My house shakes when I hit the off button. It's actually sorta freaky. Tonight I decided to get a little motivated and maybe save some money even. I realized that not only were the fans when the system was off annoying, but they were probably wasting power. Then there's the matter of the other devices in the system which have no or only very short term state information which was powered up all the time. So I plugged a small power supply into the receiver's switched power outlet, ran it to a relay box, and started moving power cables of stateless equipment from always live power strips over to to ones fed by the relay box. Half the equipment in my rack now turns off about a second after the receiver turns off now. The only catch is apparently the compressor the sub is plugged into releases a little spike on the line when it loses power, which ends up being loud enough to cause the house to make creaking noises. I already have a relay box over by the sub, now it's just a matter of running some control lines so it turns on after the rest of the system is on and off before the rest of the system shuts down. I wonder if the power saving will be worth the hastle...

Work today went well but busy. The boss is gone so I had to catch up on a couple things, and was woken up by a phone call at 8am. Such is life I guess. I also got computers communicating, and am working on getting a rate-limited network connection going so I can simulate WAN links to verify before shipping the equipment out. Actually it may not be shipped but carried (although not by me), which is another fun thing to try and work out. Then there's all the other stuff wanting time...

Weekend was nice as I just sat around most of the time. It was nice enough Sunday that I was able to open up the house and let it warm up a bit. I tried to reboot one of schdav's servers that died but it didn't come back up for very long. I rebooted it by sticking my hand behind it where I couldn't see and flipping the power switch. I found out today that the power supply was sparking and stuff when he tried to start it, so I'm glad I didn't find that out the not-so-fun way when I was attempting to fix it. I watched Memento over the weekend. People said it was confusing, but I didn't think so at all. Yea it's backwards, but it's so consistent the pieces just naturally line up without trying. It was one that actually kept me interested through the whole thing, which has become somewhat uncommon lately. I should really get some sleep now...