andy’s place…

So call me un-American, but once I heard that we, as a species, needed to do sex-checks/testing on athletes, age checks, etc… I decided that the Olympics were really beyond saving, and therefore not worth watching at all.
It’s a shame too, as I used to like watching some of the events.  The running stuff, boring.  Javelin was ok (spear throwing, what’s not to like), gymnastics was incredible… but I gave them all up.  No more.

I tried to get excited for Phelps, but I couldn’t.  Glad he did what he did, incredible performance, but I didn’t watch any of it.

Just another thing as I get older that is removed from my life, either by force or my choice.

Well, at least now that they are over, my late-night talk shows are back on.  Robot Chicken reruns to fall asleep to were getting old…

Well, now that I’m back and somewhat back in the swing of things, I’ll get to a post.

The weekend was pretty busy.  Friday, headed out to the Hills to our family cabin for a weekend of work.  Hit up the races on Friday night.  Good racing overall, what I paid attention to at least.  No good crashes, which disappointed my little nephew Jamie.

Next morning, it was time to begin adding on another bedroom, namely mine.  Step one was the bad one… knock out a hole in the foundation.  That involved me, a sledge hammer, a hammer drill, and a flat bar.  Oh, and a lot of complaints from me.  Several hours later, it was all finished, and it went to floor joists, walls, and backfill over the next day and a half.

Then the fun of a 3 hour drive with my brother, who can’t sit still in a car….

Two weeks, I’m back out there again for more of the same…

…seriously complain about an outage of a free service?  Twice in the last month or so, I’ve heard repeated whining, bitching, and moaning about how people were inconvenienced or affected by the Gmail or Google Apps outages.  Inconvenience, ok, I can buy that.  It can suck to not have access to your email for a while, but if it is not your business email, it’s not that big of a deal most all of the time.

Now, for the real complaint:  People that base their business on a free product/service, and bitch when they can’t reach it.  Why?  Why?  Why?  Why is it that most of the people that say this allowed to write?  If you are basing your whole show, your livelihood on a free product/service with no SLA, no guarantees, no real support system, then I can’t feel bad for you at all when I see you in the unemployed line (ok, I don’t want anyone there, but you get my point).

Now, maybe I’m a little biased in that I work in a shop that has money… lots of it in comparison to many shops.  I hear $100,000 for a purchase and say “that’s cheap” on a fairly regular basis.  And yes, I expect some Linux/Open Source people to tell me that they do this “free” thing all the time, but that has a support system of sorts.  While I may disagree with the effectiveness of this approach, it’s still support.

Gmail/Skype, etc… and basing your show on this?  I’m glad you are… every time an outage occurs, it’s just that much easier to compete in the market, as you just eliminated yourself.

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

Finally had an almost boring day at the office… unbelieveable.  7 weeks of non-stop this-and-that, running around, balls-to-the-wall speed, and the one day it’s not, I really didn’t know what to do with myself.  I spent most of the day finishing random paperwork, and cleaning my office and the one next door that I use as my storage cube.  And if tomorrow morning goes well, I won’t have to worry about really much of anything for the rest of the week.

The beautiful thing is that I’m also maxed out on annual leave, so if I can’t find much to do in the next few days, I can just punch out for the rest of the week and really do nothing…  sit at home, watch movies, reorganize the junk in my 2nd bdrm, maybe mail that shirt of Seth’s back that he left several months back (It is washed btw)

So many choices of what to do when you have nothing to do…  I still got paid for it though.

I completely forgot motherboard…

I haven’t seen much for these in a while…   Intel, Gigabyte, Asus, Abit?  Who anymore?

Sound card…  any reason to go PCI Express for one?  Or just PCI?  I’m leaning towards PCI…

Any other little cards worth the time?  Physics card?  TV Tuner?

So, with all this extra overtime I’ve been getting, I’m debating on whether I will build a new machine or not.  I’m letting some get stored away for a rainy day, since I keep having bad expenses come up and drain my savings, but I’m starting to get comfortable enough that I might start buying a component or two here and there until I have enough to get serious and finish it off.

So I’m looking at re-doing the whole thing.  I might be able to save a sound card, hard drive, or optical drive, but otherwise, it’s the whole show.

Looking for any opinions for the following:

First purchases will most likely be the components that have the least chance of getting out of date:

Case

• Thinking about an Antec 900, 1200, or P182.

Monitor

• Thinking about a Samsung 22″ or 24″ widescreen.  Which one, I’m not sold on.  The size of the 24 would be nice, but getting into a nice 22 is the same money as an eh 24, so a nice 24 would be a little steep…

The rest of the components:

CPU

• Thinking a Core 2 Quad, just determining clockspeed… 2.66 is the current thought, but I’d like the 3.0 if the price comes down.

Memory

• 3 Gb will most likely what I get.  4 would be ok for getting 2×2GB, but I have no intentions of going 64bit for a while, so I hate wasting, but it really isn’t wasting…

Hard Drive

• Probably do two, a 10k Raptor for OS and games, and a 500 or so for bulk data.  I’ve been a WD fan for years

Video Card

• Looking at either a 9800 series or a GTX 260.  Probably in the 300 dollar range or so, depends on the price/performance numbers

Sound Card

• Whatever Creative is putting out, I can deal with.

Optical

• Cheap dual layer burner is good

Keyboard/Mouse

• I really don’t know…  The G15 looks nice, but 100 bucks is a little steep.

Thoughts?

So, I finally broke out of my anti-theater shell and went to another movie.  Before The Dark Knight punched out of my local theater, I jumped in for a matinee today, and I don’t regret it.  Probably one of the better written movies in terms of tying things together.  The Joker, yeah, was good…   not enough of him on screen though.  Too much on Dent and Wayne…  by the way, I’m not entirely sold on Bale as Wayne.  Maybe I’m just more a fan of Keaton holding the role…  maybe it’s just me…

Well, back into my shell for another 1-2 years…  Casino Royale was the previous theater trip I made…  I might go see Quantum of Solace, not sure yet.

This has been one of the longest weeks for work and personal in recent memory…

Monday was spent heading to Sioux Falls and Vermillion for work.  5 AM start on the road in heavy fog is a blast, then go to a site where I’m restricted, heavily, and install a 350 lb router.  Well, since it took 6 hours to get the power hooked up, I went to Vermillion for fiber cleaning and last minute work.
At least Monday evening was good… Mike, Sonja - I like the house!  Finish up the lawn and we can have a poker night for sure!

Tuesday, more travel, Madison and Brookings for the same thing, fiber cleaning and wrap up.  800 miles in 2 days (in fact, I have 2996 miles of work travel in July).

Wednesday through Friday have been long days in the office, basically 8-10 hours of config work to make sure this thing works next week.  All of it being mind racking config work, as its all new to us, but if this fails, it will be all over the news.  We can’t have this…  Plus all my regular work at night.  It’s getting old…

The weekend, I get the dog to watch.  She likes to get up way earlier than I do…  thankfully, she naps a lot, so I can too…

Pray that Monday-Wednesday work out well…  I don’t need anything to go wrong…