Travels and Images
WEEK 34 2004
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Saturday 21 August
2004
Saturday - hmmm. The fantasy speech is
gone after all. That's the problem with multiple versions of a page,
you can overwrite all too easily. No great loss.
The computer is working relatively well. It still seems to run rather
warm - about 75F warmer than the house ambient. I have a CFD job
running, 100% CPU utilization, so I'm working it hard. While the
temperature was staying within limits the whine of the fan was
distracting, so I took the side off and directed the air from a small
desk fan into it. That really helped, with the CPU fan slowing down and
becoming quieter, but the CPU temp only dropped to about 140F. Hmmm. I
really don't know what a Prescott core is supposed to run at.
I was reading Herb Payson's 'Advice to the Sealorn' yesterday, in particular the chapter on weather. At the chapter's end he describes a weather reporting system he came across:
I love the
weather rock, a rock the size of a softball which hangs with its
explanatory sign on the porch of the French Harbor Yacht Club in
Roatan, the largest bay island of Honduras. The sign says:
If wet -- raining
If white -- snowing
If swinging -- windy
If bouncing -- earthquake
If gone -- hurricane
Friday 20 August 2004
Friday - talked to my father this morning. He mentioned that I hadn't updated this page in a couple of days. Actually I did, but I didn't upload. Accckkk. Actually I had more or less decided not to post yesterday's fantasy presidential speech, but what the heck.
When I got up this morning my new computer was dead, dead, dead. Golly! I said, and Gee Whillikers!. The cat's, unused to such strong language, looked askance at me.
So, this afternoon I went out and bought a new power supply. It seems
to have solved the problem - the old power supply was a no-name brand
from March of 2001. (But I probably could have bought a new Dell
desktop, complete with monitor, for what I've spend on this system
now.)
The system runs very hot - in my warm (80F) dining room while under
continuous 100% CPU load it has a CPU temperature of about 62C. That
value is from using the ABIT motherboard monitor which may or may not
be accurate. The thermal limit is 70C, so I'm pushing things there.
Those numbers are with an 80mm intake fan, an 80mm exhaust fan, and the
nice new double fan power supply. If I take the side off the case off
the temperature drops to 55C.
There are aftermarket CPU coolers out there, but the mobo has so little
clearance around the CPU that I'd be hesitant to buy an aftermarket
part for fear it wouldn't fit. There are also better cases, with
improved ducting, but that is starting to get a bit expensive. Just
leaving the side off is the cheap (but noisy) way to go...
Thursday 19 August 2004
Thursday
- I see that Kerry has finally replied (sort of) to the attacks on him by O'Neill and the Swift Boat Vets. It wasn't really a reply in the sense that it answered any specific question, but rather a response,
attacking Republicans and the president for attacking him.
eh, lots of junk deleted. I'm tired of this...
Wednesday 18 August 2004
Wednesday - My friend Tim pointed out that
this week is actually the anniversary week of the Chester visit, in
2001. It was also on that trip that his brother got engaged in Edinburgh, and that
same brother had a (somewhat belated) reception last week. Cool.
Not a lot going on here. Warm, but not roasting.
Mark Zimmerman, over at his Zhurnal is going on a loooooonnnngggg run. His plan to pass the time:
Or suppose I get bored and wish that time would fly more quickly? My
Secret Plan, as I've already told Steve, is to explain Hawking
radiation and information theory to him. That will require some
background lectures on quantum mechanics and general relativity, of
course, to set the stage. (My understanding of these topics is rather chaotic, but that won't stop me.)
The hours will pass as if they were as many minutes --- for me, that
is. From a listener's perspective the effect will be reversed.
Tuesday 17 August 2004
Tuesday - Over at The Archaeoblog they have a link to a current excavation at the Roman Amphitheater in Chester
and unusual finds. Chester was just about
my favorite stop in Britain a
few years ago, with canals, a complete medieval city wall upon which
you can circle the city, Roman ruins, and much more. Here's a photo I
took
from the old city wall looking down at the amphitheater:
Monday 16 August 2004
Monday - not a lot to say. Working away on things. I have some sort of minor summer cold it seems.
Sunday 15 August 2004
Sunday - didn't do a lot, some
cleaning and what not. Feeling a bit tired after the late night out
Saturday, having gone to a 'John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown
Band' concert down in Palmdale. It was the last of this years free
outdoor 'Starlight Performances' and it was a nice night - just about
perfect weather and a well behaved crowd.
The band was fun, sort of old-style 1970's R&B rock and they
really worked hard to get the crowd going. It was a pretty dead crowd
at first, but by the third set people were getting up and dancing. I
helped out by yelling things like "Providence loves you John!" at intervals, and then "PATS" when JC (yeah, he calls himself that) asked the crowd what their favorite team was.
My date was from Rhode Island and I bought her a $20 t-shirt which
she got autographed afterwards. Seems she'd been waiting some time to
get that souvenir...
Photo Notes:
Back in college there was a job fair on campus, and one of the
companies was...Halliburton. Yep, the evil corporation itself, come to
recruit minions petroleum engineers.
They had some sort of huge oil drilling thingey truck, and they just
drove it in and parked it in the middle of the grassy quad. Shameless,
no? Stuck to my old tool box is this cool, if somewhat puzzling,
sticker I got from them - just why are they using a UFO (click picture to see) for a logo?
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