I have had more and more picture piling up over the few years, I haven’t really used any photo organizer until this point. This is where Picasa steps in perfectly, I need to see what I have and to remember how I want them organized. The only pictures I have organized perfectly is the my motorcycle pictures, by brand and then by date. The best part of the program is seeing all your pictures in one window, it even reminds me of pictures that I haven’t seen in a while. I have to figure out how to index certain pictures and how to leave out certain photos, it took a little while to index my main PC that is holding about 6000+ pictures and some in very high quality, I tend to snap away with the camera.
This is one of the first steps to reorganize all the pictures I have, the first set of digital pictures are from 1999 which I took with my Sony Cybershot F505 which was a gift from my cousin, it was an amazing camera and was great for a 2.0 Megapixel for a very long time. Now I have a few other cameras and always snapping away, I just want to organize all the photos I have since I know they are located in different drives and on different computers, with Picasa its going to make things a lot simpler. I just have to figure out all the bells and whistles of this program, I really like how smooth it is and very feature rich.
I have been downloading at a very high rate over the past two months, and I’m reaching a bottle neck which I didn’t think I would hit this quickly. I am currently running out of space on my main systems. I’m filling up my hard drives with TV shows, Anime, and movies.
Space Breakdown:
- Main PC (Armor Jr) :
- Space: 698 GB
- Free Space: 27 GB
- External (USB Attached Maxtor):
- Space: 233 GB
- Free Space: 58 GB
- Infrant NV+ (Network):
- Space: 1603 GB
- Free: 231 GB
- Network Drive (Maxtor):
- Space: 278 GB
- Free Space: 198 GB
- Total Space: 2812 GB
- Free Space: 514 GB
- Free Space: 18.3%
I had a simple process of moving old things to the Infrant and keeping new things on the Main PC, but I reached a bottleneck with that a few weeks ago and so I started moving some data over to the external storage and some over to the network drive. I had a system before but now that just doesn’t accomodate the amount of data that I am downloading. I have to figure out a different system of moving things over, I don’t even have enough time to watch all that I am downloading, but I want to download all that is available now so that if it isn’t available in the future at least I could. I have to figure out a new system, this isn’t the total amount of space that I have available but I need to figure out where to move all my media at this rate it is just getting all filled up. Before I thought I could just organize all my photos at a later point, and I kept postponing so many things but at this point I have to organize my pictures, music and other folders so that I can utilize all the space I have efficiently, since I have more to download.
Work has been a huge load for the past couple of days. There is that feeling at the end of the day where you feel your brain shutting down. I didn’t manage to get a bite to eat until late in the evening, and I only wanted to pass out after that. The most annoying thing is that headache from lack of sleep. I’m just very happy that one of the business trips that was planned got canceled, I thought I might have another marathon on my hands and this trip would have been a 4+ hour flight.
One of the best feelings after a long meal is stuffing yourself silly and then passing out. I don’t care about the health implications but sleeping with a full stomach when your exhausted feels damn good and you pass out right away.
I have been on a huge downloading spree as of lately, I have managed to get a lot of Movies and TV series. Then I realized that there are some Anime’s that I don’t have complete and I don’t have access to them all the time.
So this is just part of the list of Anime’s that I am currently downloading to complete the ones I have as well as the more episodes:
- Mazinger Z – Full
- Kyo Kara Maoh – Full
- D.Gray-Man
- Gundam 00
- Oh Edo Rocket – Full
- Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihoheto – Full
- One Piece 1 – 300
Between all these Animes it easily adds up to 200 GB to be downloaded over the next few days. Now I just have to figure out where to store them and how to organize them. (Click On the Picture for More Details)
I have had a Home Theater PC for some time now, and it has turned it one of my most essential sources of media. I thought I could sustain my usage with a small factor PC but because of the HD quality movies and TV series that I have been downloading it just couldn’t handle the usage, the Mini-ATX wasn’t cutting it.
So I have upgrade and transplanted some parts into my new HTPC from Silverstone, it could fit 6 Hard Drives, ATX motherboard, and everything else. Turns out it isn’t completely the case, who ever designed it packed everything in extremely tight. With my configuration I could barely fit everything in, cooling was very important for this heavy duty machine.
K pretty much redid all the wiring and hardware configuration done in Hawally, it was completely rewired due to bad wiring. We moved the hard drives around as well. Instead of taking 1 hour for the software install after getting the hard installed, supposedly ready, we had to reconfigure the hardware and start again from there. Thanks to K for being a stickler for neatness and airflow.
