Its getting hot in here!

So I built this whole encyclopedia site this last spring.  I powered on a 2nd server (huge rack mounted things, not just some PC) in the extra room in my house.  All was well, though it probably costs me $50 a month in power to run these suckers.  Anyway, once we stopped using the Air condition (its December now, and though it dropped down to 40 a couple times already, its 80 outside now in Dallas, woot!) that room got *VERY* hot.  Even 2 little servers, barely working, could easily throw that room up to 100 degrees.  Crazy.  So I had to leave the door open, and those things are kinda loud and annoying.  Anyway, a month of that and I was sick of it.

So I got my previous "primary workstation", which was a Dual Xeon 3.6 Ghz with 6GB of ram.  I upgrade the 8 SCSI hard drives to 146GB/15k/U320, and installed Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 (an upgrade from the 2008 R2 versions).

I had some various things that slowed progress in the middle of all that, but end result?

The entire site, as well as my internal network, is now running on a SINGLE sever that is far quieter, with less power consumption (even though it had 14 fans in it!), even though I had to give up a bit of memory (I wasn't using it anyway).  My storage is redundant, but if the server exploded I'd be down a day or two while I built a new one.  Also, I'll be putting these servers at my datacenter at work soon, and will move the site back over to them (and their gigabit+ internet connection) so eventually the site will be much faster.

So what does this mean for the site?  Ummm... absolutely nothing.  However I do have the new forum software also installed on it, and will be launching it soon.

Now, onto Battletech stuff!

First, my old MUL_QS application I wrote a long time ago that used the API that Skyhigh had added is now defunt with their new updates, and the application basically doesn't work anymore.  I could probably make it work with my database instead, but I think time would better be spent just making a simple website that showed you the QS cards all by themselves, easily viewable on phones and stuff.  Chime in if you disagree and I'll rethink it.

Next, a couple new products.  First was a PDF of the FedCom Civil War.  I bought it, as the version I downloaded long ago kinda sucked.  Guess what, so does the new one.  Just crap.  Total waste of money.  Ugh.

However, they also finally released TRO 3067 Unabridged!  I know lots of people were really anxious for this, there is a total of about 315 units in it.  The designs are always, well, new designs that people could make themselves. It'll take me a week or two to get them all entered into the database for ya, but they will all be there soon.

There is a new Interstellar Operations beta thing out, a force generator.  I perused it, and thought it totally sucked.  It wasn't quite a mercenary unit generator, and wasn't nearly as good as what was already in Strategic Operations.  I have no idea what it is supposed to be used for.

I still read the official forums as I still have some accounts on there, but I've ceased posting entirely.  It really seems their forums kinda suck and the topics the epitome of lame.  Even if I was never banned, the only even remotely useful forums anymore seem to be the errata ones, although they accept errata, they never say its confirmed or update the PDFs, which is amazing.

I get the feeling the BT community is just dying, more and more every day.  I love the whole universe, but the game... well, I think I'd rather play 40K or anything with counters.

Somebody mentioned that I should just do my own miniatures based rules system.  While I've thought about something like that before, it is just a lot of work and I'm pretty sure I'm already making more money than I could doing a board game system.  Computers are the future, and that is something that CGL just hasn't quite been able to grasp.  Old non-tech people probably, its common among games like this.