I’m back, but need another day or two.

I got got back from my Caribbean cruise last Thursday evening, but have not really spent any time at the computer until then.  We left our house a mess, so most of the weekend was spent unpacking and straightening up.  Plus, it was nice out so the kids got some backyard time.

I’m probably going to need another day or two to go over what I missed over the past week-and-a-half, but first look tells me it was not that much.  The biggest thing I’ve come across so far is the downtime for theTVdb.com that doesn’t appear to have any kind of resolution in sight so far (not that there won’t be one, just that it appears there is some serious financial issues in resuming operation).

The only thing I have done so far is update my unRAID server to the latest 4.5b8 and I can definitely give a thumbs up to the increase in write performance.  I went from 12-13MB/s to around 23MB/s with this beta.  I haven’t played around with any of the new tunables, but am looking forward to see what they may have an affect on.  unRAID would be perfect for me if they could just fix that damn kernel locking that causes a stutter every time a disk spins up while watching a video.  Increasing the spin-down delay to 4 hours has helped, but that comes with a cost and is not a solution to me.

I have also discontinued my Dish Network service.  It wasn’t intentional, but I downgraded my service a few months ago to save a few bucks until we got past some tough times (we weren’t watching that much anyway) and swore I had setup autopay.  Well, according to them, I did not and my service lapsed due to non-payment and they charged me an early cancellation fee (I was under contract).  They wouldn’t waive the fee when I told them there must have been a mistake  and wished to resume service, but wanted to charge me an additional reconnection fee also.  I guess it all works out since the cablecards will hit shelves early next year and I won’t be bound to a dish that has no tuner coming any sooner.  I just hate that it will be Comcast that I have to go to for my TV service if I choose to go that route.  I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it, I suppose.

Anyway, check back for (hopefully) some new news!