So a friend of mine recently linked me to a video that was posted on the snowbird youtube channel and since then ALL I have been doing is watching these damn videos over and over and over again!!!! I just can’t stop!!!!!

This weekend Richard and I are planning on heading to Vail, CO to meet up with one of our buddies that moved out there over the summer. However after watching those damn addicting videos from youtube I kind of want to hit up Utah instead.

So what do to? Go to Colorado? have a free place to stay? Hang out with our buddy Dave? or hit up gods country and get in on some of that powder action in Utah? oh the choices…

So now that Comcast has implemented the 250gig a month limit I have been trying to come up with a solution to monitor my bandwidth usage and track it from month to month. Currently I am running a Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 router with third party firmware from DD-WRT.

Because I am running DD-WRT it now allows me to capture SNMP packets and use that to monitor my traffic. In the past I’ve used simple tools like SNMP Traffic Grapher (STG). I soon found out that STG wouldn’t cut it for what I needed and started looking around for something more robust and something that would save my data month to month.

I started looking around and found Cacti as well as MRTG, both were great options but a little hard to get up and running for a Windows Zealot like myself. After digging around some more I found a .exe self installer that someone put together on the Cacti forums and from there it was simple as double clicking, following a few instructions and I was up and running with Cacti on my WHS box.

Here is the Windows stand alone installer for Cacti: http://forums.cacti.net/about14946.html

The installer does everything you need to get it up and running, all you need to do, is download it, transfer it to your WHS box, then RDP into your WHS box and double click and install. The installer finds out that you already have IIS installed and up and running on your WHS box, so its a really easy, straight forward install.

Right now I have it installed, configured and pointed to my DD-WRT router with SNMP enabled, and monitoring my internet traffic that is going through my router, I now just wish I had a way to send me a notification if I were getting close to the 250gig a month cap. Like have it alert me via email if I were to get within 90% of the 250gig cap, but for now I have at least got it monitoring my traffic and logging it, which was half the battle.

- Josh

So my Buddy Ben Drawbaugh over at his site posted up a little topic about the state of the economy and housing market and mortgage deal and brought up some interesting points. You can read some of the comments I left and his responses makes for some good reading and good debate material.

Anyways some points I raised was that if the banks/mortgage brokers weren’t so eager to give out “risky” loans as Ben describes them we wouldn’t be in the situation we are now, and having to bail out the companies at fault. However Ben states that if people weren’t so eager to accept those loans we wouldn’t be here either, which is a valid argument as well. I think thought that a bank who is approving these loans should be more fiscally responsible and do further checks on who they are giving these loans out to.

I will be the first to say that I am a recipient of an 80/20 ARM mortgage, but for me it was the only way to stay under the payments that at the time, my wife and I could afford. We both were fresh out of college, just starting out our careers, and just getting our feet wet in our marriage as well. We did the 80/20 ARM to avoid paying PMI as we weren’t able to come up with a 20% down payment on our new home, and if we would have gone with a conventional 30 year fixed we would have had to pay nearly $400 more a month with the PMI and at that time it just wasn’t possible, it would have put us up in the uncomfortable zone where we didn’t want to be, hell that $400 could have been a car payment or two for us.

In the end though I still don’t think it is right for our government to bail out these companies for the mistakes they made, and yet you still see the CEO’s and other higher ups of these companies walking away from the ordeal like nothing was wrong, and they didn’t do anything wrong. I feel if they didn’t give out such risky loans, to risky people without doing anything more than an income verification check, meaning they should actually look into their monthly expenditures as well, than we wouldn’t be in this precarious situation we are in now.

- Josh

James Quintin over at we got served one of my daily stops for WHS news has started a series of posts about his “ultimate HTPC build” and thought I’d share it.

The first post James goes over what his goals are, what he expects out of the system and what he plans on doing with the system. The second post James goes over his hardware choices for his HTPC build and how he set it up, as well as shares a few photos of the build.

Note that James is located across the pond (UK) and thus has different tuner card requirements than what we have here in the states, but all in all, the build is quite good, and looks to be a solid performing HD HTPC.

So head on over to we got served and check out James’ build.

- Josh