3 posts tagged “rambling”
The subject says it all. The Shuttle I'm using here is relatively old, it was bought about three years ago before I got to Danga. I've been using it ever since. Originally it had only the built in integrated video, 512MB RAM, 40GB hard drive, and a Celeron 2.5GHz processor.
Over the years, I've slowly upgraded her. First I stuck in a second video card (1996 Matrox Millenium... whoo-boy, it's slow, but at least it does 1280x1024) and then later I bought an extra 512MB RAM to boost it to a gig. Finally, today, I broke down and upgraded the video card again. GeForce 6200 with 128MB of video ram.
The display is now much faster and the CPU isn't as loaded when the system is redrawing on the screen. It's kinda nice to be able to scroll without seeing 100% CPU. Granted, it still seems to have problems moving the Flash around when it's paging... hm. Questions for another day, I guess.
Next upgrade: bigger hard drive, and need to try to get a better processor. Celerons are horrid. And perhaps get more RAM, but eh, 1GB is probably fine... it makes Xen a bit tight, but I'm not running Xen right now. Probably not going to either, as VMware is more flexible for what I want to do. Just need to fix that disk space problem above, see...
Really, the point of this post is just to post. Because I need to update this thing, yeah, that's it. Next stop: real work. Ahhh yeahz.
I need a rear view mirror on my desk. :) I keep having people come up behind me and they startle the crap out of me because I usually get engrossed in my own little world. It's the only way I can stay productive!
There was a really interesting article a while back about knowledge workers, interruptions, and productivity. I forget who wrote it, I should go dig that up and pass it around. I know it doesn't apply to everyone, but it definitely applies to me.
Interrupting me on AIM, or via email, is great. It means that I can park my brain and then go deal with whatever the query is. It also takes much less brainpower to click the window, type out a response, and go back to work than it does to interact with sight and sound. That totally just dumps my brain's core, or something.
The key is asynchronous!
Anyway, enough rambling. Gotta get back to work!
I want to see Blue Man Group in concert one day. It's just one of those things I've wanted to do for ages. I once had the opportunity when I was going to college out in Massachusetts, tickets were obscenly cheap -- $5 or $10 and that included the bus to and from Boston. But I was too late (they sold out in about 2 minutes). Alas. Apparently they play in Vegas a bunch... hm.
So, this weekend was pretty good. I spent most of the time working on my server, trying to get it resurrected. I ended up using Centos 4.2 as the base operating system and then installing Xen 3 over top of that. I learned a bunch about the whole process and I think it went pretty smoothly this time. (Last time was a horrid, horrid mess.)
Also spent a bunch of time in EVE, as our alliance (ASCN) is totally kicking ass. We are utterly destroying about 4 months of hard work put in by the Imperial Republic of the North (IRON) and G Alliance. They're pretty pissed about the whole thing, but there's not much they can do.
To give you an idea of the scale in EVE, we had 600 people on this one mission on Saturday. That's 600 people. In one place, at one time, doing one thing. G/IRON were pretty much impotent to stop us.
Since then, we've been maintaining around-the-clock defense of the objective, with never less than 80-100 people online. EVE is such a multi-national game, it naturally works out into shifts. The North Americans are on around 0100 GMT up to 0800 GMT, when the Australians start taking over (and the early Europeans), and when they go to bed the Europeans are home from work, and they hold it until the Americans get home again.
We were having French lessons last night, too! In my player group ("corporation") alone, we have an Austrian, a German, a guy from the Netherlands (?), a Swiss, a Frenchman, a Russian, a couple of Australians, a bunch of Brits, and then a bunch of Americans. It's really interesting seeing the diversity and talking to everybody. One gentleman even has an EVE blog that he maintains. It's pretty cool -- lots of pictures, I recommend you check it out.
