New house in Noblesville
News ·Tuesday March 1, 2016 @ 17:03 EST (link)
Our three-year search for a house came to an end last year, and we closed on this house in December, and, since we had only a few months to go on our apartment lease, decided to ride it out and move things gradually, hiring a truck (Two Men and a Truck, in fact) for the larger items. Speaking of which, Sunlake Apartments did very well and, as we left everything cleaned, refunded our full security deposit. I'm dating this back to March 1, when we were starting to be fairly well settled.
One of the first things I had done was to install Ethernet (cat6, 23 AWG, CMR UTP, to be precise); I looked into doing it myself but was concerned about making holes in the wall where there ought not to be holes, or other damage, so I paid a professional, Jeremy of Mine Electric, to do it, and was very happy with the results (and based on the trouble they had, I made the right decision to leave it to the pros). I connected it up to a TP-Link 24-port switch and put a TP-Link router between the switch and the incoming internet. We have both AT&T—business class for the servers—because their customer service doesn't suck, and Comcast for speed; since the router made it convenient I took a page from my friend Bob in California's book, even though I don't do a lot of work from home. AT&T is slow due to distance from the distribution point, and if Comcast can manage not to mess things up too badly we may go with just them. Using an actual router is a change from previously having my Linux server/firewall/NAT connected directly, and surely a security improvement, although it made for some topology changes. The previous owners left a cable modem, which we were able to use (after a bit of persuading Comcast's tech support) and a wireless router, which we moved into the living room (and turned into more of an access point, installing DD-WRT). The main server, minas-tirith, lost 1007 days of uptime when I moved it (but that's 1007 days of unpatched kernel vulnerabilities too). It is being switched from Gentoo to Arch Linux (it started as Redhat, a few motherboards and CPUs ago), because that's what I've been using lately and it's also an opportunity to embrace more best practices in regards to security and layout.
Around the end of January I was rear-ended turning into the driveway, but the other person's insurance paid up reasonably for the most part (they tried to fob off an aftermarket trunk lid on me, and I had to pay the difference), and I got the car back about a month later after driving a blue Dodge Dart in the interim. I started putting my hazard lights on turning for a little while after that, but decided that was unnecessary and just made sure that the person behind was giving me enough distance when I signaled, although I don't know for sure if that would have helped; even with distance if the following car is going too fast and not paying attention a collision can result. Parts of the exhaust pipes, trunk lid, bumper, lettering all had to be replaced, and the license plate frame was badly bent.
Speaking of Bob in California, he and his wife Jill and their son Raven got to be our first guests (but due to snow in Colorado not our first overnight guests), stopping in on the way to tour Purdue since their son had early acceptance there for an engineering program, and we had a nice visit.
Several useful items were included in a bill of sale with the house, such as the comfortable leather chairs in the media room, and, speaking of which, a couple more TVs, probably both newer than ours. Since we don't use cable or the like, I bought an MSI Cubi, a small computer, to connect to the media room TV (the other TV, in the kitchen, has a computer connected, which I'll update at some point). I set it up with Kodi like our main TV, and put it on the local network, although for various technical reasons it only accesses our movies so far, not TV shows; but we usually watch shows in the living room and go to the media room for movies anyway.
There's still work to do but we're fairly comfortable here, have maintenance figured out, and are enjoying the space and benefits of the new place (like the great kitchen). And we'd be happy to have more visitors!
Books finished: Zero To One, The Icarus Deception, Hunters of Dune, Sandworms of Dune, The Law of Nines, Paul of Dune, The Winds of Dune, Sisterhood of Dune.
