Summer Cleaning?

We’ve decided to clean up our basement. Well, it’s not really a basement since it’s not really underground, but it’s the ground floor room. We’re getting this cleaned to accomplish several things. First, we have all this stuff that we’ve carried with us since before we were married and much of it, we haven’t used. So: Freecycle and Craig’s List are getting them. We’ve given away and sold a couple of trunk loads so far. Second, we need a more organized place to work on our computers. Third, we also need some space to set up our studio lights.

In cleaning out things we’ve been carrying around way too long, we’ve emptied some files out of our filing cabinet. Most need to be shredded. Here’s a picture of the pile:

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Ant that’s after we’d been shredding a while. We started shredding but had to stop. Our shredded is not capable of high volumes of paper. It told us to stop:

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I guess we have to give it a rest now.

Saved By The Elephant

I have a spreadsheet I keep on my laptop with which I keep track of my billable hours for work. The company has a tool, but I like to keep an independent check on it with my own records. Just in case, right? I click on the desktop shortcut I have setup for it and to my chagrin, it says “file not found”. This is not good. I search my laptop and sure enough, it’s gone.

All is not lost, however, since I have Windows Live Sync keeping copies of all my data from the laptop to a share on my server. Of course, the program works flawlessly by replicating the deletion and thereby removing the server copy of my file.

Not to worry, I think. I know that not too long ago, I set up Shadow Copies on the server, which keeps snapshots of changed files. The only problem with this is that it only goes back as far as when I turned it on, which was 2 weeks ago – AFTER the file in question had already been deleted.

My last hope: my online backup system – Elephant Drive. This, like Mozy and other online backup services, has a desktop client [or in my case a server client] that runs and copies files and changes up to the Internet for backup. This is exactly what happened shortly after July 2nd, which was the last time I changed this file.

A simple browse and right-click later, I was saving the file back into its old place on my laptop.

I like Elephant Drive for the main reason that all the other services wanted to charge me MUCH more money just to be able to install their client software on Windows Server. If I have a server, I must therefore be a business and be made of money or something. This is not the case – I’m just a geek with a server or 7 at home and want to keep all of my data and files in one place. So, for $4.95 per month, they let me run it.

It’s now proven its worth. While that particular file might not be worth the $35 I’ve spent so far, the experience I’ve just had certainly gives me a degree of comfort that my files are safe.

My recommendation to you is this: find a backup solution that works for you, but be sure to include automated off-site [or Internet] backup as part of it.

Email Is Back: With A Vengeance

After about 5 days without email, I was finally able to restore our email service – and even get us upgraded to Exchange Server 2010 Release Candidate. All it took was a complete destruction of the old Exchange environment (twice) and rebuilding from scratch. Good thing I was able to take a backup of the mailboxes!

So, if I hadn’t replied to you for a while, now you know why.

Additional Media Center Woes

Things were looking up with the media center now that I got the cable card tuner and a new video card. It was looking great, that is, until the technician left. It seems that Cox has implemented Switched Digital Video on their digital cable network. That totally broke my media center. I can get a few channels, but not a lot of the ones I regularly watch. So I’m stuck. Either I go for Fios which doesn’t do SDV, or I wait until someone (ATI) puts out a patch for my tuner that supports SDV and get a tuning resolver that it will work with on the Cox network.

I have decided to wait, really, since we’re doing a number of things and we still have the old DVR to fall back on until things get more settled around here and we can really think about what we want to do with the cable.

One day, this will work.

One day…

Death And Life

On Sunday morning, July 5th, Laura’s father Larry passed away at his cabin in the woods of East Texas. We knew it was coming, but not how soon. We had booked a trip to leave on 7/12, but on the advice of her brother we moved it to 7/4 for Laura, and I was to come later. However, our plans were to change on the news that morning.

I flew out the morning on July 6th.

Since then, it’s been kind of hectic. Laura has been amazing in her stamina in the face of loss and I’ve been trying to keep up and be supportive. I’ve been helping by organizing and scanning pictures for archival purposes and in hopes of a future slideshow or movie in Larry’s memory.

Media Center: Phase 2

I’m now beginning the second phase of the new media center effort. We’ve ordered two things: a cable card tuner and a new video card. We need the new video card to be able to view HDCP content, such as HD video from the tuners, and a future BluRay drive if we go that route. It also has an HDMI jack which will give us more vibrant color than the VGA jack we’re currently using.

