Oh, pancakes!

Dear readers - apologies for the lack of updates (again).

Firstly there was Christmas. Or as I prefer to call it, the "non-denominational Winter festival". Being a devout atheist and all.

Then there was new year.

After that there was work. Customers breaking their computers, and me having to fix them.

Then there was flu. Nasty.

With all that, I haven't managed to post anything on here for a few weeks. So I thought I'd better rectify that.

Not that there's a whole lot to update. The start of the year is pretty boring. The new server (detailed in the last blog post) has been behaving itself. The old one is sat here in my office waiting for me to tear it down and use the parts to upgrade our server here (400GB storage, nearly full). Sure, 400GB was a massive amount of space in 2007 when I built this server. In 2015 it's not much. So I plan to use the 3TB disks out of the failed co-lo to construct a new RAID for the office, and retire the old server. 8 years is a good run for a server.

In other news, I bought a piano.

Well. I actually bought a drum kit. But due to a miscalculation, it wouldn't fit. It fitted in the space, sure, but what I'd overlooked is the space needed to play it...

So back it went. And I returned with a digital piano instead. Which did fit - and is awesome:

Since taking the above photo I've connected a set of Mission 760iSE speakers (which you can just about see in the bottom right corner of the above pics) to the line out, via a Technics SU-V300 amplifier. This improves the sound no end. I've also replaced the office chair with a proper piano stool.

The music stand is useless for single sheets (although fine for a proper music book) so I'm planning to remove it and replace it with a TFT monitor. There's enough space on the top for a keyboard and mouse too, which will give me a rather nice music workstation. Although I do need to move it around so it's no longer blocking the French doors.

More to follow soon...

But why "Oh, pancakes"?

Two reasons:

1. Because when Vince killed One-Gloved Maurice in Rex The Runt series 2 episode 1, after Bad Bob says "Vince you idiot, you just killed the only mouse Rex ever loved", Vince replies with "Oh, pancakes!"
2. Because it's Pancake Day, so it seemed like an appropriate bit of randomness.

I'll try not to leave it 2 months before I post an update next time.