A long gap

Since my last post, we have had a fairly wet New Zealand winter, and other than finishing the welding course, no further progress has been made on the car. In fact the mini is now off the road for a couple of months, because I was a bit fed up paying warrant dees and licence fees for a car I was only doing 1000km in every six months. I haven't competed in any events since then, but Lynn and I did go to see the Rally of New Zealand in Hamilton, so not totally motorsport free.

The main reason for this inactivity is the need to spend time and money on other things. Since getting broadband at last a few months ago, I have been building up a home network. Downstairs in the lounge we have a 'Media Centre' PC, an Acer L3600 3l format, with 2 gig of ram, 500gig hard drive, a TV tuner, and a wireless network card built in. This is connected to a Samsung LCD TV, and an Onkyo 8522 stereo receiver, with two sets of speakers, a pair of Wharfdale Diamond 9s flanking the TV, and a pair of Kef C20s as the main room speakers. It's all connected so that I can record TV, VHS tapes and audio from any source (including LPs and cassettes) onto the computer, and the computer can play back through the stereo and the TV. Our main passion on that at the moment is listening to BBC 7 over the internet.

In the office I have an XP machine with MS Office etc on it for office type work, and an Ubuntu machine running Ubuntu 6.6 as it came off the disk at the moment, but with an upgrade to 8.4 or 8.10 planned in the near future. The mother in law has an XP machine which I have just rebuilt with new memory, new hard drive and new DVD drive, as well as a wireless mouse and keyboard and HP printer I had spare. All these machines are networked through a Dynalink DSL-604T Wireless ADSL2 router, either wirelessly, or in case of the machines in the office, via ethernet.

Also connected to the router is a Venus Network Attached Storage device with a 320gig hard drive in it. All machines have access to this 24*7, as it is the only part of the system never turned off, other than the router. Next step is to make the NAS drive available via FTP for when I am travelling etc. Nice piece of hardware, cheap ($90 plus $90 for the HDD) and a doddle to set up and use.

Downstairs in the lounge thee is an HP 8183 wireless printer/scanner with built in negative and slide scanning, as well as a light scribe DVD writer! Another nice piece of hardware, and it can also act as a network shared drive too if I leave a big memory card in one of the slots!

So setting that lot up has been taking cash, and an incedible amount of my spare time.

Plans for the next few weeks include building the shed I promised myself last summer. When that's done, I may start work on the car again. In the meantime I may build an A frame to tow the mini with, so that I can get to some of the more 'fun' events. I have to have some justification to buy a welder eventually!