Besides the BDFL podcasts, I haven't had much in the way of Net output, so here goes. I've been busy at home getting furniture moved around as previously blogged; we have some stuff coming tomorrow. As a part of the moves, I got a new Dell 1907FP LCD monitor and it definitely beats the 17" CRT that it's demoted. After having a similar one at work for over a year now, I definitely knew what I was missing at home.

More of my audio stuff (Mackie 1202VLZ, Alesis QSR, Yamaha MIDI controller) has made it back into the basement as a result. I haven't played the synth much since getting the bass thing going full-time again, but we'll see.

I've been extremely busy at work, probably one of my busiest times there. I've been waist-deep in blade servers and VMware for the last few weeks and it's all finally coming online. This is probably going to end up being the most significant infrastructure I've helped design and build to date, and I think it's going to showcase how we can best manage our Windows Server infrastructure in the future. It's also fun to have extra hardware to test out Ubuntu on. :)

Melissa is doing great. We can't wait for her next ultrasound so that we can find out the baby's gender. We're both looking forward to having another little one around here.

I mentioned on last Tuesday's BDFL podcast that I finally moved this site to another hosting provider. I now have cygweb and the MHS site co-hosted on the same MT 3.33 instance. One thing I wasn't prepared for is a rise in comment spam. Apparently this MT instance was in some spammers' site, but since MHS doesn't have comments, it was bulletproof. Not so much now. I highly encourage you to use TypeKey if you want to comment, but I may incorporate a simple Turing test (perhaps the one implemented in the TinyTuring plugin) for those that don't want to authenticate just to comment.

Just as the winter weather starts kicking in here in Harrisburg, the wheels of change have started turning as it pertains to our furniture. We're expecting our second child in early May, so to get his/her new room ready we have to move some stuff around.

If I was a taxpayer that had helped fund a stadium for my local NFL team, I'd be pissed to learn that the league decided they were going to take regular-season home games away from my community. It'll be interesting to see how the league or team owners will compensate fans and local businesses negatively affected by this decision.

Since their announcement about five months ago, I've eagerly awaited Dell's first AMD-Opteron-based servers. The PowerEdge 6950 was released today. I'm quite familiar with HP's ProLiant DL585 boxes; I think they've been the best VMware ESX hosts on the market for the last few years. With the PE6950 release I compared its specs to HP's latest DL585, the G2. Beyond the badges and management software/interfaces, here are the major differences I see:

• The PE6850 utilizes Broadcom chipsets; the DL585 G2 uses nVidia plus AMD. Until I saw the Dell specs, I wasn't even aware Broadcom made system chipsets. Their ServerWorks division does; perhaps it's the first time system chipsets have been marketed as Broadcom since the acquisition. I know nVidia's been making AMD system chipsets for some time. Advantage: HP.
• The DL585 G2 offers one more PCIe x8 slot than the PE6950 and two PCI-X slots that aren't present in the Dell. Advantage: HP.
• A sweet config with four 2.6GHz processors, 32GB of RAM (16 x 2GB DIMMs), a RAID controller with four 72GB drives, and a DVD-ROM drive lists for $22,560 from Dell, and $23,624 from HP. Advantage: Dell.
• This is Dell's first enterprise product with Opteron processors; HP's been doing Opteron for a few years now. Advantage: HP.

With tonight's episode "Hiro's", Heroes has become a must-watch show for me. A more interesting implementation of the "six degrees" theme than Six Degrees, that's for sure.

Update: Steve Gillmor likes Heroes, too.

It was great to have another Locke episode on "Lost" last night. He's one of my favorite characters. The "sweat house" scene with his vision of Boone was well-produced. It's a shame we're only going to get three more new episodes until January.

Ryan has one of these guitars. After a few months of flat-out strumming, he's started to do some rough fretting, harmonics, and is experimenting with feedback. With the built-in amp behind the strings, that'll happen. ;)

I moved the main ICYG streamer over to FB2K 0.9.4/Oddcast 3.1.15 the other day. I'm shutting down the old website. The new player is populating both last.fm and foosic with playback info; they're both neat services. Since the links on the old website weren't generating sales, it seemed pointless to maintain the site. I'm generating unique-artist playlists every 4 hours now; I'll probably increase the playlist duration as time goes on. This thing is pretty much vanity at this point, but I'll continue to keep streaming. I like tuning in the mix and continuing to test the boundaries of the software.

Old camera: Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P51
New camera: Canon PowerShot A530
Old camcorder: Sony Hi8 CCD-TRV66
New camcorder: Canon MiniDV Elura 100

Thanks to Oddsock for updating his excellent streaming DSP Oddcast to support foobar2000 0.9.x. I certainly wasn't one of the ones bugging him about it, but now that it's here I'm playing with it. This was a great time to do so, as FB2K 0.9.4 came out recently. And I've been thinking about changing around the ICYG back-end.

I've got a decent FB2K/Continuator/Oddcast chain going, with 44.1kHz Stereo Ogg Vorbis streams of Q0 and Q8 (in-home only) and a 32kHz Stereo 64kbps CBR MP3 stream. I've confirmed that FB2K 0.9.4 now supports FLAC streams; however, in my limited testing so far I've found that Icecast develops CPU usage problems when dealing out a FLAC stream. I'm eager to see if I can serve one out within the house stably, but for listening purposes the Q8 Vorbis stream is just fine.

I've got an instance of Winamp and Eric Milles' Remote Speakers Output plugin that I've got going 24/7 listening to that Q8 stream and pumping it to the Airport Express attached to our stereo. Hi-def ICYG in the living room is a nice thing to have! And Ryan likes it when he hears the station IDs he recorded over 2 years ago come on...

Melissa and I had a great time going to see the Bills beat the Vikings yesterday.

Traffic in the area of Ralph Wilson Stadium was backed up, but no worse than I thought it'd be. We were in the thick of it for about 20-30 minutes and then parked in one of the outer lots off Abbott Road. I wasn't thrilled by the idea of buying a window sticker for $7 or any of the other memorabilia I saw, so we headed into the Stadium about an hour before kickoff. That gave us time to get some food, find our seats, and settle in. We were pretty worried about both the tempature and the chance for rain; neither turned out to be a factor. Temps were in the low 60s, there was no rain, and the wind swirled around a bit. Great football weather.

Our seats turned out to be great. They were in the front row of section 200, nearly lined up with the goalposts. We had a great view of everything but the Jumbotron -- it was behind us. I brought some binoculars with me, and they were a great help when play was at the other end of the field. The guys were plenty close when on our side. I didn't mind seeing the game from that perspective; I liked seeing the formations head-on.

And the game? Great. Willis McGahee's first TD of the season came in the end zone closest to us. We knew it would be a low-scoring game, but I didn't think the Bills would let the Vikings come back late in the game. They kept it together and got a little bit of luck as well. One thing I was proud of was that the stadium got very noisy (I helped) every time the Vikings offense had the ball; I have to think that had an effect. Seeing the game in person reminded me that these guys are still human, and that media coverage of NFL games tends to over-amplify both the game and the players. But it's all in good fun.

Thanks again to Melissa (I love you!) for treating me to a great early birthday present!