At Least It Was A Productive IT Weekend

Every once in a while, it information technology at our house takes a leap forward. Sometimes, it’s forced, like when the hard drive in our old Mac Mini started to pack it in, threatening to take our photo collection with it, or it’s just overdue, like the upgrade of our WiFi this past winter.

I’d like to think that this time, I was proactive. I identified that while our external media drive wasn’t full or showing age, it was getting older. At the same time, my backup drive at work was full and was six and a half years old. So I ordered a new Western Digital MyBook 6TB drive and replaced the one at home, and I have taken the old one from home (WD 3TB) and brought it to work to replace the old drive here. I toyed with the idea of setting up a RAID array or getting a NAS (network attached storage), but those options were more expensive for incremental returns.

I also have unified my network cabinet with the addition of a 8-port gigabit switch, taking the load off of the Shaw Hitron cable modem and the cheap 5-port switch I had in there previously.

The Internet seems to be more stable, but I fully expect to see Shaw back. Collin (senior technician) came over Monday at 10 and was at our house for an hour and a half. When he left (having set up a replacement cable modem) all was fine. But then someone on the back end at Shaw made one more change… They were supposed to disable the WiFi on my modem (bridged mode), but I think they ended up disabling my ethernet ports instead. Another four hours of texting with Collin later, the Internet is back up. So that killed holiday Monday.

But on the bright side (very, very bright side), when hanging around with Ian in the basement, he sat down at the drums and I showed him how to play a standard “four on the floor beat”. It took a bit to coordinate his hands and feet, but in short order he had it. I let him play against “Night Prowler” by AC/DC, and then I played a 12-bar blues riff with him, and then we played “Summer of ’69 together, with him drumming and me playing my Strat and singing. It was awesome.