Surely everyone has had a difficult time moving forward in their respective lives. It would be a stretch to ignore the missing piece at Interact. This post will really serve to update anyone interested in a few major things going on in my life at the moment. All are somewhat related to Media Center (in an ever so minor way).
1. I had asked a lot about building a house probably close to a year ago. Well, my parents (who were the subject) did in fact purchase a new house. Unfortunately, with what was available and limited free lots, they ended up with a house that does not have Ethernet run in the walls. So, we are getting estimates on the cost to run Ethernet because of course we will want a HTPC in every room and wireless is not an option due to slower speeds, less reliability, and the drawback of increased radio broadcasting and radiation.
2. I reside in Iowa and just finished my sophomore year in college. Just for the summer, I am traveling to California! With my currently most marketable skill being web development, I applied to around 150 companies, with many specifically stating full-time permanent. Doing this, I received quite a few responses, including responses from those specifically stating permanent! With several offers, I ended up choosing the most money offer and found an apartment less than two miles from my work. So I gave my resignation letter at work and this trip is definitely moving forward. My budget should allow me to still bring a decent amount of cash back in addition to paying all expenses. My cousin will ride out (driving--renting car is $3K+) and we will start at her sister's house, 20 minutes from my apartment. This will be quite an experience.
3. My server has been running much better lately. I think I discovered the problem that would cause monthly drive "failures." I had a podcatcher downloading several podcasts, including one or two over bittorrent. This excessive, spread out writing, seemed to trip the algorithm that fails a drive. So I moved this download process to a single drive (that can't "fail" through an algorithm, really). Then, my scripts that clean the files and move them just move them between drives, instead of just different directories. I have not had a drive fail since then, which was around two months ago. I did notice a bug (I think) where it would send me warning messages based on the date (and not month/date) so when I had a major series of events in January, I kept getting all the warnings Feb, Mar...etc. Luckily I realized I just need to clear the history to resolve this but it's a strange bug!
4. MC still working great for most things. Of course I always have suggestions for improvement but I figured I would just wait a little while as I have been swamped. Finishing up my sophomore year was beyond imaginable. Thankfully everything turned out great in the end, but it was a lot of work. This with work and projects has kept me off Interact. A while back I said I'd be on more but that never happened.