I was up until 4am last night trying to establish a static IP address for my computer so I could open a port in my router to allow me to create a Web-based media streamer. Why? Just to see if I could.

I was getting ready for bed just before midnight when I stumbled across an article about Subsonic – an open-source Java-based media streaming solution – and I knew I wanted to give it a whirl. But setting up remote access to my computer proved to be too much for my addled mind once I had turned into a pumpkin. But I woke up at 8am with the kids and gave it one last shot before going to work and I managed to get the whole thing running beautifully in just under 15 minutes. And I learned a lot about port forwarding, DNS servers, and Linux networking in the process. I was so excited that I almost didn’t realize how tired I was. Almost.

You see, I was getting bored with the 1 GB of music I had loaded on my phone. And I wasn’t about to load and reload new music every few days just to keep things interesting. Sure, I could have packed my 32 GB micro SD card to the gills with music but, you see, I don’t listen to music all that often on my phone. Much more often, I watch video. And video takes up significantly more space than audio. So loading music on my phone just became an afterthought.

I had also loaded about 4 GB of music onto my work laptop so I could listen while at the office. But even that was getting stale. And how often does one really want to choose new songs to copy to a thumb drive and then transfer to an external device? I just didn’t have the space to load all 53 GB of quality music I have at home on any portable device. And that’s why Subsonic is such a wonderful solution. Now, I don’t have to copy my music onto anything. Ever. I can just stream it. Onto my phone. Onto my work computer. Onto your computer! Anywhere. The music lives on my home computer and I can listen to it wherever I go. Pretty frickin’ sweet.

Oh, and when I got to work this morning there was a brand new laptop waiting for me. Score! But that meant that I had to spend most of the day setting it up, configuring firewalls and proxies, and transferring data from my old computer. I can’t believe I’m actually sitting in front of a computer right now to write this. I’m going to sleep. G’night!