Well that was a very Brooksider weekend.  I rolled down there Friday after work with a few co-workers for happy hour, to sort of get the weekend going.  Didn’t stay long though.

Saturday I was sitting around the house waiting for Donette to get home from her Texas trip when Ed called.  He was on some kind of charity pub crawl thing, where you go around playing putt-putt golf at a bunch of bars.  They were about to storm the Brooksider, so I went down there to eat a little lunch and laugh at them.  He and Kim paired up with Mike and Christy for the event.  I think they scored well in “style points” if nothing else; they had some kind of sombrero get-ups on.  After a while Donette stopped in to watch the fun too.  Like a real trooper, she came straight from the airport.  It pretty much wore her out though; She planned to hook up with them later at some of the other places, but took a nap instead.  Around 8:00 that night she was STILL napping, so she just called it a day and slept all the way through.

Sunday was similarly low-key.  We went to Jalapenos for lunch, then I popped over to the Brooksider to watch the Brigade game.  Unfortunately (in my book anyway) most of the tv’s were tuned to the MU game, but I guess it was still something to pass the time.  I hung out there for a while, then went home to make some dinner.  With the upcoming season #6 of Sopranos right around the corner, we decided to get back into the swing of things by replaying season #5.  So, we whipped up a pot of spaghetti, and had Todd and Susan over for some re-runs.  After watching episode one, however, the girls decided they needed to watch “Desperate Housewives” so Todd and I bailed.

Well, that was a half-hearted update to say the least.  I am distracted by my latest “project” and can’t concentrate.  I started shopping around this weekend for an external hard drive, so I could back up my PC’s at home.  (SINCE DONETTE LOST MINE!!!)  My attention was quickly drawn to the “NAS” option; Network Attached Storage.  Instead of just plugging in an external USB drive to each of your PC’s and backing it up, you put an IP address on these and they act like another device on your home network.  Nice… But then the Linksys NSLU2 caught my eye.  This setup is a bit different than most; instead of an “all-in-one” unit, this just gives you a network interface and two USB ports, and you plug your own drives into the USB’s.  This actually makes it a bit more cost-effective, as I can build my own external drive relatively cheaply, and if I should ever find the one Donette lost I’ll have TWO!  And as if this doesn’t fascinate you enough, there’s MORE!!  As with most other Linksys devices, it runs on a version of Linux.  And, as with ANY other device, if you put Linux on it, somebody will hack it.  Sure enough, a search quickly turned up the NSLU2-Linux page.  An entire site dedicated to the Linksys NSLU2 (aka “SLUG”) and those who love them.  SWEET!!  So… My big scheme is, I want to put one of these things together, load Apache on it, and turn it into my webserver.  “What is the advantage,” you ask?  ABSOLUTELY NONE!!  But I would probably be the coolest kid in Brookside if I got it working, I’ll tell you that much.  You can also run a fileserver, mailserver, and all kinds of other neat-o stuff on it.  And, actually there IS an advantage; Instead of the 400 watt PC with the 19″ CRT monitor that sits in the basement spinning my light meter all day long, so Munkirs can post his one derogatory comment per week, this little guy would pull less than 15 watts and do the same thing.  Oh yeah, I’m pumped.  This project will be a bit hampered by my marginal Linux skills, but I’ll call it a “learning experience.”