Adam's R&R

Well, here comes the next leg, 900 miles (or so) to Seattle. And we need to be there by Thursday for Turkey day. In a bit of a rush – we have to get the rental car, check out etc.

Hopefully I’ll get a chance to post on the road, but if not then it’ll be from Matt and Ruth’s house next

I added Atom and RSS feeds to the site. I also added Adsense, mainly to see how hard it would be – I don’t expect to actually make any money In the end it was easier than I expected – even settin up the account was pretty easy, I can see why this is Google’s secrest sauce.

On other geeky fronts my Seti@Home efforts are going well. Still #1 in the old country and I have some more hosts coming soon. I “found” a Sparcstation 20 and all that was needed to get it up and running was a Framebuffer Card and a hard drive (which I had already). I added a second CPU ($5 on Ebay) and I’ll be installing Solaris 9 on it when we get back from the west coast. The CPU’s are only 75Mhz but they have plenty of L2 Cache, so it should be usable. I’ll probably use it as a backup server in work which will free up a nice Dell for other stuff.

The G4 Cube has gone the way of the dodo, so I’ll have to look elsewhere for an OS X box. I figure I’ll wait until Apple switches to Intel before I buy a new one, even if the Mac Mini is tempting. I’m a fan of the Pentium M platform so I can’t wait to see what Apple does with it, especially with the dual core version due out early next year.

The XBox 360 has made it on to my wish list, but I think I’ll wait until the new year. I may have no choice if the shortage rumours are true. MarioKart on the DS might be a “must have” though. I’ll see if I can check out a demo somewhere once it’s released. That’s enough of the geek stuff – back to normal stuff next time, before Jen gets upset.

Finally have some time to post. Anyone looking back over this might notice that my posting output drops off around the time a certain person arrived in the US, though I’m sure she will tell you that I don’t do anything anyway and should have plenty of time left to play around on the internet

I reverted the main page to the blog because it’s the only incentive I’ll get to change it, plus the old page was pretty boring. I think I’ll stick some sort of CSS template around the content pages (now in their own category on the right) to make the look purty. Since I am still lazy, I’ll probably use one from here. Nice designs and open source – what’s not to like?

I finally got around to updating some of the links too, and I added the standard Blogger toolbar to make it searchable. I may even add AdSense to the site though I doubt it will generate much revenue. Even though I do work for a competitor I have to say I’m pretty impressed with the ease of use of Google’s web based tools. Hopefully our products will follow their lead.

I recently got through reading the latest Wheel of Time novel and I think Robert Jordan is finally starting to move things on a bit, though I still don’t see how he finishes it off in less than another 2 books. If anyone is thinking of starting to read this series, my advice is to wait until it is finished – the 2 year waiting period between installments and the Tolkien-esque pace is infuriating.

On the subjects of books, I’m over halfway through Terry Pratchett’s very large catalogue of Discworld novels all of which have been excellent so far. I can also recommend Good Omens which he co-wrote with Neil Gaiman. Looks like I might have another author to try when my Pratchett supply is finally exhausted

After reading rave reviews (and because Jenny bought it) I read Ken Grimwood’s novel Replay. While not as earth-shatteringly good as the reviews make out, I’d highly recommend the book to anyone whether their tastes tend toward Sci-Fi or not. If I had read this book in 1988 when it was published I would have been far more impressed, given some recent writing and Television, the story does not have the same impact today but is very entertaining nontheless.

Finally the new George Martin book in the Song of Ice & Fire series should be landing soon and I want to read Everything is Illuminated before I see the film so my dance card is pretty full for the foreseeable future.

Wow – possibly my longest post, and I haven’t even touched on recent and upcoming travels. I’ll save that for next time

Well, I haven’t had time for much updating recently between the job and the newly moved in girlfriend Such is life and I’m happy enough with that – always better to be doing than writing about doing….

On the tech side I’m probably going to sell off some of the extra equipment I have lying around – after all who needs multiple dual processor machines doing nothing but running SETI?

My poor G4 cube died a little while ago – looks like the logic board – so I’ve ordered a replacement – if that doesn’t work then I think I’ll sell the parts I can figure out work and order myself a Mac Mini. On a happier note I did manage to compile and run BOINC and the appropriate SETI@Home client running on my Cobalt Qube 2 (thanks to Steffen Moeller) – it runs on a MIPS processor similar to the PS2, and I managed to get Debian running on it some time ago (thanks again to Martin – see Debian on Cobalt).

So, for now I am without a BSD based OS – not to mention the OS X GUI – maybe I’ll install a BSD OS on one of the spare boxes………but I think I’ll redesign the web site first – put up a proper front page instead of the blog – we’ll see

Well, I’m settled into my new place (kind of) – all the books, CD’s, computers etc. are still waiting to be put away, I need to wait for the boss to arrive in January for a decision on such things as placement of shelves and desk purchases….

Not much time to settle in though, since I’m off to the old country tomorrow for Christmas and I’ll be there until January 9th. Only a couple of small issues with the new apartment, the garbage disposal unit looks to be on the fritz and the shower in the master bedroom has no pressure – not a big issue since the shower in the spare room is working fine, but still not ideal.

I have Comcast all hooked up, but I’ll probably hold off on the phone side of things and check out the VOIP offerings. The only thing I’ll use it for anyway is international dialing and you can get some good deals on that with VOIP….

Have a couple more presents to buy, but the major stuff is done thank God. Got another home baked hamper type thing from Todd’s wife – nice!! – been spoilt this year – hopefully it’s a yearly thing. Mmmmmmmmm……..cookies……