And eight months later...

Is this thing on?

It's really been eight months since I posted last? Talk about slacking.

I've been REALLY busy! Well, kind of busy. Would you believe moderately occupied?

So many things to do, so little time. Splitting time between house renovations, car projects, competitive shooting, and computers sees little time for much else.

Just when I thought I was getting on top of things, I lost a couple of critical servers, and spent a lot of time rebuilding machines and recovering data. I was running semi-professional systems, RAID disk and all, but decided that replacing the broken systems with real data-center stuff would be a good idea - this wasn't the first time that the semi-pro stuff had let me down.

I picked up a couple of older IBM servers - rack-mount, redundant power, redundant memory, redundant disks, the lot - and migrated everything to freshly installed (and licensed) Windows server 2012, then I picked up a couple more identical servers, and migrated all the other stuff (Linux web stuff, and VMWare mainly). So now the house reverberates to the keening sound of MANY cooling fans, and nobody can sleep, so another project gets started to build a dedicated, sound-proofed, and temperature and humidity controlled server enclosure.

Oh well, at least I taught myself to weld.

Of course all those cooling fans, and power supplies, and disk drives means a spike in the power bill. Solar panels here we come! If only batteries were cheaper.

Funny thing is, the Oz government offers rebates (in the form of traded RECs - Renewable Energy Certificates) that have seen the price of household solar systems not change at all. Before the implementation of the REC system, a 5 kW system cost about AUD$8,000 - immediately after implementation the price was AUD$8,000. Subsequent price drops have all come from improved yields on panel manufacture, improved technology, and economies of scale.

Stupidly the effective maximum allowable capacity of a domestic, grid-connected solar system is 5kW. That's not what the law actually says - it states that the maximum difference in generation capacity between phases is 5 kW - but nobody ever said that the electrical trades draw the best and brightest. Even more stupidly, it is illegal for a solar system to generate power if the grid is down. If the system is NOT connected to the grid, all bets are off, and capacity is dependent on the depth of your pockets. Which brings me back to the ridiculously high cost of batteries. If they were cheaper, I'd go totally off-grid, but to do that would take four (or maybe five) Tesla Storage Wall batteries, and a larger panel farm to feed them. Even then gloomy winter days would see me running the numbers to decide what to shut down. Oh well, first world problems.

Back to more enjoyable subjects, I spent a few weeks thrashing on one of the car projects, and then drove 700 km to a seaside resort for a week. Foolish maybe, as I didn't get everything on the list done, and only had a day and a half of testing before departure, but the car performed almost perfectly. Only minor issues with a slight tyre rub (from larger wheels and tyres than stock), and  a broken ABS sensor wire. Trivial really. The outbound trip was sedate - long weekend, so double demerit points applied - but the home-bound trip was a little faster, as my confidence in the work that I had done increased, and also the police presence on the roads was a little thinner.

Did you know that a four-speed auto equipped V8 will change to SECOND gear at 90 kph if you stand on the throttle? Which of course I would not have done if I hadn't encountered a road user who thought it was funny to do 30 kph less than the speed limit where I couldn't pass, then speed up to 5 kph OVER the limit when passing was possible. I dropped in behind him, and he slowed to 30 under again. Hence, the firm prod of the right foot. The speed warning device in the passenger seat went off at 170, but somehow couldn't detect that I slowed to 140 instead of all the way back top the 110 limit. Oh well.

Enough for now.