First off, I no longer have an abundance of free time. My previous jobs would leave me with something to be desired, so I would typically pull up the blog and post some musings from time to time when it became slow. Not the case with the current job, no boredom in foreseeable future.

Second, when I get free time now, I’d rather watch TV, a movie, play a video game, play poker, hang out with friends. OK, I’d pretty much rather do anything else. Updating the blog is lame.

Third, I don’t tinker around with stuff anymore. The original intended purpose of this site was to post my experiences with tech, and my unique solutions (or at least reposted hard-to-find solutions) to problems I ran into. Most of my popular posts have finally either faded out or are no longer applicable (e.g. installing MySQL 4.0 on FreeBSD 4.8, or downloading no longer available Invision Power Board 1.3.1).

Next I never really had an audience that was interested in reading the blog. I never updated enough and had a consistent basis of content to keep any regulars around. I never really pretended I did, but I assume nobody will be really sad to see this go.

Next, the information I have posted is not interesting from a historical perspective. One of my ideas behind posting on here was that I would some day in the distant future think “what was I doing on March 6, 2005″.

Next, enough personal information is out there about me, I don’t need any more. I recently went through and expunged about 70% of articles, posts that weren’t really relevant to anything. “I’m going to be doing this next week”, who cares, right? There’s more, and it’s just an annoyance.

Next, this is really the only reason that I have a domain with hosting. I have been contemplating the switch to a solution in the cloud (Google sites, specifically), and this is really my only barrier. Sure, I could utilize some cloud WordPress or Blogger solution, but it’s not worth the effort for all the above reasons.

Finally, I’ve learned everything I wanted to know about the space. One side effect of blogging on here is that I learned WordPress, I learned PHP, I learned MySQL, I learned how to use asynchronous javascript, I learned about mail and domain hosting. These helped me get my last job, which in turned prepared me for my current job. Now that I learned these things, the project site can be thrown away now.

In conclusion, it’s been a great 6+ years. I’ll still have an online presence, and this blog may be kept for historical purposes, just not so visible.

ETA, when I get around to it

I’m really excited about this opportunity for my career! I have to believe that some high power had a hand in forcing me out the door from my previous position, because I’d still be there otherwise. This job has better pay, more interesting work, and with a better company (of course the last two are my opinion, any former co-workers of mine).

The Boxee Box — an Apple-TV like embedded set-top-ish device. Under $200? Amazing. I am buying one asap.

The coolest thing out of the Boxee booth was the keyboard/remote combo. Assuming it’s reasonably cheap, I’m getting this for sure.

Simple as that, and the telnet client is included again. I don’t know why they don’t install it by default, it’s < 1 MB and incredibly useful.

I found this guide, which says

It’s one thing to be sold the wrong size drive, but these “hacked” drives which appear on your computer to be the right size, actually corrupt your valuable data to make it look like it fits on a much smaller capacity memory chip.

I followed their guide, and sure enough, my 64GB drive is closer to 20GB, or 21,850,329,088 bytes. The first file after this amount looks like this:

So I filed a claim on eBay, hoping to get this refunded. Turns out the seller’s account “no longer exists”. Meh. Moral of the story (which I should have already known): if it looks to good to be true, it probably is.

Edit: Ebay gave me a full refund. Hoorah.

So I’ve been looking out for deals on iPod Touches. Found a 2nd generation 8 GB iPod touch with a cosmetic crack on the screen (digitizer, not LCD) for $80 with a load of accessories. Picked it up as well as a replacement digitizer (and tool to open the front) from eBay for $14. I am happy with this deal so far. As far as I’m concerned, the iPod touch is all of the good things about the iPhone and none of the bad.