Just thought I would take a moment away from the normal geek-ness of my site, and do a personal update. About 8 months ago I posted that I had just had a baby son, and yay verily, 8 months later he’s grown up quite a bit (see picture). He has long since gotten his first tooth (Christmas day, 2013), and 3 more. He’s working now on tooth 5. About two weeks ago, he figured out crawling forward (he’d been crawling backward for at least a month prior, and was quite good at it). And shortly after figuring out forward crawling, he started finding all kinds of new things to “pull to stand” on, like the stairs (hence, the picture). =) So, that’s been fun (baby-proofing things he finds that we didn’t even think were likely to be found). =)
The only issue has been, the little guy doesn’t sleep well. At his best, he was sleeping in 2 hour chunks. Lately, this has been hour, at most, chunks. Turns out much of this was due to him having ear infections, which we’ve been fighting, and seem to have under control at this point, but lately he brought home a “wonderful” cold from daycare that both my wife and myself caught, and have been “dying” from the last several days, all the while he’s been crawling around wanting people to play with. ugh. But, we’ll all get better.
In short, parenting is interesting. It’s both exceedingly enjoyable and exceedingly frustrating, and given previous experience, as the little boy gets more able to interact with me/us, that scale will begin to tilt more and more toward the “enjoyable”, as most of the “frustrating” comes from him not being able to communicate in any real way. So, maybe it should be said parenting is all about patience…
Ever since I first saw the 
Back in July 2011 one of the stock Western Digital HD’s in my 2009 Mac Mini Server went out, so I bit the bullet and purchased two new Western Digital Scopio Blacks (both 500GB), and RAID1’d them together. Fast forward to a couple weeks ago, and my RAID goes offline. I run several days of block checking, and find that the upper drive has gone out (which, I’ll get replaced by WD, but at this point, I’m looking to replace both drives… and I generally don’t trust refurbished drives). Anyway, figuring two new 500GB drives would cost about $100, I started looking at alternatives, and quickly found the Crucial M500 240GB SSD for $140 through Amazon. I then wouldn’t RAID drives together, I would just put OS/Services on the SSD, then use the still functional 500GB Western Digital drive as storage for larger files (downloads, backups, etc).