February 2008 Archives

This morning I managed to break the dome on the existing light in our dining room.  I bumped the light with my head and the dome fell off.  It bounced off something on the table, rolled across the table, fell onto a chair and then bounced finally to the floor and broke.  This gave Kelly the excuse she had wanted to buy a new light.  She mounted the new one this afternoon.

I also took another picture showing the shelf we put up a few months ago to hold Kelly's cook books and cooking magazines.  Below it are some prints as well.

Kelly has nicely put up with me having the new server sitting on dining room table.  Today she seemed to be leaning toward me not having it there anymore.  I moved it to its almost permanent installation in basement.  The below picture shows it sitting next to its older much larger and louder soon to be retired brother.  This goes well with the last post to give you scale of this new tiny server.  Also you can see the amazing wiring mess that lives in the same area.

My friend Chris claimed that he couldn't get an accurate feel for the scale of my new server.  His suggestion was comparing it to the size of my head.  This morning before moving the server to more final placement I took the pictures.  First is front shot, one just server (on dinning room table) and next with me.

Next is a side view of the server and me.

I would say that in volume my head and the server are pretty close.  Which is pretty small for a server I would say.  In the front view you can see the add-on lunchbox external drives for my 1 TB mirror array.

Last November I upgraded my Sanyo PLV-Z4 720p projector to a Sanyo PLV-Z2000 1080p projector.  I thought it was an amazing deal at the time.  It was $2495 as a base price with a $300 mail in rebate for a net of $2195.  Just recently I was reading some comments on the projector and realized the price has fallen through the floor.  The projector now has a base price of $2195 with a $600 mail in rebate for a final cost of $1595.  That is just crazy, trimming 37% off the cost in 3-4 months.  If you want a 1080p projector I definitely recommend this one, especially at the new lower price.  I am not sure how long the mail in rebates last however.

For Kelly's first 29th birthday she rented the upper floor of the Patterson Bowling Center which features Duckpin bowling.  She has since rented the same place for her birthday party every year.  This year was her 4th Annual 29th party.  She invites 50+ people to try and pack the house.  We ordered a custom cake from Costco with it decorated showing 4th 29th, however Costco lost the cake and couldn't find it when we tried to pick it up.  We had to go with a standard cake.  Over 30 people showed up on February 9th.  Everyone brought food and drinks and as usual we had a bunch of extras.  Some pictures of the night are available at this link.  One sample picture showing the fun being had that night is below.

Our older dishwasher hasn't been working to well recently and I also wanted a quieter one.  I had been looking at the Maytag ones to match the range we got recently.  I narrowed it down to the MDB8951BWS after some research as the one to get.  Over President's day weekend Best Buy, Lowe's, Home Depot and Sears all had it on sale.  Best Buy was about $50 more than the other three that were all within $2-3 of each other.  We went to Best Buy on Monday and brought pricing from the other places.  We had them price match Sears as it was the cheapest and they had free delivery and take away (we found out on the receipt, they didn't tell us it was free up front).

One side note is Best Buy price matching for appliances is amazing, they just pull up a list of competitors and enter the price.  There is no calling to verify stock or any resistance at all, this is compared to price matching almost anything else at Best Buy where they have to check local price, stock and other issues before price matching.

On Thursday night after talking to my dad I took apart the old dishwasher.  I was very careful to remove anything I thought I might might be needed on the new one.  However I forgot to remove a key component.  The copper elbow to attach the water input to the dishwasher was left on the old one and taken with it.

Due to a snow day I was home on Friday for the delivery (Kelly was off as well and would have been there if I wasn't.)  It got delivered about 1:30 PM.  After getting it unboxed I checked the fit and checked how to set it in.  As I was doing the install I realized I was missing the elbow, oops.  After trimming the mounting strips and adjusting the feet I went on my first trip to Home Depot.  I got an elbow that fit properly into the dishwasher but did not fit in existing water copper pipe.  I found this out after getting the dishwasher in place.  I then took out the first elbow and again headed out to Home Depot for trip number two.  I got the second elbow and brought it back and it was wrong as well.  After not being to thrilled a second time I called my dad again.  After some discussion we figured out I was buying a flange elbow rather than the compression one that I needed.  I returned the first two elbows then tried to get a third one.  I first found what I was looking for on the rack but when I picked it up it looked wrong.  I stood there for 10 minutes trying to figure out what was wrong.  I then realized what the bag said and what was in it were two different things, the bag was cut open.  I found a sealed bag and decided with some encouragement from a Home Depot guy that it was the right one.

