I like to say that every solution has two problems.

However, sometimes there are more.

Long story short, my basement flooded over the May long weekend, as I think I’ve mentioned before in my blog.

I can tell you that it’s a good news/bad news situation.

The salvage and restoration company (who did a fantastic job overall) boxed up all the AV gear from my media room and put it away in storage.

The good news: testing individual components, nothing was damaged, and everything seems to be working.

The bad news: I did NOT have a copy of the most up-to date connection document for my AV system, despite looking everywhere for it.

The only design documents I had were for prior iterations of my system, and included equipment I no longer own.

That’s not the end of the world: I redesigned how everything connected to everything else based on logical design principles, and wrote a new connection document (that I’ve saved!).

However, the revised connections completely invalidate the programming of my T2c remote control and RP-6 control processor from RTI.

It gets better.

My old programmer friend, upon whom I’ve relied on over the years to keep my system controllable has left the business and is no longer available for hire.

That forces me to face the fact that the RTI control equipment for my media room is eight years old.

By whatever yardstick one might choose to use it’s a Legacy System.

I find myself faced with a dilemma.

Find a way to resuscitate my eight year old controller, or start researching and considering new control options.

The other alternative, six different remotes on the coffee table, is too terrible to contemplate.

The truth is, spending money on reprogramming the old RTI hardware seems like throwing more money at sunk costs.

And really, a lot has changed in eight years, so new controllers can potentially be better and more interesting than what I’ve got now.

But at the same time committing to something new is a gamble, and that makes me nervous.

What to do?