The Howerter Blog

On our recordings at church there has been a very audible hum. Last night I spent a couple of hours trying to get rid of the hum. I discovered that when I connected the board to the new recording PC, the noise went away. A balanced connection is most likely the solution. This has been bothering me for a couple of months now. I am glad to have it resolved.

I am a little tired of having my servers break. Lately, I have been having to do maintenance on my servers almost every night. My backups haven’t been running for a couple of weeks now. I have been trying to move everything off the old web server so it can be my dedicated backup server. Now I finally have everything off so I can begin that process.

My current web server needs to be rebuilt so I have been trying to move everything to another server. I first tried to move my PHP apps to a Windows Server 2008 box. I must say I am not impressed with the FastCGI module in IIS 7. If could have been due to the OS being 64-bit, but the pages were taking 7-10 seconds to load. This server is also my Exchange server so I know it has the horsepower. Anyway, I decided to use a 1.3GHz  Celeron e-Machine and installed Windows Server 2003 Web Edition. This is working well. I forgot how much a pain it is to rebuild a web server.

I finally got around to connecting our church piano to the MIDI controller. I must say I am impressed with the setup. I spent a couple of hours downloading a bunch of instruments. Most of them are not worth using, but I found some good grand piano and Fender Rhodes samples. I still have a lot to learn, but at least it is a start.

Has anyone seen the new Pepsi Refresh Anthem commercial? It starts with Bob Dylan and shows a series of then and now pictures. The final montage is some rapper that is supposed to represent our generation. Does anyone else have a problem with rap being our generation’s defining music?

When we moved into our new house in August of 2008, I was in a hurry to get my servers and network back up so I tried putting everything in one closet. This turned out to be a bad idea because I have been fighting heat problems ever since. Mike, a friend from work, offered me a Black Box wall mount rack and I decided that it was time to fix my wiring job. After about 6 hours of work, it is finally finished. Everything is running nice and cool now. I noticed that my Gigabit switch was hot to the touch when it was in the server closet (it happened to be sitting on my Fast Ethernet switch). Because the switch was so hot, my Windows Media Center was showing video artifacts when it was playing movies. Since I moved the switches, the artifacts are gone. Below are a couple of pictures of the finished product.

The patch panel in my closet

The rack in my crawl space

I have purchased some equipment so I can do some multi-track recording at our church. We are also going to try and use a MIDI controller to interface with an audio program  so we can change the sound of our piano. I order the parts for the PC and the piano and they should be here today. I have always wanted to get into this. It will probably be a late night tonight.

I am so ready for some consistent warm weather. This weekend was very refreshing. I got to vacuum up some more leaves. Yeah!!!

With part of our tax return I decided to buy a bass guitar (and many accessories). I have always wanted to learn how to play. I have been playing for about 3 weeks and I am still having fun. At some point I think that I may play in our church’s secondary worship band. I am not very good at learning new things, but I am pressing on. I even dusted off the trombone on Saturday. It is amazing how you never forget how to do certain things. I haven’t played my trombone in two years, but I could still play. Crazy.

Have you ever noticed after it snows that everything sounds different outside? Everything is slightly muffled. I was filling up the car with gas and a car drove past the station. I could barely hear it because of the two inches of snow on the ground. I also enjoy how the moonlight reflects off of the snow covered ground. I would like to get some pictures, but by the time I get home it is dark. Maybe it will stil be around this weekend.