Corey Gouker's Machine Inside the Mind

At work here in building 50 on campus, dead tired, though it's not actually from work. It's from the lack of sleep. Last night Jon and I moved my diminutive desk and computer set up from the extra room into the "central hub" of the apartment. I could've held off for a while but I figured Jon didn't really want to sleep on the futon in the living for another night. Plus Andy will be moving in at some point in the near future. He recently took a SDET internship for MS working on Office PLEX. So at least now he's got his room ready.

I'm quite scared about how much electronic equipment we'll have in that "central hub" alone. There's already over 1.3TB worth of hard disk storage. Within the next 3 - 6 months it'll probably hit 3TB, plus whatever Andy brings. That's a heck of a lot of storage. Anyway, last night really wasn't that bad. Moved the 9' desk into the room where it's nicely positioned in front of the fireplace, set up the Klipsch 5.1's with the Creative DDTS-100's with oh so gorgeous S/PDIF sound and stereo to 5.1 upmixing. At that point it hit 3AM and I hadn't even finished setting up the Gateway 901x.

There's been a lot of physical labour the past days here at work and I'm kind of not looking forward to doing all the cable management that is seriously required when one has this much equipment and doesn't want things looking like a jungle. When I last did this, in San Jose, it took over 6 hours to complete. I get the feeling this will take longer, plus there is a certain little requirement of ambient lighting that one must take care to complete the set up. I think once I get done I'll post the photos to my gallery along with Sean's Media Center Flickr Pool.

In my never ending quest for massive amounts of storage, I'm lusting over a nice desktop (yes desktop, not rack) case that can handle up to 16 SATA II drives. Nothing less than 8 drives of course. It'll all be RAID-5 and connect back to my server via GigE and/or SCSI or some other single cable. And the stupid thing would cost less than $1000 to buy without any drives. My best bet so far... But it's a rack mount, and without requesting a quote I'm sure it's 3x more than I want to pay.

Surely there's a company out there that's open to enthusiasts that are willing to pay just a tad more than the average consumer but not the Fortune 500 type pricing this stuff seems to get now.

I keep going back and forth. I know for sure that I need to handle at least 8 drives for RAID-5 in the next 3 years, and I know it'll be all with SATA drives, I'm just not sure what the best solution is at this time, especially with all the motherboards now that have onboard RAID.

MCE managed to grab this new MSN Search ad the other night. I quite like it, it's pretty cool. Best from MSN so far. Though I do miss the "Home" adverts they had way back. I definitely prefer this add over the "Your Potential. Our Passion." ad campaign. They weren't bad but then again they weren't "cool". This almost has that all important cool factor except it has the guy talking at the end. If they could've left that bit of it really would be a 10. I give it a 8 for now. Definitely looking forward to the next ones. I can understand needing to get the word out that the MSN Search is actually "new" but umm, I can't really remember Google needing to do a major TV ad campaign . Anyway, definitely check it out if you haven't seen it. There's a certain opening scene to Contact/Encarta splash screen feel to it.

UPDATE: Here are a couple links to the videos from MS PressPass.
"A New Way to Search"
"Basketball"

So I totally slacked and didn't post part two of my Creative Zen PMC review, but nevermind. Battery life is quite good, I managed to listen to music nonstop for a drive in a 10' U-Haul from San Jose to Redmond without needing to charge it so I'm happy. While I still think the Creative is a brick (albeit in a piano black finish), the user experience and just the overall satisfaction with what's actually in the device is what does it for me. I'll probably buy a Creative Zen Micro Photo when those come out since I refuse to have a player that can't do album art... That's actually one thing I love about the PMC. Personally I'd really love to see a Zen Micro sized device powered by the same stuff that's in the PMC, imho, THIS is the key to making the PMC's take off and making a true iPod killer. Well, at least from the device side. The other OEM's are coming close to the level of Apple's industrial design, Creative being the forerunner. After using iTunes for Windows on the laptop for over 3 months I'm still at a complete loss at how anyone could actually want to use it. Sure the real time search is nice but the software is just crap. It's slow and total bloatware. I hate that it has the iPod service, etc.

Getting back to the point, I really love the PMC, I don't really use the video enough simply because DVR-MS to WMV encoding takes too long with WMP10. I've not gotten down to really moving DVD's to WMV either. But wow, I really love the way the navigation for all my music, and I really love my album art. The degree with which the PMC matches the UX of the MCE is sweet. I take the PMC into work everyday and I'm actually finding in the role I've placed it in, it works really well. Now if it only fit in my pocket...

I made the supposedly easy upgrade to dasBlog 1.7 take ages. At least it seemed that way, a lot longer than it could've been really. All is well now.

In the process I started arguing with Kyle. Then I told him I love him in that geek way and all is well there now too. Or so it seems.

Kyle's being cheated by AGUK. I'm pretty sure the meaning of clearance is the same in the US as it is in the UK. While I can't blame the company for wanting to keep that extra 50%, it seems a bit steep. Especially if they want to keep a good customer who provides them business and sends business their way. If it was only, say $10 or $40 I'd say let it pass, big deal, but he paid $348 on the 29th then on the 1st he finds out they've slashed it to $174. Kyle's started up a thread on this forum and hopefully should see it resolved successfully. On the other hand it doesn't seem much different from the people I know who paid $250+ for the Audiovox SMT5600 only to find out later they could've bought the same thing from Amazon for better than free after mail-in rebates.

Why must companies be like this though? Sure it's good to make a profit, but is it really worth it when you piss off otherwise loyal customers? Or is the "life isn't fair" rule apply here?