the weekend

Hi, I'm still alive.

I took a long weekend this weekend and spent the vast majority of it wrestling with a new computer. By vast I mean 8am to 1:30am with almost no interruption. I'll post more about that in a separate entry because I don't want to blather on about it without a cut and fair warning.

The most notable break was a trip up to Brunswick to visit with littleredhead and groundctrl. The weather, the food, and the company were all delightful. Perhaps if I spent more time with nice, smart people like them and less time with the P.I.G. (Public In General) I would shuck off my curmudgeonly persona. Well, maybe not, we can't expect miracles. But it is a possibility.

Oh, also, as a result of that trip my to read list has expanded, go figure. I now have added Christopher Moore's "Bloodsucking Fiends", Japser Fforde's "Lost in a Good Book", Douglas Coupland's "Microserfs", J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit", and Mark Z. Danielewski's "House of Leaves".

Today was once again sunny and reasonably warm so I walked down to the park, sat in the sun, bent some chainmail rings and read for a while. It was quite pleasant other than the old guy who seemed to be prepared to solicit every unaccompanied male in the park. Maybe he was just friendly, but he didn't seem friendly. I chose not to make eye contact so I'll never know.

Now I'm being productive and multitasking: files are copying in the background, a roast is cooking, the Roomba is charging for an adventure in floor cleaning, and I'm going to clean up my desk.

build details on the new computer

The goal with this machine was originally to make a machine as power efficient as reasonably possible, do some shuffling, and retire a 7 year old machine. After a discussion with derien, we may retire two machines after all the moving around is done.

( the ugly details )

The components fit together quite well considering the calculated risks I took. I had to take some plastic off the large fan on the side of the case so that it would clear the CPU cooling tower, but the dremel tool handled that easily. I also had to hack together a longer USB cable to run from my multi-card reader to the USB headers, but that was minor.

Other than the onboard video for X giving a lower than ideal resolution, everything works with FreeBSD-stable.

With all the other PCs off, no music playing, and the fridge compressor off, you can just hear the machine at idle. I haven't run any stress tests on it, but for what I use it for most of the time it will be virtually silent.