Part 1: Planning a functional home-office space.

So this is my obligatory monthly post it would seem… Not much new to write about. Some changes at work, I was moved to a different facility. Hours suck, commute sucks, but all’s going well for the most part. I do hope to be back soon, mostly because it’s closer and the hours are better. I’m overcoming the other reasons I didn’t want to be here. Gotta take life one day at a time and make the best of it or you’ll find your life is miserable! My coworker here is good, she’s got a great attitude and is easy to work around.

As for home life, I’ve gotten the new profiles website and discussion board site up and running – still a few tweaks to do there. I havn’t updated my Tee Shirt site in way too long, so that’s on the list ot “to do real soon” I need to build out 3 new servers, most likely gonna use FreeBSD again. One will be to replace the old 166Mhz secondary DNS and Mail sitting on the Speakeasy DSL at home, another will be a new secondary DNS and Mail on the SBC connection, and the 3rd will be backup NS and MX to put at a friends house.

I still want to replace the 2 monitors left in the computer room with flat panels to save space and electricity – just havn’t gotten around to spending the money on them yet. Also need to clean up and move old servers out of there that I don’t use anymore. There are about 6 computer that I don’t or won’t be using once I finish cleaning them out and adding/replacing the 2 servers I mentioned earlier.

I also really want to get a Media Center PC and a NAS (Network Attached Storage) to put all my CDs, Movies, Etc on as well as record TV to watch later, etc. But seeing how slowly I’m attacking these other projects – not to mention the cost (Close to $3k whan all’s said and done) I don’t see that happening soon.

I havn’t been out taking pictures lately – mabe with cooler weather coming I will feel more like taking some on the weekends. My Sony F828 is still “new” but I want another camera already It’s really handy and does a great job – but I want a more professional digital – not to mention the fact that I want nothing to do with Sony now after their little rootkit goof. (If you havn’t heard, search google or slashdot for sony rootkit)

Well, enough rambling – I’ve successfully cooled off under the AC now after spending the afternoon cleaning – and now it’s time to go home.

I know I always say I’ll post again soon… but in case I don’t, worse case scenario is you’ll hear from me in about a month!

I know I always said when I got a blog I wouldn’t be like everyone else and go weeks or months without posting anything, but I have a really good excuse….

Okay, I’ll save you all the drama, except to say I’m still here and will post more when I find something worthy of my time For now, go check out Buffoon Tees for lots of funny tee shirts!

I spent the day trying to finish the Houston Crime Statistics site that I started last weekend, and now have it online. I’m proud to announce the google-look-alike page that allows you to search crime stats near your address!

Houston Crime Stats

Now to go grab dinner and enjoy a fun evening of more Star Trek! Which reminds me, I need to post my NetFlix queue on here too… Ahh, another project for tomorrow.

-Kris

I had heard about the Google Maps API, but have not had the chance to play with it until last weekend. It’s very easy to do, and fun to play with. But I was struggling to find a purpose for its use – until I came across the City Of Houston Crime Statistics data, which is free to the public.

After obtaining and processing the data from them to get it into a MySQL database, and geocoding as many of the addresses as possible (Houston’s streets are so confusing, even the police officers don’t know how to enter the correct street names and addresses) I’ve gotten a very basic working model of the crime stats linked to a map – so you can search for crime stats near your address for example.

When I get a few more bugs worked out, and a slightly more appealing interface for it, I’ll stick it online for anyone who’s interested to take a look at. Due to the addressing errors, geocoding takes out about 10% that can’t be matched to coordinates, but overall the result should be a semi-usable reference to crime stats based on geographical location.

Kris