Started, Max geek, take a peek

So yesterday I got home to a crew of 6 or 7 people finishing up pressure washing the house.  As I approached I was really surprised how clean they managed to get the gutters.  I asked the crew leader what they used to do it?  He said it was just a bleach solution.  Wow, I never had that kind of success with bleach.

In addition to cleaning the exterior they did some other prep work like pulling the downspouts off which will be painted the house color.  I walked the perimeter of the house with our sales guy Jay and Felix the crew leader going over exactly what would be done.  Felix seemed very confident in what he was doing which made me feel confident as well.

The job of painting the house which seemed so daunting to me is just another day in the park for them.  They didn’t see any real complications.  Today they will be repairing cracks, applying primer and maybe even getting a first coat of paint on the house depending how stuff goes.  Jay said they pulled additional help in to make sure they get everything done.

Yesterday Randall asked if I was going to stream the paint job.  I hadn’t really thought about it but Randall’s suggestion got my wheels spinning.  After thinking about various ways to do this I came up with a pretty solid option.  I used my spare car battery that I have for powering my timing box and connected it to my DC inverter to provide me with AC.  I then took my wi-fi netcam out to the party van and slapped it on the dash, connecting it to my rigged power source.

I turned it on this morning and checked it out, it seems to be working just fine although the picture is not as clear as I would like.  I am not quite sure how much power the cam uses but I think the battery should be able to power it all day with little difficulty.  It will be kind of cool to peek in on the crew to see what is going on.

If you would like to take a look yourself go here.  Be warned you may have issues viewing the cam with internet explorer, sometimes it can crash the browser.  It is solid with Firefox.  To see the stream enter “dufguest” for both the user name and the password.

If that isn’t geeky enough, last night I decided to install Hyper-V on my home server.  Hyper-V is a Microsoft product that allows you to run virtual servers.  I used a simple tool to create a virtual version of my old Windows 2003 server.  I then mounted that server within Hyper-V.  Just like that I had two servers running one one piece of hardware.  It works great.

Now I can decommission the old server hardware without losing any sleep since I will have a virtual version of it available to fire up whenever I may need it.  Although Hyper-V has been around for a couple years I never really played with it much.  Better late than never, it’s a great product.