Wow. Time for an update, eh? I’ve been super busy with the barn. I have the side and back up and all but two panels on the roof. I hope to get the front covered this weekend and get the trim and cap on. After that, I’m going to be putting in the poles for the hay loft and trenching in utilities. My plan is to get concrete poured the week of Oct. 20th.
I’ve been messing around with VLC streams again. For the last few months I’ve been streaming a 96k stream of Sirius to work. It’s been working great. One problem is that if I want someone who doesn’t have VLC installed to listen, they’re out of luck. After digging around the net a bit, I found out that I could stream via the MMS protocol using the VLC streaming documentation. VLC sure is an amazing piece of software… for free too!
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Well. I’ve been busy. I’ve got all the trusses up and I’m working on the rest of the roof. The metal is here and I’m hoping to get some hung this weekend.
Been too busy at work to do much of anything else either. I have 3 programming jobs and the website go live date coming up. The 3rd guy we hired is working out very well. He seems to be a good fit with me and the other IT guy. I’m hoping he’ll go full-time here in a few weeks. We got the quote for our new office furniture. We’re hoping to be moved in by the middle of next month! I’ll take before and after pictures!
As you can see, I’ve ditch Pandora. My last.fm stuff on the right of the page hasn’t updated in quite some time. www.slacker.com is the new Pandora. Check it out. I’ll put somethin’ over there on the right… as soon as I figure out what. 
The new media box/web server has been chugging along for nearly a full month. Seems to be working out pretty well.
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I’m in the process of building my new media PC. Well, actually, it is my old Opteron 165… which is serving the page you’re viewing right now.
I have DVB Dream, Apache, MySQL, VLC, Sabnzbd, and MediaPortal installed on it. Right now I have VLC streaming Octane20 to my system as I type this. At work, I stream any Sirius station I can receive via Dish. I simply log into the server and change the channel to Hard Nation or something.
Construction on the new barn started this weekend. My dad and I have all the poles stuck in the ground. All the 20 footers are plum… but we haven’t gotten to the 24 footers yet. I ordered the trusses today and have arranged for the guy that did the ground work to come back with his rig to pick them up. I still have to order the metal and the materials for the hay loft.
Oh yeah. Here’s a layout.
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Well. I’m hosting my site from home now. We’ll see how long that goes. I’ll get more into the specifics later.
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A few days ago, I had an interesting call. Someone was in need of their computer being fixed. The DCOM service was corrupt. When I got there I noticed the S.M.A.R.T. hard drive was complaining… time to back up your data. I brought the box home with me, disabled the rogue service, and screwed around trying to clone the drive with Gparted. It would instantly error on me because of bad drive blocks. I did a chkdsk on the old drive.. same result. The OS would boot fine so I knew the bad blocks were in unimportant locations on the disk. The drive would flake out occasionally however. I went to Acronis and picked up their 15-day, full functional trial of Easy Migrate. I stuck in the replacement drive, booted windows, installed the app, and with a few clicks, the drive was cloning. 30 minutes later, the system powered down, I removed the drive, and presto!
Nice free way to do some emergency rescue. The customer was lucky this time.
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