StovePipeHat

why i hate steve jobs

"If you're a wonk and you want lots of controls and features, Microsoft is right for you," Mr. Kay says. "If you want a simple experience and you're not tech-savvy, then you'll probably do better with Apple."
http://www.appliedinformation.com/~rollins/tmp/wsj.html
I recall I saved up for nearly a month to buy the extended keyboard for my first Mac just so I could get those stupid arrow keys.  MrCheap is all about the keyboard shortcuts.

Homeless, and a Million Dollars In Debt

So, our new house is still not ready for us to move into, and we've moved out of our old house.  The "net net" (as they say) is that I'm homeless, even though I own two homes, and over a million dollars in debt.

We're temporarily living with our in-laws, and cranking the pressure on our contractors to get the house done.

Today I managed to get a skeletal home office running in the new house, so at least I have an office to go to during the day.

God Bless America

Server Move Done - Real Life Move Not

Yesterday was quite a day. I woke up around 6 and started un-racking all of my server equipment at the old house. I took the opportunity to clean up lots of dead equipment that was still lurking in my racks. I also did a bunch of consolidation - getting down to the four servers that I really need:

• Carrara: Sendmail, Primary DNS
• Makrana: Backup DNS, SQL Server, VMWare host
• Dolomite: NFS Server, Web Server
• Lumachella: Exchange Server, DHCP Server, WINS Server

Paring down to four servers allowed me to get into a single rack. Suprisingly, the rack is still very full - switches, firewalls, power equipment, etc. take up all of the remaining space.

Because I'm using the same ISP (DCANet) as before, they were able to route my netblock dynamically tied to the MAC address of my router. As such, the theory was that as soon as I hooked up my router in the new house, I'd be in business. I worried all day as to whether this would happen. When the movers finally got the equipment in, the first thing I did was plug my router in, fire up my PC and - boom! - I'm back up on the 192.31.246/24 network in my new location!

It took me until about 11pm to get all of the servers up, wired, set up with a nice KVM monitor station, etc., but it's all finished now.

The rest of our move was not as complete by any means. We learned about a week ago that our contractors were running behind, and that the carpet upstairs wouldn't be laid by our move date. We were, however, unable to postpone our move as our preferred movers were booked through the end of the month. We ended up moving all of our furniture into the new house as "storage" until the rooms upstairs are completed. My living room looks like a storage locker. We can't live in the new house in this state, nor can we live in the old house. We're therefore relegated to spending the next couple of weeks living off of the hospitality of Claudia's parents. Thankfully, I'll be on the move for TMNG much of this time.

Lastly, I have a huge project left getting the old house cleaned up. The movers refused to move any stereo components, flat screen TVs or monitors, or "fragile" items. All of these need to be moved by hand, and are currently scattered all over the house.

Store Is Still Open!

By the way, kids, the StovePipeHat Online Store is still open. Buy yourself something pretty.

Welcome to our Temporary Home

Long story short - as part of moving to a new home, I've decided that running the old Slashcode infrastructure for stovepipehat.com makes no sense.  Using slashcode has been "too big a stick" for what has become a shared web space for a few participants.  As such, moving it to TypePad will make life easier. 

I'm going to import all of the old stovepipehat.com archives here shortly.  Until now, keep reading for information on the big move!