The pics from Washington and Spain are up on Comerford.cc so enjoy. Things are slowly returning to normal and I think I’m getting over the jet lag – slowly.

Tonight methinks junk food, wine and TV are the order of the day. Bring it on!!
—–

Well, finally got home from DC, be prepared for a bit of a rant. What a trip! – first of all the conference I am going to gets cancelled – an hour after I land in Dulles. Next, we get hit by Hurricane Isabel. Finally on the way home to Dublin via London (no direct flights) we have to make an emergency landing in – wait for it – Dublin because someone on the plane had a “Cerebral Event”. Not a good thing to happen but you might think that on the bright side we’d get to finish our trip a little early. Unfortunately not. After sitting in Dublin on the plane for about 2 hours we were not allowed to leave the plane – the main excuse was to do with our baggage, apparently they could not let it fly without us.

Instead we had to fly to Heathrow where we then missed our connecting flight to Dublin – this also happened to be the last flight to Dublin. So we got to London and stayed in a hotel overnight. The flight in the morning was (of course) delayed by about an hour but at that stage I was expecting it.

When we get to Dublin, Jen’s bag arrives ont he baggage belt but mine is nowhere to be seen. After going to baggage enquiries I find that despite the airline’s excuses the previous day, my bag had flown to Dublin on an earlier flight without me. So essentially the excuses the previous day were BS that suited them at the time.

In the end it wasn’t BA’s fault that there was a medical emergency on board but I think it wouldn’t have been beyond them to let us off in Dublin. What really annoys me is that the whole reason I opted for the flight was so I wouldn’t have to take the Monday off work – in the end I had to take it off, I was too damn tired and pissed off to go into work. Plus I wouldn’t have made it in until after 2 – not really worth it at that stage. So, an interesting and frustrating trip – I’ll be posting the pictures on Comerford.cc soon, probably tomorrow, along with the pics from Spain. Now if this query would just finish so I could go home………
—–

I left the Shuttle machines running SETI while I was away to judge the performance of the Linux machine now that I have Gentoo running on it. The first signs are encouraging – it now is cranking units out faster than the Windows machine.

This is what you would expect since I unlocked the Athlon XP in the Linux machine using a wee kit from High Speed PC and I have it running at a higher clock speed. Prior to that, running Redhat it was still slower than the Windows machine despite the higher clock speed. Nice work Gentoo
—–

Well, got back from Puerto Banus on Saturday – I believe I stayed awake the whole day, watched football and the like and helped my mother make dinner…….unfortunately I remember none of that because I was too tired having had just 2 hours sleep before we drove to the airport.

Puerto Banus was brilliant – hopefully we can go back next year to one of the houses nearer the port so Jen won’t have to drive everywhere, and of course the plan is for a crowd of us to go over there instead of Portugal. Fingers crossed that my uncle doesn’t sell it before that…..

Now that the leisure trip is over it is on to the work related one. I leave my house tomorrow morning at around 5.30 a.m. and I will arrive in Dulles 14 hours later. how can there be no direct flight to Dulles from Ireland? It’s insane.

Jen will be joining on me on Wednesday and will add driving in the US to her list of vehicular accomplishments. Since she just had a weeks driving on the right (for which I am eternally grateful) she should breeze through it

Lots of shopping shall be done – I’m thinking iPods and PDA’s (can’t afford a laptop this time). Should be a good submission for Rip Off Ireland – we’ll see whan I get back.

More next week…….
—–

God, the last day in work is always horrible – trying to remember all those little things that you need to do before you leave (and usually forgeting at least one that you get screamed at for when you get back). All the while all you want is to get to the pool, get a beer in your hand and get a tan

—–

One of my Shuttle SN41G2′s is running Windows XP, the other was running Redhat 9. I wasn’t too impressed with the performance of the linux box when running Seti since it generally underperformed when compared to the linux machine by around 20 minutes per unit (10%).

So I got a Gentoo CD and installed that. I have to say that the install was nowhere near as complicated as I thought it would be, which was a pleasant surprise. After resolving a kernel panic caused by a RAM disk conflict I was up and running again. We’ll see how it performs………..
—–

It seems like I’m just back from Portugal and I’m off again.

This time it’s a bit hectic. First stop is Puerto Ban�s in the south of Spain. We (myself and Jen) fly out on Saturday, returning the following Saturday. The times are a bit crap but you can’t argue with �129 return per person.

Then, the Tuesday after I get back (16th), it’s off to Virginia just outside Washington D.C. – unfortunately this time it is for work Jen is going to follow me out on the Wednesday. On the plus side – being with work means I get a special rate on a King Suite in the Marriott – Nice

This’ll be my fourth (I think) visit to Virginia and this time I’m determined to see some of the sites (besides the bars) before I go. Given the price of electronics over there I’l probably pick up a few neat gadgets too

I doubt I’ll want to see a plane or an airport for quite a while after that. With no direct flights it means changing in London both ways – ick – and I’ll be getting in very late on Sunday night with a monday morning in work to face the next day……not nice.
—–

Having recently obtained a G4 cube on E-Bay I set about upgrading it. After all a G4-450 and 256 MB of RAM with just 20GB of Hard drive space really doesn’t cut it these days. So I toddled over to Other World Computing and bought myself a nice 1.2Ghz G4 upgrade.

Then I added a 120 GB hard disk (Maxtor) which was perfect because the cube won’t address anything much bigger and also threw in a respectable 1.5 GB of RAM.

Now the only problem is a graphics card – the standard ATI 128 pro won’t do Quartz Extreme graphics in OS X which is annoying. I have an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro that will do the job but the damn thing don’t fit. So that is my next project – I have to relocate the DC adaptor board to get it to fit so i think I’ll leave it until I’ve got plenty of spare time.

If you want to see what’s involved take a look here. I’ll be doing something similar though I don’t think ribbon cable will carry the current properly so I’ll probably use individual wires for each pin.

Besides the graphics, I have a pretty decent machine on my hands. There’s a pretty bad pic of it up here. I’ll probably do a detailed guide to upgrading the graphics card so there’ll be better pics available then.
—–

Well, found this site in a nested comment over at Slashdot. Certainly makes blogging easy…. and seeing how I’ve been meaning to code one into my own domain (www.comerford.cc) for about 6 months, now I can take the easy way out
—–