Stately English Manor

Happy Halloween

Jacuzziectomy

Thanks to our wonderful plumber, we are now one step closer to reclaiming our back yard.

He came over last week with a reciprocating saw, and, in exchange for the heater and filter, helped me lift the jacuzzi out of the pit and then carved it into nice trash can sized pieces.

 

Scurvy Knaves and Comely Wenches

Still playing catch up....

The week before last was the week without music.  Last week was my 40th birthday.  And next week is our friend Joelle's 40th birthday.  So last weekend, we threw a themed 40th birthday party here at the Stately English Manor.  The theme:  Dress like a pirate.

We had a good turnout, and nearly everyone came in costume.  We only had two holdouts...and one of them brought her dog.  In costume.

Click on the pictures for larger versions.

The pirate deck:

Doug & Heidi:

Rosalie, Doug, & Heidi:

Rosalie, Laura, & Nancy:

Nancy & Laura:

Tahoe:

Todd:

Jason, Nancy, & Cristina:

(Nancy's pics here.  Cristina's here.)

Cristina & Peter:

Yoly & Mark:

Brett:

Joelle, Brett, & Lionel:

Joelle & Lucy:

Hilari:

After the party: Mrs. Redbeard barefoot & pregnant in the kitchen:

And finally, Loot!

Woo hoo!

Thanks, everyone, for helping us celebrate!

Week without music

A few weeks ago our music server went out.

Several years ago, I bought a SlimP3 player from slimdevices.com.  This was their first generation digital music streaming device; the current version is the SqueezeBox.  The SlimP3 player is essentially a clock radio-sized piece of hardware that converts a digital mp3 stream to analog output.  It has an ethernet port, which connects it to your network and from which it receives the mp3 stream, and RCA output jacks, which connects it to your stereo receiver.

Many years ago, when upgrading my CD player, I decided to go with one of those CD jukebox things.  The one I chose was a 25-disc model.  I eventually found this irritating though--I not only had to remember what was in the jukebox, but in which slot it resided if I wanted to play a particular track.  And, since I owned more than 25 CDs, it didn't really live up to the idea of it's potential--I may not have had to swap out CDs as often, but I still had to swap them out periodically to hear what I wanted.  So when I got tired of that, I decided I wanted a digital solution--I wanted to have instant access to *all* of my music, without the constant need to swap discs in and out, and I wanted to be able to make lengthy custom playlists that weren't limited by the number of albums I could have loaded at any given time.  So when I saw the SlimP3 player, I was intrigued, and got one.

This type of device isn't as novel as it used to be, but I still like mine.  The device itself--the hardware--just converts the stream from digital to analog.  Unlike some current digital jukebox solutions, it has no storage capacity.  Instead, the server software, written in perl and totally cross platform, runs on your computer, and the size of your music collection is limited only by the size of your hard drive.  This suits me just fine, as I can easily upgrade my storage capacity by upgrading my hard drive.  I'm actually using a dedicated Linux box as our music server, so the music stream is never interrupted by any additional load on the CPU (I occaisionally have need to place heavy loads on the machines I use for actually doing stuff, and thus didn't want to have the music server running as a service on any of the machines I actually do work on).  I run Samba on the music server in order to share the music folder on the network, meaning it's easy for me to rip CDs from my laptop or the Mac mini and then drop them over the network into the music folder on the music server (which resides in the "server closet" with my other Linux box, the SlimP3 player itself, and a couple of daisy-chained amplifiers that power three pairs of speakers throughout the house).

As can be seen in the photo, the server closet is also the attic access closet, hence the ladder.  Orpheus, the music server, is on the right, with the amps resting on top, and the SlimP3 player on top of those (behind the silver external hard drive).  An ugly tangle of speaker wire and ethernet cable runs up to the top of the closet, before making its way through the house.  It's also apparent from this photo that this closet was never painted after we pulled the half-assed shelving out of there; someday we'll have to empty the closet, replaster it, paint it, and install some wire shelving that will help organize this space a little better and allow air circulation for all the electronics.

Another nice feature of the SlimP3 player, which I began to take advantage of after we moved into this house and I set up a whole-house audio system with it and the afore-mentioned daisy-chained amplifiers and speakers, is that I can set up musical alarms.  We currently have the server set to wake us up with a random album from the collection each weekday morning, and a random mix of songs on the weekend (at a slightly later time than on the weekdays).  It's also set to only allow certain genres into the random mixes, so I can tell it we don't want to wake up to a random audio book chapter, for example, or podcasts, or holiday music (or, if it's December, I can limit it to holiday music instead).

So, a few weeks ago, I ran into a hard drive error on the music server, and I had to close it down.  Fortunately, I had set up a nightly process to mirror the contents of the music folder to the other Linux box, so I was able to order a new hard drive for the server without fear of losing any of the music (about 75 gigs at last count).  When the drive finally arrived, I did a clean re-install of Linux on the machine, and copied all the music back over to it.  So we have our music back and life is good.

Unfortunately, I didn't mirror any of my configuration files, and now I have to refigure out how I had the backups set up--I was using rsync over an ssh connection, but ssh normally requires a password, which doesn't work too well with a cron job.  I think I had host-based authentication set up to get around that, but I'm having to re-research the issue to set it up again.

Moral of the story:  Always have a backup plan in place, and don't do it half way.