How I spent my weekend

[mdlbear]

My main line of geekiness this weekend centered around getting my former workstation, Trantor, ready to serve as a new recording machine (under the nodename Dorsai). Not as much progress as I'd hoped -- I spent quite a lot of time chasing my tail because the gigabit ethernet card on my former recording machine, Harmony, suddenly decided to be referred to as eth3 instead of eth0. WTF?

(Aside: since my internal domain is thestarport.org, all my node names are stars or planets, mostly from science fiction. Machines used primarily for audio, naturally, get names mentioned in filksongs. The laptop is Argo; you've already met Harmony and Dorsai. Most of my early workstations had names from Star Wars; Dantooine is currently being used as a print server. Tatooine, Moseisley, and Hoth are long out of service.)

Anyway, Trantor finally got renamed, and has a shiny new GigE card, and both it and Harmony have eSATA headers installed in case I want to use external hard drives recording media. Only thing left is the software, which will initially be 64studio.com (an easy upgrade from Etch). At some point I mean to try the 64-bit version on Dorsai, and also UbuntuStudio. One way or another, I'll have Dorsai in the bedroom studio and ready to record with sometime this week.

Meanwhile, I did quite a lot of uncluttering. Moved most of my inventory of CDs -- 5 boxes worth -- into the front closet (now that chaoswolf has much, though not all, of her stuff out of it), and did quite a lot of re-arranging, consolidating, and uncluttering in the office. This included moving two defunct computers (Algol and Flare) up to the attic, recycling two empty boxes that had somehow gotten stored in the attic right where I wanted to put the computers, and moving a mostly-empty shelf up two inches so I could slide a computer under it. I also got Dorsai out from under the desk to where I could work on it. Which in turn required consolidating some of the CD-shipping stuff into a file box.

I'm still left with a couple of items sitting out on chairs, including a storage drawer full of old floppy disks that no longer fits on the shelf I moved, and the box of CD-shipping stuff that was originally in the spot where I moved Dorsai.

Oh, and I finished ripping the last of the pile of CDs that's been hanging around in the office waiting to be ripped.

So although I didn't quite reach my goal of an operational recording set-up, I got quite a lot done. Not complaining.