On vectored thrust.

Hey, it isn’t rocket science:

Ok, maybe it is.  I didn’t do this, but I admire whoever did.  It wasn’t terribly well-designed or executed, but it looked good in the process!

ETA – Real post tomorrow!

On fire and humour.

If you can watch the first five seconds of this and not laugh, then there really is something wrong with you:

On awesomeness.

See here.  Not just that video in general, but right about the 2:00 mark.

Nine months well spent!

On relief.

After quite a miserable week, and last night the best part of 18 hours of sleep, I feel mostly human again.  I guess it is proof that you don’t appreciate being healthy until you’re sick?

In other news, anyone notice that the default buttoms for Firefox 3.6 look a lot like the Ice Blue theme from 2.0, which I really missed?  I’m glad to have they back.

Hopefully the muse will come back from holidays, I’ve had at least a week where I haven’t had much to write about!

On misery.

Whatever I’ve got, it has migrated to my right ear canal, which now feels like an ice pick is being rammed into it.  Further, it is 3 AM and the only decongestants I have on hand are the ephedrine-based ones, so it is going to be a bastard of a day at work if the three hours of sleep I got is all I’m likely to get.

On precision.

It turns out that installing Win7 from new requires that the hard drive to which it will be installed be the first device in the boot list.  Isn’t that just a fine thing?

Anyway, after getting past that I got it installed onto the smaller of my two RAID 5 arrays, which was a remarkably quick process compared to the last time I installed XP and took at least an hour at it.  Win7 looks good and is intuitive enough given a little background in Windows operating systems.

Oddly  enough I pretty much dodged Vista; the only time I ever used it was to revive a friend’s laptop which had barfed all over its MBR.

I’ll give M$ credit, it does boot at least as quickly as Karmic, although I’ve done no meaningful testing to compare the two.

Anyway, got to get some sleep some time tonight, one more day and then I can sleep for the weekend.  (This after a week with lousy sleep and the flu…)

On quotas.

I figured quota was in fact the plural (shades of data) but M-W has it different.  Anyway, I’ve got my sort of-annual flu, and and therefore a little sub-optimal.  I might take tomorrow off, but I won’t have a good answer until tomorrow morning.  It isn’t that I’m incapacitated, it is the problem of taking it to work and sharing it with everyone else; better to lose one person-day than possibly many more.

Briefly:  The other day I saw a $60000 CLK500 with a red tree air freshener.  I was going to come up with some snark, but I think that’d be cruel.

On inevitability.

Everything changes, sure.  I accept that.  Life would be pretty dull if it were constant from day to day.

However:

After seeing A last night I was talking to the co-worker with whom A is living, this morning.  I told he of my plan to show up with my jumper cables, explain to A what they were for, and thereby cleverly broach the idea of starting something.  From there I somehow mentioned that I had the spare parts lying around to cobble a desktop PC together which she could borrow.  I don’t know if he meant to do it or not, but my co-worker then told me that she is leaving in June.

I don’t know what she will say about it tomorrow when I call on she, and I know the future is anyone’s guess, so I don’t want to go flying off the handle.

Whatever she has to say, all I hope is that she is honest.  She might break my heart now, she might do it later, or she may never.  I don’t know, and I’m nervous as hell about it, but I’ll try and be open-minded.

I was going to get a good sleep tonight after a short one last night, but between the noise the neighbour is making and not being able to get A off of my mind, I’m restless.

Obviously, all of this is not a strong point for me.

On alternatives.

An idea finally congealed which is so blindingly obvious in hindsight that it is painful:  Use my handle-less double-wall pyrex cups for coffee, duh.

I told you it was obvious.

That problem down, all I must do now is keep they where the cats can’t knock they over.  I don’t mind losing one, but I really don’t wish to make a habit of it.

In more compelling news, I got to see A again tonight.  Her wireless installation was misbehaving, and I got it sorted out sort-of quickly (heh).  While I was working on that we talked about music and some other stuff I’ve forgotten utterly; Beautiful intelligent well-thought women do that to me.

On expensive smoke.

So this morning I let the expensive smoke out of my EVGA board, and now it doesn’t work.  Hopefully the chip and the memory are still good, a new board isn’t much of an investment these days.  Oddly enough the smoke smelled a lot like bacon, so I guess it wasn’t a total loss.   I took advantage of the situation and put my working Asus A8N32-SLI board into the new case, which has some clever features:  Tool-less drive cages once you install the adapters, silicone dampers for the hard drives, and an eSATA port on the front.  Once I get that SAS cable I’ll plug in the hard drives and see how much noise it makes or doesn’t.  With the CPU fan, the back case fan on low, and the two stock nvidia coolers at presumably their lowest setting, the noise out of it is about the same volume as keystrokes.

If you’re curious I’m booting from an external drive, which works well but leaves cables all over the place.  I don’t mind cable clutter, but I’d prefer as little as possible.