Tuesday, March 17, 2015

The Big Disconnect, and Data

As of last Thursday, our house is officially without cable TV- for the first time since 1993, I believe.  We still have video, to be sure: over the air (antenna) broadcasts for local news, weather and "local" television, and  Amazon Prime and Netflix for video entertainment, as well as our local library for video checkouts. We're probably losing a few programs that we really liked, but with the money we saved in taxes, fees and discontinuing cable, we were able to add Netflix, increase our internet bandwidth and STILL save money. Yay us!

In other news, some of my regular readers may have noticed a dearth of posts recently. Well, I've been away from this venue for a bit, but have been quite active on Twitter. I've got a few accounts there- for more general info and updates on coding and Arduino, find me @echtemich; for bigdata and IoT, you'll want to catch my @CjoelHarrison account- be forewarned, though- the propellers' rotation on the latter account generally exceed 100% of theoretical on a regular basis!

Big news from the SUL! As detailed in my last post, we had to RMA a motherboard. I'm happy to report that Mr. T is the proud father of a fully functional bouncing baby PC. Well... I've seen servers that were smaller than this thing. OTOH, its really quiet- a nice Win7 gaming rig.

Of course, this created a domino effect, as his old machine was moved onto my desk. When this happened, we started planning what to do with my corner of the office, and a couple of events threw everything into momentary confusion.

The first event was our getting rid of cable TV. When we did this, we signed up for Netflix, and my Raspberry Pi lost its dedicated television to another location in the house. Second, the desk to my right was pretty much dismantled- all that currently remains is a recently acquired WinXP Media Center box with no internet connection. This box will eventually move back over to Mr. T's side of the SUL when the rolltop desk next to his desk goes upstairs, and the stereo cabinet and component stereo migrate into that space. In the interim, I need to hook the KVM back up so that I still have another internet connected PC.

With all of the moving of things about, I've added to the list of things I've not worked on recently: the database, the Pi, the Arduino (Processing) and Python programming... its also been forever since I've visited Codecamp- I think this is also my first blog entry in about a month. Once the desk is moved, things should settle down a bit.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.