New Specs:
- Silverstone LC16M
- Intel Core 2 Quad Core Q6600 2.4GHz
- Gigabyte GA-EX38-DS4
- 2 GB 1066 Mhz Corsair Ram
- ATI 2600 XT 256 MB DDR4
- 3 X 750 GB Hard Drives (Total 2.25 Terabytes of Space)
After all those hours we managed to get things up and running, while things were downloading we went out to get some food from Maki. There was a lot of traffic but K had the navigation and I had the driving, it was more like rally then a drive. I want to thank all the police for keeping all the riff raff on the roads in check. When we got the food, we ate like there was no tomorrow while continuing the install and updates, everything is completely operational. The tweaking will be left for another time.
From the end of the last week I felt a little scratch in my throat, from that damn dust storm. It kept building up but got worse of Friday. I had a sore throat and dry cough, I took some cough syrup to help me out and it did improve. Everything morning I woke up I felt that my throat was all clogged up but after some cough syrup it got better. That dry cough is really annoying, and if I laugh too much I start coughing really hard. It hasn’t gone away but I’m keeping medication to a minimum hoping that with time it will go away.
Since I didn’t have much time between my meetings I quickly went to a few places to see if I would get anything. My first stop was Borders where I spent a total of 7 minutes flipping through books and magazines, I usually spend at least 2 hours there just checking out books, magazines and taking pictures. This time was different since I was going their in between my meetings, I managed to pick up two books at least which seemed interesting. One book was about the Italian guys in Brooklyn in the 1970s starting a small business and then going into the cocaine trade which was really interesting, and the other book was about the days of Krypton before it was destroyed discussing Superman’s ancestors and home planet.
- Last of the Good Guys – John Carbone
- The Last Days of Krypton – Kevin J. Anderson
It has been two and a half months and my search for my Michelin Front Tires have ended. Thanks to HH Tuning for finding the tires for me in Bahrain, they weren’t available any where else. I wanted the Michelin Pilot Sports 2 since they have amazing traction in the dry and rain, much better then the Continentals I had before. After the GulfRun I had the rears changed to Michelins but the fronts weren’t available, and at last after this long search I managed to get them.
As soon as I got these tires I took them to Michelin to have them installed, and an alignment if possible. The place was packed full of cars of different kinds, I knew there was going to be a wait but I knew who I was looking for from last time. They got going with the tires, it was a multi step process with different guys at different stations, they were very efficient as usual. They had a few cars on the alignment area so I thought to do that later.
When they were doing the wheel balance I found that my right wheel was slightly bent. Now I have two rims which are slightly bent and that need to be replaced, getting the OEM rims is going to be expensive so if I’m going to have to spend this amount I would rather buy after market rims, so I’m looking at my options. They managed to finish my car in 25 minutes while the place was packed full of cars, I do recommend people to go there because of there professionalism, quality of work, and efficiency. It only cost 12 KD to mount the front tires.
This is probably one of the funniest moments I had on my trip. As I departed the plane after landing in Dubai, there was one Japanese gentlemen walking in front of me and one behind me. I noticed the man in front of me was Japanese, I could identify him right away. Then they started having a conversation while I was in between them walking out of the plane and then into the terminal. The distance between immigrations and the gates in Dubai Airport seems to feel like its a 10 Km marathon. At first I was going to pass the two gentlemen, but as the conversation progressed in Japanese I seemed to be picking up some words here and there. I had this odd funny feeling that I wanted to tell them I knew a word or two, so I continued to listen in on their conversation trying to see what I could pick up. I felt like a idiot, but it was funny since I managed to pick up that they wanted to go eat and drink after this, one guy doesn’t feel like something (wasn’t sure what some of those words were), then one thing they saw was very nice, and somebody they were dealing with is in an idiot. That is all I could pick up after walking behind them for 15 minutes I only understood about 10% to 15% of their conversation which was hilarious. I need to learn Japanese!
This is an Infrant widget that has been customized to work with Yahoo Widgets and you can have multiple Infrants and you select which one you want to moniter. I call this one the Infrant Bunker since it belongs below in the Bunker. Right now I’m dumping all the TV Shows, Movies, and Anime that I have into it.
With it set at X-Raid its redundant and hot-swappable, each 1 TB drive gave 931 GB of actual space for a total of 3.724 TB available in total. When set at X-Raid some space is taken for redundancy and I am left with 2739 GB or 2.739 TB worth of space to work with and this is a lot of space that I am very happy with. Now to dump as much as possible into it, connect the Cat6 Cable with the Gigabit switch and just start streaming from it.