I haven’t said anything useful in a week or so (some might say years…) so here’s a brief update.

I bought a new PC case with fans everywhere and also a hard disk fan for each of my disks. The whole thing works great and looks good too, very robust. It’s good to be back in amongst the speed demons, though I’m grateful to my AMD 1200 machine for carrying me for 2 or 3 months while I get myself back on track.

The other weekend I gave away all of my old computer crap that has been lying around in the garage for the last few years. Thats about 10 or 12 old PCs, 4 PC cases, loads of various PCI and ISA cards, hard disks and so on. Just heaps of it. It’s good to clear out and it all went to a good home, I didn’t throw anything away. I kept just enough to cover me in case of disaster. I’m now down to a modest (for a geek) main workstation, backup workstation, spare PC #1, spare PC #2, Smoothwall machine, laptop, work iBook, old iMac and Sun Ultra 10. The 2 spare machines are for playing with and setting stuff up on. The Sun Ultra 10 and iMac were to play with different architectures and I was going to set up the Ultra 10 as my webserver. The iMac is kind of redundant since my employer bought me an iBook.

The old Smoothwall machine is now also redundant as of today as I bought a Linksys WAG354g to consolidate my existing firewall box, wireless access point, ADSL modem and network switch into one little box. And what a little box it is. It’s smaller than your average Cable modem and comes with an ethernet cable, telephone cable and microfilter – everything you need. It is built on Linux and the source code is GPL’d. The OpenWRT project also produces a Linux distribution that runs on it, so you can configure it exactly how you like it if it doesn’t already do what you want.

On the house scene there has been a bit of a move. When returning from a weekend in Cheshire visitng my friend Carl we passed the 3 bedroom bungalow owned by my friend’s mother which has been lying empty while she redecorated it from the ground up. It is nearing completion and they have been living elsewhere, but due to a combination of difficult circumstances they weren’t sure whether or not to move back in. It seems that we could kill 2 birds with one stone by moving in ourselves. It is considerably more than we would be willing to pay but it would help them out of a difficult situation, provide us with a very nice place to live and we have the opportunity to offset some of the cost by having an extra person live with us if we can find someone suitable. Quiet, tidy, studious, non-smokers in full-time employment are welcome to make a pitch.

Aside from all that things are going OK. Work is going fine, busy as usual, I was away in Gosport for a few days last week visiting one of our main clients.

I think the challenge for the next few days and weeks (in a note to self kind of way) is to work out whether we can afford this house on our own and if not find a likely lodger, fill in some forms, get a new car tyre, read some of the books that are stacking up next to me, learn some python/PHP/shell scripting/regular expressions and play with Flumotion.

Peace out.