TobbyHagler.com

I'm sitting here watching Superbowl 43 and surfing the web, and it occurs to me that as technology progresses, there are inherent flaws in all systems that are more obvious as time passes.

We tend to notice that the closer to perfection that a thing gets without quite reaching it, the more noticeable the imperfections. Look at all the Japanese androids -- the closer to human they appear, the more evident the flaws that make them non-human.

I have a Mythbox that I built well over a year ago that I absolutely love. And as long as it's working correctly, my wife loves it to. One of the really cool things about it is that I have all of my DVDs available on demand, along with all the recorded TV shows (think AppleTV and Tivo having a Linux-baby).

Having movies immediately playable from a menu is teh awesomes. However, this requires an enormous amount of storage space. I don't have enough space in the nice Mythbox case that's designed to look like an entertainment console rather than a beige box computer. So I turned my existing Linux server (which handles NAT and firewalling for my home network) into a storage server.

For almost a year, I had three 500GB drives merged together via LVM to make a 1.4TB volume to contain all my movies. This has been plenty of room, and thanks to LVM, all I need to do later is add more hard drives and extend the volume.

However, this has no failure tolerance. One drive dies, and the entire collection is lost. Yikes.

I suffer from Obsessive/Compulsive behavior, and I'm in a technology-oriented industry. The Web is one of the few industries where OCD is just as much a blessing as it is a curse. But I sometimes find myself distracted by the technology I'm working with and loose track of the thing I really wanted to do in the first place.