Life is Good

What more can you say? As Jodi just pointed out, we just hit our one-year mark and, though we're frazzled with activity (what else is new?), it's been great. This new home is just one big project for us to do together and we're having a great time with it.

Get married, if you ever get the chance - I highly recommend it.

So, a quick techie update: we've got our Apple TV. I have been ripping movies for I-don't-even-remember-how-long now. We're on the tail end of it all and, naturally, I've run our of available hard drive space.

As luck would have it, I just purchased a LaCie Ethernet Big Disk for use at work and it's a very interesting device: 1 terabyte of storage, gigabit Ethernet connectivity (as well as USB 2.0, but Ethernet is still king of the hill for throughput), a web-based admin utility that gives you access to all sorts of stuff. (acct. mgmt., HTTP and FTP-based file access, built-in AFP, etc.).

One very interesting capability is the devices's "MediaServer" facility - it's able to search itself and present any movies, music or photos found as a network shareable volume, accessible to any media programs or devices on your network. For example: turn on the MediaServer function and it'll index any music found on the drive. Now open iTunes on your machine and the drive will appear as a playlist!

So I'm waiting for mine to show up so I can finalize our home storage.


One more acquisition: Airport Extreme Base Station. Gigabit Ethernet switch. 802.11n wireless. Automatic USB drive sharing. These are good things. The bad thing is that it's been kind of twitchy with our DSL connection. Oh, well - I'll figure it out.

The bottom line is that our little hideaway will be very 21st century when it comes to our music, movies and (someday) photo collections!

P.S. - Have you ever noticed that, no matter how well you try to plan and budget a project, it always spirals out of control?! Life is good, yes. Predictable? No.