dannyandeliza.com

My SSD purchase on ebay was cancelled.  Most annoying...  I'm going to give the guy a negative review worthy of the ages since now I'm in some sort of weird multi day holding pattern with paypal and my chase credit card.  Very annoying to say the least.  Ah well, it's probably all for the best anyway.  Some big ticket items and bills are coming down the pipe in the coming month.  Better to pay those off first.  Still, I'm ridiculously annoyed...

I purchased some computer parts and am excited to work on my computers.  Specifically I am getting a 256GB Crucial M4 SSD and a Zotac Geforce GT 440.  Some parts will be shuffled around but in the end both my HTPC and my main computer will both receive significant performance boosts.

The HTPC will pick up LAV CUVID decode capabilities as well as MadVR rendering with the use of the Zotac card.

My main computer will pick up fairly blistering SSD speeds to boost overall system performance and will pick up the old video card from the HTPC.  The additional video card will allow me to finally output to all five of my monitors.  It's going to be nuts!

All in all, the computers in the house are getting really close to being "done".  The HTPC still "needs" a fanless power supply.  My main computer still "needs" a better heatsink and somewhere down the road a faster video card.  But...  things are looking good from where I'm at.

It's been a rough weekend for us but me especially.  Lets just say that I've had a sensitive stomach for a while now, but boy did it ever make its presence known this weekend.  As such, I'm going to start keeping a food journal.  I'm going to discover just what it is that makes me queezy.  I have a feeling it's a combination of food richness and portion size.  We shall see.  This would make for a great small project for me to make on android...

Lately, I've been helping my uncle with the computer network at his office.  Not that long ago, he purchased a new server and three new computers to help him move on to electronic charting.  It has taken a while, but now he's pretty much all setup to move forward with it.  I've been taking the time to read up on how to setup and administer a Windows 2008 R2 server.  Same stuff different name to me really.  But there are some nice things that I'm going to exploit in the coming weeks.

First up will be Hyper-V.  One of the machines in the office is running Windows XP, but hasn't been used in a long time.  It does however contain some important information related to billing.  Using disk2vhd from sysinternals, I'm going to move that to a virtual machine and plop it down onto Hyper-V.  Once done, we can recycle that hunk of junk and have easy access to the data.

Next up will be shadow copies.  I know, this isn't new.  But since I don't want to be taking calls from their office whenever they need something restored from backups on the server, this should save me a lot of time.  I'll be recycling a disk from one of the other machines as a dedicated shadow copy repository.  I guess this is best practice, but it'll also make it easy to keep the shadow copies from taking up space on the backup volume.

There are other things I'm mulling over too.  RDS host sounds interesting, though he doesn't need it.  Active Directory is another.  I'm really drawn to using Active Directory simply to manage passwords and password policies.  But, this for sure will cause more calls to me if they forget a password or if the AD has problems.  Not appealing.  The trade offs are probably worth it though.  Argh...  Maintaining a balance of ease of maintenance and use of technology is a tough one in this case.

All in all, it feels good to be helping him out and to learn something new.

This website has been running Joomla 1.5 for a while now.  But, I think it's time I made the move to Joomla 2.5.  The page will get a new theme and all that.  Hopefully all of the content will stay intact though.  I haven't really investigated what makes 2.5 the latest and greatest, but I'm looking forward to it.