I just had a shock when I glanced at the post date on my last post here… it’s over 3 weeks ago!
I’ve been pretty busy since then dealing with some family issues (more about that later), but I’ve also done some stuff to the site:
The site has moved from it’s old home (a crappy old laptop) to it’s new, improved surroundings (a virtual machine running on an opteron based server). I’ve also moved from windows to Ubuntu for my hosting needs and, apart from some ‘Case’ issues (Linux recognises the difference between ‘This’ and ‘this’, windows doesn’t) the move went pretty smoothly. Since then I’ve fixed a couple of bugs and re-instated the ‘Thank-you’ functions that used to be present on the site. Make sure you start thanking those uploaders
The Move to a virtual machine means I can now backup the entire server in minutes, and restore it ina similar timeframe if there’s a problem. Which is nice. I can also shift the server onto different hardware easily, should I need to fix a hardware fault with the server. The only real issue (albeit not much of one) is that to do this backing up process I have to take the server offline briefly. That’s not a massive problem though, especially since the site usuaully goes offline a couple of times a day anyway.
What else has been happening…. well, not much really. I’ve been off work for over a week now, looking after my fiancé who’s recovering from being admitted to hospital last Tuesday. She’s suffered with depression for a long, long time and after a year of dealing with that on top of the pressures of looking after a very demanding little girl things came to a head. She’s relatively okay now, although it’s going to take a long time before she’s actually ‘okay’ I think. Thanks to everyone who posted well wishes in this thread.
The company I work for have been really good to me during this little crisis, letting me take time off work with no notice and even finding us a counselor through their employee assistance program, which makes me feel really guilty about the fact I’m actively seeking another job. Basically I’m bored of my current position, there’s no opportunity for advancement or anything exciting where I am so I need to move on. Also, I need a job that’s closer to home (I currently spend 2 hours a day travelling to and from work) and pays a bit more. Does that make me a bad person?
I actually have an interview tomorrow, for a PHP development position. This would be pretty cool, it’s a much more interesting role and might actually keep me awake during the working day, it’s much easier to get to (20 minutes on a bus) and it pays more. However, there’s still that niggling feeling that I’m screwing over my current company.
On the gadgets front, I’ve recently discovered Media portal. I’ve been looking for a windows replacement for Myth TV for some time, and this seems to be it. The major benefit of myth TV (and media portal) over other, simpler media centre solutions is that they can be run in a client / server configuration. This means that you can have a large, beefy machine stacked with TV tuner cards hidden away somewhere in your house while you have small quiet machines connected to your TVs. Myth Tv is perfect for what I want, but it doesn’t support thetuner card I have…so, we’ll see how I get on with Media portal. The only problem I have now is how to connect my PC to my TV. My TV only accepts composite or RGB over scart, the only adaptor I have for my PC puts out S-Video. However, after reading this thread over at AVforums, I’m now on the hunt for someone to build me a VGA->RGB Scart cable since by pure chance my media PC has a radeon card in it (Nvidia cards apparently can’t do direct drive of a TV).
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