Travels and Thoughts

Travels and Images

WEEK 11 2006

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Saturday 18 March 2006

Saturday - the boat move went well. Indeed the weather was almost too good - virtually no wind at all. We hanked on the jib, and had the main ready to hoist, but never bothered. There just wasn't enough wind. Instead we motored, at about half power (three quarters speed, probably) across placid miles of water, almost pond like, the two of us sipping cool drinks, stripped down to t-shirts.

Out the Richmond Ship Channel, upriver with the tide, under the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, north across San Pablo Bay (almost running aground in the mud flats!) and finally past Mare Island and through the Carquinez Strait to Glen Cove.

It felt a little odd, leaving Marina Bay after nearly ten years. When we came back to pick up a couple of small items they were already showing the slip to some prospective custormers. So that took the edge off...

Friday 17 March 2006

Friday - put in half a day at work, then headed north. It's supposed to be better weather, and my brother wants to move the boat. Of course, he could move it himself, but given it's age and condition it's best to have some help along. So, we'll see. I'll bring a camera.

Thursday 16 March 2006

Thursday - working on Gridgen. Yesterdays' efforts resulted in the conclusion that OpenGL, required for Gridgen, was improperly installed on the cluster. And even if it was properly installed the particular Xserver I am using to access it remotely does not support the correct GLX extensions.

I may be able to reconfigure, and to buy that software. But in the meantime I installed Gridgen locally, on my PC, just for practice.

At home I have resurrected Hobbiton, my own cluster. Indeed, it's better than ever. I added memory (that I had laying about) to each node, so that they now all have 300MB+, rather than the paltry 128MB of their former incarnation. I also have a gigabit switch to replace the fast ethernet hub I was using. Got them up and running, but "Merry" won't talk to anyone, and can't be pinged. Possibly a mis-seated (or possibly bad) ethernet card.

Sadly I've forgotten how to run PVM :-( Gotta go look at my notes. Anyhow, I want to set up MPI as well, and a NFS share.

Wednesday 15 March 2006

Wednesday - Book #15 is H.M.S. Surprise, by Patrick O'Brian. It is a great read. Line to watch out for: "Jack, you have debauched my sloth!" This was a book on tape, borrowed from my father. Now I shall get a non-fiction book to listen to for the next couple of weeks.

I also have several "dead tree" books that I need to get through. For example: I was loaned "The Secret Life of Lobsters" and had to return it to the library as it was due, only a third of the way finished. Oddly I ran into the friend who loaned it to me at the library, and my friend was able to renew it, and loan it to me again. Heh.

The band was playing when I got home. So I went to the library, and then to a friends' house until 10:00, and there was quiet when I got home. Usually this midweek sessions mean a gig somewhere for the aspiring rock stars.

Tuesday 14 March 2006

Tuesday - just working, not a lot to say.

Today is pi day. And, in a while, it will be pi approximation day. Weird that I would hear of this on a law professors blog, Althouse.

Interesting too, that a post on Kelo & the move to take Souter's home got the big response that it did. People are still upset, this is an issue with 'legs'. There is Kelo style abuse going on right now in California, up in Ridgecrest, not far from Lancaster.

Monday 13 March 2006

Monday - back to work. I've given the system administrator for the cluster a wish list: Gridgen, and also a more modern browser, Firefox. The ancient version of Mozilla on the Redhat 7.3 box (circa 2002) has serious issues with frames.

Sunday 12 March 2006

Sunday - in the late afternoon of Saturday it snowed. It's not the two feet that we got back in 1985, perhaps a half inch, but it was pretty. I could tell when it started snowing by the muffling of external sounds.

Apparently it even snowed in San Francisco.

Sunday morning it was clearish, with the Sun peeking through, so I thought I'd let the cats out to play. The cold and the snow didn't seem to bother them. Once in a while they'd stop, shake a paw, and then continue stalking the finches. Afterwards I went for a walk myself, snapped a few pictures, and went out with some friends to a late lunch.

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: Riley in the snow.

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