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30 November 2003
ah, the sweet sounds of silence
Yeah, it's me posting. I'm back. With what? Yep. You got me: another one for the geeks in the crowd...
In my on-going quest to ratchet down noise in the (home) office, I was able to use the holiday weekend to finally move the blog and our mail, web, and dns services from a trusty, but getting kinda flaky, Cobalt Qube 3 to a PowerMac G4 Cube running Panther Server. The move was actually about 1/5 the work I was expecting it to be and was about as pain-free a move as I've ever done. OS X Server 10.3 is way better than 10.2. I really like it. The (remote) Server Admin app is much improved and just works. Go Steve!
I turned off the Qube last night for the first time in three years. It's been a great machine, with a super-easy web admin interface, but it's been gathering a few strikes against it:
We got the Qube 3 just over three years ago for under $1000, just before Sun bought Cobalt and raised the price. $2BB exchanged hands in the deal?!?! Did I read that right? Now the products are EOL? Huh.
Turning off the Cobalt in favor of a more stable server without a fan was really the last step in the quiet office conversion. The most important step was moving our desktop environment to a PowerMac G5. The computational power of a Cray X1 Node. Nine fans. Hmmm, you say? It really is astonishingly quiet. Easily the best designed computer I've ever had at my desk. Total Geek Love.
Lastly, and certainly not to be overlooked, was replacing half the guts of the one lonely PC we keep just-in-case. The cheap $49 case and power supply it had been using sounded like a medium-sized jet taxiing for takeoff. In came a new case, new case fan, new cpu fan, and new power supply. I've been meaning to plug these guys for a while: you really can end pc noise. It made a huge difference.
Now, if only I could find a quieter solution for the NeXT Machine...
25 November 2003
another holiday memory
Simple equation:
Staying up all night
+ spending days in the petri dish that is the law school building
holiday cold
This is the third year in a row that I'm sick during the week of Thanksgiving. Not the kind of holiday tradition I wanted to start, or wish to continue, and some of you are saying that this is all my fault. In fact, I'm quite sure somewhere in the Midwest someone is saying, "Young lady, don't burn the candle at both ends...": unfortunately, one of the supplies one gets at the start of each year in law school is a case of double-ended candles and a box of those neat wooden matches...
What all this brings to mind is that for several years, every year, my mom and I would have to make a Christmastime visit to my pediatrician.¹ Some years I had to get a bottle of little white footballs² because I had strep throat. Not the kind of Christmas gift one really wants, but...there it is.
Then, for years, I was pretty healthy around the holidays, and now this pattern seems to have returned. What's especially disappointing to me about a stuffy nose on Thanksgiving is that I can't experience the full impact of the giblet gravy Terrence makes. It will be fantastic anyway, but when I can smell it cooking it's gravy's answer to ambrosia.
So...back to the blanket, and the comfy chair, and my tax reading. I hope all of you are passing on this particular holiday tradition.
¹ Not that this was a painful experience: I had the best pediatrician. He smelled good, was soft-spoken, and had a great air of authority about him while still being really nice. And his nurse was great, too. It was about as positive a medical experience as one can have. I miss it, in a way.
² "little white footballs" were what I called the penicillin pills that he would prescribe for strep throat
24 November 2003
snowflake, r.i.p.
I felt compelled to break my silence to report that Snowflake, the white gorilla, has died. Snowflake was the subject of a National Geographic article a long, long time ago, and when I was little the article was one of my favorite bedtime stories. Let's just say my mom and I had a rather loose definition of "bedtime story." Since HLC got me thinking about favorite books recently, I guess my favorite bedtime stories were:
From National Geographic: the Snowflake article; the article on the Tasaday people; anything about Eugenie Clark, but especially her article about the sleeping sharks of the Yucatan; anything about sharks, or octopus; anything about Jupiter or Saturn
Then there was the volume of two-page stories...I think it was titled something like "I Can Read My Bedtime Story." Lots of good ones in there. The Three-Pig was a hoot, as was Vanessa the Vain Mermaid. (The Vanessa story features sharks, so that was a bonus.) There were many more--I think we read the book so much that the binding cracked, but I loved it.
Go, Dog, Go: Loved it. Especially the dog party in the tree.
Dr. Seuss books: At one point I could recite "If I Ran the Circus" ("...bring on the elephants, jugglers, and clowns from a hundred and fifty-three faraway towns...") but I think I've forgotten most of it. The Grinch was great; as was Happy Birthday to You! I think my mom always dreaded my requests for Fox in Socks.
The more I think about this, the more I'm starting to remember.
I have a list of things about which I hoped to blog, but at this point in the semester, being incommunicado is a fact of life.
So why am I typing if I'm supposed to be under the radar?
I finished my work at 4:30am, and it seemed like it would be more painful to be disturbed by the alarm clock at 6:00am than to just tough it out. Now (5:11 or so) I'm wondering about the theory that getting 90 minutes of sleep is worse than getting no sleep at all because your body just begins to relax and then gets awakened. The too-late-to-sleep approach used to work when I was an undergraduate, but now...perhaps the years do make a difference.
More soon...or not. I'm going to try to catch up on my list of blogables once final exams are behind me and my comment has been submitted.