With the hol­i­day sea­son wind­ing down, I fig­ured I would get back to build­ing mod­els.  Of course, I had to get the Ex-S off my work­bench before I could start a new kit, so I finally got around to fin­ish­ing it today.  Yeah, it only took me sev­eral weeks to build this thing.  Got side­tracked with work-related things and panic clean­ing before my par­ents showed up for the hol­i­days and the model just kind of got pushed to the side.  But I finally got around to fin­ish­ing it today, and I really wish that it was easy to pose some­thing this unbal­anced.  So instead, I’ve just got some pho­tos of it sit­ting there on its stand from dif­fer­ent angles.

I’ll admit, this is most def­i­nitely not my finest work to date.  Towards the end of build­ing this kit, I think I was just so fed up with its com­plex­ity that I just wanted to fin­ish it and move onto the next one, so I started to skip some of the decals and paint.  Maybe one of these days I’ll actu­ally get around to find­ing a trans­la­tion of Gun­dam Sen­tinel and read­ing up on how this mon­stros­ity actu­ally per­formed in com­bat.  Maybe even­tu­ally I’ll get around to attempt­ing a decent pho­to­shoot of this thing at a later date, but for now it shall sit on its stand between my ZZ Gun­dam model and NANOHA (my server).

Final Opin­ion on the Ex-S [Ext] Gun­dam MG 1/100 Kit: “WARNING.  May cause tem­po­rary insan­ity, annoy­ance at grav­ity and obses­sion over tiny lit­tle details.”  I believe that about sums it up.  This kit is truly for hard­core mod­ellers only, or those crazy enough to try and build it (which includes me).  For the time being, I think I’ll stick to slightly more sane suits.

Next project: Prob­a­bly a Metal­lic Fin­ish HD Color MG 1/100 Hyakushiki, some­thing that thank­fully is much eas­ier to pose and per­son­ally one of my favorite suits of all time.

Over­com­pli­cated Exces­sive Model Pow­ers Activate!

More pics after the break…
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So I finally got tired of hav­ing both my backup server and net­work share server down and decided to do some­thing about it. Unfor­tu­nately, rebuild­ing both of them is not cost-effective at the time since com­pletely rebuild­ing the Solaris Raid-Z server I used for back­ups and the Cen­tOS 5 server I used for net­work shares would involve siz­able expen­di­ture of both money and time (which as we all know equals money). So I ended up look­ing around for some­thing a lit­tle more bud­getable and ended up find­ing the Acer Aspire Easy­s­tore H340, which Newegg.com sells for $379.00. The H340 runs Win­dows Home Server, which I used sev­eral times set­ting up home media net­works for clients while I was in col­lege. It’s essen­tially a stripped down ver­sion of Win­dows Server 2003, with­out all the fun that is con­fig­ur­ing a Server 2003 instal­la­tion from scratch (which I’ve done more times than I want to think about). Microsoft released it a few years back in the hope they could get peo­ple to start using cen­tral loca­tions in their homes for back­ing up and stor­ing media to play on their var­i­ous com­put­ers and Xbox 360s. Of course, Linux did this ages ago and I’d been using Linux and Solaris servers to do back­ups and share media until their hard dri­ves crapped out on me over the past year.

Win­dows Home Server Console

(Run­down and more details after the break)

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