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So, where to start. I guess I’ll get the sour stuff out of the way. Today I had 2 of my 4 finals, and lets just say it didn’t go super well. I only have myself to be angry at because I should have put more time into studying. That’s all I have to say about that. On a much higher note, after speaking with a guidance counselor at the college I have discovered that I only have 4 classes remaining after my current quarter before being eligible for graduation. So, presuming I can make a 180 turn from my midterms I should be officially done with school in June. This has definitely motivated me to want to get everything turned in and to start focusing harder than ever on school.

Now, for the more entertaining stuff. I received my USB to Serial adapter on Tuesday. I passed it through to my home automation VM and I’m back in business. I was very impressed, Ubuntu recognized the device immediately, the only thing to note on these types of devices is that they appear as /dev/ttyUSB0. Once I figured that out, I updated my scripts and I can now have the lights turn on when I walk in my room again. Just in time too, I was starting to trip and fall as I was trying to make my way to my lamp.

I have been doing some reading on various topics trying to get some other things going for myself. I picked up a Home Buying for Dummies book and have read about 25% through so far. I decided a while back that after graduating that I’d continue living at home for about another year while working full time to save up a down payment for a condo/home. The timing appears to be perfect, the market is still going down and rent prices are starting to fall in response. So, right around the time I will be ready to buy the market should be apexing and about to swing up making my purchase a great investment. I also have been reading up on how music effects your mood. I’m not usually all into psychology, but I have been picking up some interesting information. My reason for delving into the subject is that I’m playing with the idea of making an intelligent music selector. Ideally when I enter my room, my room should figure out my mood, and play either supportive or correcting music depending on how its setup. I’m definitely overwhelmed by the amount of data I’d have to collect and process, but I’m excited at the prospect of creating such an algorithm. I haven’t made any moves in terms of code or design, so I’m not sure if anything will materialize, but I liked the idea so I thought I should put it up here.

With regard to the new server, I have run into what appears to be a known Linux bug with VMware. After migrating my Linux VMs, my clocks all started to drift wildly on my VMs. Now normally this is no big deal for me, because I don’t need to use those clocks, but what it is having a terrible effect on is my Mythbuntu Backend. The clock on the master backend decides when the slave frontends all start recording, so I’ve been missing my shows. I attempted several fixes, but upon checking up on it again today I discovered I was 1hr behind again. I think I will just have to delete the VM and start fresh. The good news is that I did get my first recording to transcode on my Master Backend and using only one core on the i7 I can achieve 175FPS trancodes.