At this point it is 5:30 PM (4 hours down already) I got back with what was hopefully the right one.  It was the right one.  Then I came up against the problem of getting the old compression fitting off, which I couldn't do.  I luckily have a next door neighbor that has almost everything tool related.  I borrowed his pipe cutter so I could trim the 1-2" off the end and remove the old fitting.  I was then able to finish with the new fitting.  The first time I turned the water on there was a small leak put I was able to mostly resolve it.  About 7 PM I had the dishwasher in place and turned the power on.  After that we started a cycle.  I watched the input and output to make sure there weren't any more leaks and there didn't seem to be.  A little before 8 PM I mounted the final covers on the bottom to totally finish the install.

I did all of the above to save $100-150 for the Best Buy installation charge.  Was it worth it, not sure due to time and aggravation.  I am just glad I didn't start at 5 PM yesterday as that would have driven me insane.  Below you can see the new dishwasher next to the recently added range.

I was looking for drivers today and I noticed nVidia has their own store, knowing that they don't sell much directly I was curious.  They had a hardware section that contained the Quadro Plex.  I am not quite sure what all this thing can do, but I figure for $20,500 it must be good at whatever it is.  Forget SLI this has 4 boards and some other bits to enable 16 screens, I suppose you could run some gigantic display like 16 30" LCD panels.  Cool.

I hesitate to even mention this since it is mostly on available to people who live near a MicroCenter.  Just in case though I want to point it out.  When I was building my server I wanted to get one of the new 45 nm 1333 MHz Intel processors.  The only one available at all so far is the E8400.  NewEgg would have them in stock for moments a day and their price was either 239.99 or 244.99, then I got an email from MicroCenter showing they had them in stock and for only 189.99.  I went and grabbed one since the price was so low.  Their prime cheap processor right now is the Q6600 which MicroCenter is selling for 199.99 as compared to the going standard of about $270-280.  On the whole MicroCenter is pretty average pricing wise but the sales like the two above I mention are definitely worth keeping a look out for.

This past week I built an entirely new server for hoyty.com (and the other sites I host).  The last time I build a new server was in the fall of 2001.  The specs for that server are at this link.  The specs listed there are pretty close to what the machine is now, I think the only difference is the SCSI controller as the on-board one failed at one point.  Also I added dual 250 GB SATA drives on a RAID controller running as a mirror.  2 GB of RAM and a dual processor (not single dual core) was pretty high end, now that is a standard low end desktop.  The old server started with Windows Server 2000 and Exchange 2000 and was upgraded to Windows Server 2003 and Exchange 2003 along the way.

Now onto the new server.  Ever since the release of Exchange Server 2007 I have been waiting for the release of Windows Server 2008 to build my new server.  Last fall the release date for W2K8 was announced as late February and I began planning for that as a new date to build server.  I ordered the bulk of the parts from NewEgg on 2/8/2008 and then picked up the processor on 2/10/2008 from MicroCenter as they had a really good sale on it.  You will see from the parts below that I built a dual core 3 GHz, 8 GB of RAM, Mirror of 10K RPM 150 GB and Mirror of 1 TB for a very reasonable price.  Admittedly I got a really good price on several components.

Some may think this is a bit overkill right now, but I hope this server will last me a really long time.  My last one lasted 6.5 years and I overbuilt it in a similar fashion.  If you wanted to build a similar server a little cheaper some places to trim pricing include using just one mirror of 500 GB HD, buying 4 or even 2 GB of RAM, use a motherboard with built in video and going with a lower end processor (just make sure it is 64 bit).  Below is an alternate configuration with some savings on overall price.

This system is a 2.2 GHz proc at 800 MHz instead of 1333 and 2 MB of cache rather than 6 MB, it has 4 GB of RAM rather than 8, has a software mirror of 500 GB HD rather than hardware mirror of faster or larger drives.  Having said all that this would make a very capable Windows Server 2008 box for a very affordable price.  You could still trim a little more off via smaller HD or lower end proc, but the savings are rapidly diminishing returns for the savings.

Happy server building.