Gobble, gobble.
An update is long over due, I suppose. The barn exterior is finished, for the most part. The eaves, soffit, and corner trim is all that needs to be done. I hung the overhead doors last week so the build is pretty much weather-proof. The barn in itself is for my wife. The eastern 30×40 section is for stalls and an overhead hay loft. The western 30×40 is for the horse trailer and truck. The cement trucks did a pretty good number on the ground in front of the building. It will take a lot of luck to get decent enough weather to get the ground fixed. I’m happy with that though. I look at the building and think, “Wow. I built a 40×60x16 barn for $26K and did 85% of the work myself! I can’t believe it!”
Looks like I may have a big programming job coming up. The hospital was looking at a tissue tracking software package for $25K + $4K/year maintenance. I looked at the CEO and CFO during the software presentation and said, “I can do a hell of a lot of programming for that amount of money.” They agreed.
I was hoping they would buy me a new laptop before the job came up. We have $1800 budgeted and I can get a Dell XPS for ~$800. I’ve decided that a 17″ screen is just too big. I’d like to go with a 13.3″ or even a tablet. We’ll see how the dice fall.
Since Sirius and XM merged, they screwed Octane 20 with Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and Nirvana. That is where I draw the line: grunge. I went through the 4000+ albums I have and picked only my choice metal, hard rock, and hair band tunes. I stuck their information into a MySQL database and built a radio station type program to stream or play locally. I built some pretty good logic into the randomness of the songs. I have a SQL query go through and pick a random song that hasn’t been played in the last 36 hours. I also have the query cross reference a history table that keeps track of the last 50 tracks so the artist hasn’t been played in that amount of tracks. I hate hearing the same artist every 2 hours like regular radio and the random setting on most media players just isn’t random enough for me. 50 multiplied by 4 minutes for the average song divided by 60 gives me over three hours before the random chance I’ll hear the same artist.
I’m building a client app that will be given artist and track info to someone listening to the stream (being me). They can also pause or trigger the next track (also being me). .Net handles TCP listeners/threads with security so the app has to be programmed accordingly. I’ve already got that code written though. I’m gunna code a PHP script to pull the “now playing” track and display it on my site. I’m very weird, I know. But you gotta do some programming for fun once in a while. Pulling company numbers, etc. just gets too boring all the time.
I just got a nice, free license of Windows Server 2008. I’m gunna update this box to, hopefully, the 64-bit flavor and do some Hyper-V stuff. I also plan for two Terabyte drives in RAID 1 for storage. 1TB is all I need. With Hyper-V, I want to build an OpenBSD VM for dual WAN routing (hijacked DSL and fixed wireless) and some QoS for VOIP. I also wanna create a separate Apache and MySQL database server… probably with some flavor of Linux but maybe OpenBSD. I hope that my DVB card functions in W2K8. Enough acronyms already!!
To all the folks that know me and check here occasionally, I hope you have a nice holiday. Turkey day is coming! My next favorite holiday next to the 4th of July.