RAID ARRAY: Well, I finally settled on what hard drives I was going to get.  Originally I'd intended to get a 500gig and run a RAID5 array using a 250gig partition on the 500 along with the two other 250gig drives...but I just couldn't get FreeNAS to recognize other partitions (even if I set them up myself).  So, I picked up a couple of open box drives off newegg.  One 250gig, one 400gig.  I'll use the 400 to temporarily free up space on the 250's, then it'll be a sort of junk drive.  One thing I will need to do is swap one of my 250's with my father so I have a SATA connection free to connect the 400gig.

Currently the camera's memory card (from two small batches of pictures) has 350meg on it.  I imagine we'll burn through hard drive space at a crazy rate if beth (or myself) start taking a lot of pictures.  The RAID array will be the new home of our photo album, web page backups, beth's poetry and whatever sort of documents we generate.

No Burnout this year: Because of the INSANE drought this year, I won't be having a burn-out.  Everything is just too damn dry.  If anything caught fire, the whole forest would go up like a match.  Minor factoid here that I was just thinking about yesterday...you can light matches in space, they just won't stay lit after the stuff on the tip burns.

Drought: WOW, it's amazing how little it's rained in this general region.  I hear Atlanta is projected to have their primary water source (a large lake) run COMPLETELY DRY by January...even if it does rain a little (this IS the part of the year that's normally kind of dry).  You'd think that LONG before they reached this point they'd have enforced a state-wide ban on watering. 

The sad thing is, I doubt there's ANYTHING that can make this better in the short term.  Any construction will take years, even if it's rushed.  About the ONLY thing they could do is maybe drill some wells into some strata that would tend to store water...then when it finally does rain...keep the watering ban in place and run the treatment plants at normal levels, dumping water back into the formation to replenish the water (use it like a sort of naturally occuring water tank)  They'd still need to lay some pipe PRONTO of course, but quick and dirty is the only thing they have time for (ugly, above-ground pipes run along the straightest paths to wherever it's needed).  Obviously that would STILL take months, but at least they wouldn't be screwed over if the "rainy" season is somewhat dissappointing. 

N4ZC.COM: Been doing minor stuff on my father's website. At some point he wants to have a podcast of his most recent show available.  There's a REALLY good article on his radio show on the site now (from Our State magazine)

POETSPLACE.ORG: We got PoetsPlace.org for Beth a few days ago...nothing there yet but it won't take long to get up a basic site.