It’s been a bad year. All I have to say is this:

I love my home, but the floorplan is a bit odd. It’s a popular thing in the region: they like to put a room or two adjacent to the front door, neither of which have doors of their own. These rooms seem solely for show rather than function.

I’m not into functionless decor, so I’ve been scratching my head — and staring at a pair of empty rooms — for two years now.

My garage isn’t air conditioned (that’s important in Texas!), and neither is the shed, and I really want a workshop.

I have empty, functionless space that isn’t separated from the rest of the house.

Time to get creative…

My Christmas was a general mess. It was supposed to be the first year I got to host it for the family, but then my 18-month-old nephew got sick and ended up in the hospital (don’t worry, he’s doing much better!). Everything fell through, and chaos abounded.

And now it’s New Year’s Eve, and I’m sitting around writing a blog post. Go me.

Good riddance, 2018.

Amazingly enough, I’m still alive.

Surprised?

At some point while I clearly wasn’t looking, 2017 managed to escape. Now I’m stuck in 2018, and I have no clue how it happened.

My attention span really is that bad.

So there I was, all gung-ho to make some serious progress. I was going to do a bunch of reseach on Z-Wave; I was gonna write a nice little bit of software to replace OpenHAB; and I was gonna blog about it. It was gonna be great!

I was truly in the Zone.

And then my boss quit, and it all went to hell in a handbasket.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with my small collection of servers when I moved into the house, so they ended up stacked on a folding table. While it was functional, it certainly wasn’t the prettiest thing in the world. Plus there was the mess of power strips and cables…

After procrastinating for months, I finally got around to doing something about that this weekend.

Hard as it is to believe, today marks floating.io’s first birthday. One year ago today I finally got around to putting my new blog together. My goal was to post often, and talk about fun things.

I only managed about a post and a half per month. This is post #20.

What went wrong?

Need I say more?

For those who are actually wondering, yes, I’m still alive. I managed to get quite thoroughly distracted, and TuneControl was shoved to the back burner for a while (as were all my other projects). I simply haven’t had the time to work on anything.

Why?

Because I decided to buy a house.

It’s been a busy week. I lost many hours to the American Idol finale. Had to keep up on The Voice, of course. Then add in the massive (and very painful) project we’re in the middle of at the ever-dreaded job… The little time remaining was devoted to “final” tweaks to my internal network, and a major rework of my Amazon VPC in the hope of making my Amazon budget go a bit further.

It’s with the latter task that this story starts.

The What

Back in 2012, I had plans. I was unemployed, bored, and had just embarked on an interesting hardware project to help organize my music collection. It gave me something to talk about, so I started a blog called Macdweller. For much of 2012 I posted various random things, including my ramblings about TuneConsole.

And then I got a job, and promptly stopped.