Joe Terranova

(and why I hate gift cards).

For the past several months, I’ve been drooling over the n810. I decided that, following Christmas, I’d be getting one for myself. My boss decided to give us our Christmas bonus in the form of a Best Buy gift card — no big deal, right? Best Buy will of course be selling them.

So, I currently have 275 in Best Buy gift cards total, and 150 in visa gift cards.

This is the n810 on CircuitCity.com . They have it, full price.

Here’s the n810 at Buy.com. Note that not only is it in stock, it’s also already on sale.

And here’s the n810 at Best Buy

When I searched for it previously, I was just told no search results were found. This confirms my suspicions — not only do they know the n810 exists, they’re purposefully not stocking it, and want people to buy n800s instead (which is of course absurd, as the n810 is better in every way). Perhaps this is because they’re really bad at turning over inventory. Perhaps it’s because they hate me.

Maybe this is why Best Buy makes so much off unused gift cards. However, if I go buy it else where instead, I’ll have to figure out something else to spend 275 on — it’ll probably end up being something dumb, like a PS3 or Windows Vista Ultimate. I guess I’ll wait a few weeks to see if Best Buy gives up on their stock of n800s and ships them all to Woot.com

JoeTerranova.net

Haven’t written in a while.

While I didn’t get a gPC (not a Walmart fan, and it was underpowered), I did get the motherboard for the gPC. The motherboard, 1GB ram, decent microatx case, and 500GB hard drive set me back around 240. It’s much quieter than my previous server, and is happily running Ubuntu Server downstairs.

While we’re talking about the new server, here’s a picture of what my basement computing stuff currently looks like:

I’m currently moving all my stuff off my previous server to the new one, including my bip and bitlbee install, folding at home, and FreePBX. On my old machine, I had used Fabian’s How-To on setting up Freepbx, particularly on setting up using the Xorcom Etch repositories. Unfortunately, Gutsy has continued onward while Etch has not, so what works on Feisty doesn’t always work on Gutsy, and that was the case with the Xorcom packages. Hopefully they’ll be moved to Debian in the near future.

Instead of using the Xorcom packages, I followed this how-to, which, besides version changes and some redundant steps, was pretty spot on. In short time I was up and running, and it didn’t take long to move over my previous configuration to the new server. The new FreePBX, by the way, is much, much shinier, and has AJAXed everything (even the Gigabytes).

Why am I moving everything, you might ask? Well, since the new server will have these permanent duties, I’ll be using the old server as a game server for the New Jersey Team’s LAN Party!

That’s about it from now. Here’s a video of Dave miming a “PodCast” on using The GIMP.

JoeTerranova.net