, and locks up.

Best I can figure, from rolling back to Fedora 8, and then searching with Google, is that the version of Xorg in Fedora 9, and almost all recent distros, has a crappy VESA driver that doesn't work on unichrome video chipsets Bleh. At least Fedora 8 worked...

So, now what do I do. I can use "linux vesa" to get Fedora 9 installed, but then X fails on restart. I can get to runlevel 3, but I tried changing "vesa" to "openchrome" and that didn't work. I read something about "unichrome" but honestly, I'm too angry that I wasted my time with this at all. I might as well go back to my Mac... sigh.

The thing is, and I really should blog about this later, I now *love* Evolution for mail. Why? because I can use LDAP with my TuffMail account. Read and Write. Address completion, web mail addressbook is the same as my desktop client, save addresses to my address book on my desktop client... blah bah mwah ahahah.

So, I'm really excited about using Linux again. Then this... Sigh. Is it really worth all this, just to stay away from being trapped by Apple?

I'm going back to sleep.

Why I don't have an iPhone

I'm poor. That is all... LOL, just kidding.

I had a comment on a previous blog post, linked to my Facebook account, about a friend wanting an iPhone. I mentioned basically that Apple makes stuff I want, but then makes me angry, alternating about every month.

This whole developer NDA thing is crazy. I read over at OS News: Apple Removes NDA on iPhone Software.

They simply don't want negative press to affect the iPhone. The NDA was supposed to do that, but it backfired, so they got rid of it. The core issue is still there, they can kill your app for whatever reason they want. They just didn't want developers to talk about it.

Now they think smoothing over the hurt feelings will make the issue go away, or at least keep people who were paying attention from abandoning the platform. The pressure didn't come from developers grumbling. Apple has already made it obvious that they only want developers if there's something in it for them, and not at all if there is a possibility that they might outdo Apple.

So, Apple is greedy and ATT is greedy (data rates are out of control -- too much money). I realize companies do stuff to make money, but golly... alternatives start looking really good when you're being punished by someone that wants your money.

Windows Home Server Trial

Okay, I hate using Windows, but I need it for games. That's about the upshot. It's worth $100, but I'd rather not pay for an OS, so I typically use Linux. However, Linux sucks at lots of stuff, and they want my time, for free, to make it better.

Uh...maybe not. My time has more value than donating it for free. Kthxbye. That's official. I've decided. My life is very busy now that I have children, and I hardly have time to even keep up with my usual computer habits.

Speaking of time and habits... here's something that should be part of that: backup. I have used ClarkConnect, and I like the idea of using Bacula with it. However, I want to look at Time Capsule and Windows Home Server as well.

I ordered the Trial of Windows Home Server. It arrived a week ago. I still haven't installed it. I'm begining to wonder if I should even bother. I won't want to spend the money, and I'm really only interested in backing up pictures, which I can store online, and my resume, which I can store online.

If I could just stick a wireless card in a WHS device, that might sway me. I like having an Airport Extreme right now, but it lacks some flexibility that I'd love to have. NDISwrapper on CC sounds awful. Time Machine sounds awesome, but upgrading to Leopard and stuff is expensive.

Holly's Weight Loss Journey

My wife, is about 6 months post-op from having weight loss surgery. She lost 100 pounds, meeting one of her major goals for the six month time frame.

You can read all about it here.

Short story, it has been a struggle for all of us. What we eat, what we keep in the house, what the kids ask for, and making time to do the things that are necessary to keep us on a healthy path so we can be there for our family.

I just wanted to give a public shout-out to my awesome wife for working so hard and meeting her goal. I may even respond to her request for being a friend on MySpace... you know, since she's hot... LOL!