Secondly, we’ll be making a trial run with a single digital tuner so that I can get the system running and make sure it works before ordering the second one.

If all goes according to plan, by next month I’ll have the second tuner and we’ll ditch the cable service provided DVR box and save even more money [we saved over $12 by getting rid of the upstairs cable receiver, and should save maybe $30 or so by getting rid of the HD DVR box set top box].

I’ll let you know how it pans out.

Database Migration

I know many of you won’t care too much about this, but I’ve migrated my web site photo gallery from MySQL to Microsoft SQL Server 2008. It’s now working on the new server. It was actually rather painstaking to get it set up correctly, but it’s done now.

The only thing you might miss is the links are kind of ugly now, not the neat links they used to be. I may be able to fix that in the future.

UPDATE: I fixed the links and they’re back to what they were.

Even More Fun With Windows Media Center

I mean it this time!

Previously, I had used our old [really only] desktop as a media center PC only to fall short of our goal. After you read that, you’ll find that I got to the point where everything was great – except for the digital encrypted channels… which was most of them. I had given up and just configured a virtual machine with an extender to play our music.

We almost never turn it on.

I had at one point subscribed to a discussion about media center and was still getting emails about it. The other day, I actually read a couple. What I read was liberating. Not in a metaphysical sense, but a technological one. In the previous post, you’ll note I discuss the fact that in order to get a CableCard tuner to work with a Windows Media Center PC, it needed to have special BIOS – and be blessed by the cable industry. While to some extent this is still true, some interesting things are happening.

First, new system boards are becoming available with the special setting enabled by default. That is great, since there was previously no way to buy special parts for those who wanted to build their own system or upgrade existing ones for lower costs. Secondly, there seems to be a “hack” out there, or more precisely a utility, which allows non-OCUR systems to show as compatible for CableCard tuners.

Guess which one I was leaning to?

Having already had a nice, capable system [4GB of RAM and 250GB HDD – possibly need more space, though] I was not really desirous of buying anything new. So, I took the old box, wiped it out and installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 RC1. Win7 is quite a bit better, I must say. Especially when it comes to Media Center. The TV Pack is included by default and it, while familiar, has a few more features. I then used a utility to check OCUR compliance: FAIL. Next, came the OCUR utility. I installed it and, Viola! PASS.

I finished building the system, including installing the Amazon Unbox player and the new beta version of the Hulu Desktop [quite cool, I might add] and customized it to be launched from inside the WMC GUI. It even uses the WMC remote control! That being done, I synchronized the music locally to the machine and took it upstairs. I hooked the old analog tuner into the computer and achieve low-def success.

Now that it’s working the way I want, the only thing left is for us to obtain a pair of CableCard tuners [I think Win7 Ultimate can handle up to 4] and cards and get them paired. I’m waiting on that because the tuners are still almost $300 a piece so that has to fit into my budget.

One thing is certain, though: the additional $40 or so per month I’m spending on cable boxes will go away once I go live with CableCards. I’ve even thought about cancelling cable. You can watch all you want on Hulu, so why do I need cable, right? Well, Laura says I can’t drop it yet and the Hulu shows aren’t in full HD and because they’re streaming tend to jump a little. So – not completely free of the cable company. Yet.

All I know for certain is that the saga will continue, and once I can save up enough for the tuners, we’ll be good to go… but…

I need to save up for a car too… decisions, decisions…

A Day of House Work [In and Out]

Gardening is hard work – especially when you find some kind of rock under the topsoil. Digging around it, we found that it could be broken into pieces. Not easily, but it could be done. So, for the last hour or so, we’ve been digging through it just to get holes deep enough for some flowers. Of course, we had to borrow a shovel to do this work, so that’s now on the list of stuff we have to buy.

The barbeque is going well – I think I have the temperature down where it needs to be. It takes a lot of work just to check on it during the day. I’m glad I have nowhere else to be!

I’m also working on the new web site, or rather, redirecting the old website to the new domain name. This is the web site for our new photography business name: Phillips Photographik. It’s the same site for now that the old one pointed to, but now I’ve changed some of the language to reflect that it’s Laura and I, and updated the contact emails. I still have to update the banner.

It will take some time for us to finalize a logo, but we’ll get it done. At least this gives us a start!

We’ve been stagnant for so long, but things are going to change soon.