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On Sunday, December 20th I finally realized a dream that started with Forza Motorsport on the original Xbox, continued in Forza Motorsport 2 and finally made it into Forza Motorsport 3. Mary Ann and I are the happy new owners of a 2010 Subaru Impreza WRX STI. The above pictures are from the STI album, where you can find more if you like. If you aren’t familiar with the STI, it is a turbo charged all wheel drive beast with ~300 hp and ~300 ft-lbs of torque.

After driving up to Tahoe, CA a few times we realized that AWD would be a huge benefit and we’d been talking about getting a new car in the coming year. We knew we wanted a hatchback for the dogs too. We test drove a few cars similar to the STI like the Mazda 3, Mazdaspeed 3, Toyota Matrix and the Subaru Impreza WRX. The Mazda 3 was boring and the Toyota Matrix was worse than boring. The Mazdaspeed 3 and the Impreza WRX were both fun, but the Impreza WRX STI blew them away. We spent a few days making sure we got the best deal possible and eventually ended up with the car seen above whose only option is a trunk tray.

Last weekend, Mary Ann and I used directions from the internet to build a pair of self watering tomato planters called EarthTainers. They are made from big 31 gallon Rubbermaid containers, the directions can be found in PDF form at TomatoFest‘s website. The bottom of a donor container is cut off and holes a drilled in it to let water through. A plastic perforated basket of dirt acts as a wick and and the whole thing goes in upside down in the intact container. The rest is filled with dirt and now you have a great little device that holds ~3 inches of water that continuously wicks up into the dirt of the container for what ever is planted inside.

It took us about an entire day to build because there is a lot of cutting with a jig saw and there was a lot of learning involved. Now that we understand the process, I bet together we could build one in just a few hours. We’ve got two tomato plants in each of the two containers. You can find more pictures in the Tomato Planters album.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been building a new server for the open source project Gallery. The server is a 1U chassis with 2x Quad Core CPUs (4x 2.5ghz, 50W), 16G of RAM and finally 4x 150G 10,000 rpm SATA drives (mostly) in a linux kernel software raid10 setup. I hooked it up to my kill-a-watt device and measured ~250W at power on (when everything is spinning up), dropping to ~180W at idle. At 100% CPU usage, it increased to 200W. I’d say that isn’t bad for a server with 8 CPUs and 4 fast spinning disks.

Bharat (the benevolent dictator for the Gallery project) and I went to the colo where it is hosted and did the swap last night from ~8:00P to 1:00A. We started with an rsync to catch the box up to current w/o impacting the site, then brought it down and did another final (smaller) rsync followed by bringing up the new server. This went very well and we did a few tests to make sure everything was working right such as rebooting via serial console, dropping to init 1 and a few other things. Since it went so well, we also went ahead and updated all the software on the box while we were there just in case we had problems. That went great, so Gallery is on some nice new hardware.

I’ll leave you with a nice picture of the new server.
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So Mary Ann and I have been in California for many months now and the only post I’ve made is about the move out here. My friend from the Gallery project recently moved out here to work for SugarCRM and he happened to get an apartment in the same complex as us. He updates his site jpmullan.com very frequently and I thought I would give it a try. For everyone out there that is keeping an eye on my site and is disappointed in the lack of updates, here we go!

I recently started messing around with my Vex Robotics stuff again. I went as far as purchasing the RobotC compiler which is much nicer than EasyC which it came with (and would have cost $50 to upgrade to the latest EasyC). I wrote a couple simple programs to learn it and started building various chassis. It turns out, Jesse likes to play with robots too. It started out innocently enough, but then I ordered some new parts and we picked up a wireless video camera as well.

It is strapped to the robot on a turret that can rotate left and right as well as elevate up and down. I need some longer wires so that it can rotate 360 degrees, but it works reasonably well now. The best feature can be seen below though!

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Perfectly normal robot with the addition of an aim-able camera
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STEALTH ROBOT!!1!one!1eleven!exclamation point!

On April 24th at about noon Mary Ann and I set out on our cross country move from Atlanta, GA to Mountain View, CA. We took turns driving, usually about 4 hours per person. This turned out to be pretty well timed because we had to stop and fill up at about that interval too. The first half day, we made it all the way to Russellville, AR. On the second day we pushed hard and made it to Albuquerque, NM and on the third day we made a mad dash through the Mojave Desert for Bakersfield, CA. On the fourth day we had a leisurely and short drive to Mountain View, CA. We arrived!

Somehow I had decided that it would be cheaper to move ourselves, rather than hiring a moving company. Renting a big truck only cost about $800, three nights of cheap hotels is negligible and how much diesel could we use? Probably not much, right? At the first gas stop I realized the error of my mathematical calculations. Going 2400 miles on ~$300 of fuel would be an average mileage of 32 MGP. Perhaps not extreme… for a motorcycle or something. On the other hand, a big ass diesel moving truck that gets ~8 MPG is going to use *way* more fuel. It turns out that to go ~2375 miles we used 304.75 gallons of diesel and it cost us $1300. That is about 7.78 MPG, paying about $4.27 per gallon. We paid about $1000 for the moving truck and spent probably $300 on hotels and food. I am not sure I want to know if it would have been cheaper to be moved. Of course, we also brought our car on a trailer so that also might make up for some of it.

Originally we had planned on taking 5 days to do the drive, stopping near the end and doing a little bit of touring of some interesting sites in Arizona. Fate was against us as we left about 1.5 days late, so we had to settle for driving through the Mojave Desert. It was reasonably interesting, but not worth doing in a moving truck. We had to drive up some pretty steep hills that would have been nothing in a car, but we were forced to slow down to about 35 MPH (that was floored). We did get there right around sunset, which was pretty neat. After about 15 minutes, we were ready to be done. Unfortunately, we had about an hour or more left to go of scenic Mojave Desert.