Our ticket/task tracking system at work has achievements, which is fairly awesome (e.g. “Gulag Archipelago — work on one project for more than 2000 hours in one year”). Recently a thread came up on the SomethingAwful comedy forums centering around (mis/ab)use of a Valve-style achievement tag generator. Here are some of my contributions to the thread, for a quick laugh. :)
This pay cycle I decided that it was my birthday month, and I was tired of my old desktop struggling to keep up with things (like, say, flash videos on youtube, or even low end gaming). With Kirsti’s encouragement, I spent about $700 on newegg.com and got the parts for a new build which has gone super well so far. (Ironically since they arrived during the work day and I was pretty busy, Kirsti did most of the actual putting together of the stuff I’d intended to. I think my total contribution was installing the power supply in the case, putting in the motherboard offsets and installing the optical drive.)
CPU: AMD Phenom II x4 955 (3.2ghz quad core)
RAM: 16gb ddr3-1333 (4x4gb, G.Skill)
MB: Asus M4A87TD
Video: Gigabyte GV-N450OC2-1GI (Nvidia Fermi 450 card, 1gb vram)
HD: WD Caviar Black 1TB (sata 3, 64mb ram cache)
DVDRW: an old but still functional ata133 LG dvdrw, recycled
Case: a ThermalTake black atx mid-tower, forget the model number
Power: antec 650w green (so named for high conversion efficiency)
OS: Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop
So, so happy with how it’s turned out. :) I’ve done things with it like have two operating systems installing into virtualbox in the background (various testbed VMs) while playing Portal via Steam on wine fullscreen in high res and it never stuttered. Ripping a DVD took less than half an hour (and I’m not sure that I found the right config options to tell HandBrake to go multi-core). OS install went smooth as silk, the hardware is super-performant, and best of all it’s quiet! The loudest sound it makes is the very faint noise that comes from really thrashing the crap out of the hard drive. I kind of wanted to get an SSD for main storage, but the $/GB ratio was still just a bit out of my reach, and I’ve heard of just enough bugs and glitches still being worked out with them that I felt that sticking with spinning rust for now was the safe call. With sata-3 on the motherboard, I’ll probably still be able to upgrade just fine to an SSD in a year or two when all the software and hardware kinks have gotten worked out.
Because I constantly forget how to do this whenever I’ve got cause to fool around with SLIME mode in emacs (usually when working through Land of Lisp, which is on Safari too), a note to myself:
This is enough to exit back out to ordinary emacs (from which ctrl-c ctrl-v exits, naturally).
I love weekends where I don’t have to work (at least, when I’m not getting paid overtime — you want to give me time and a half on top of my nominal hourly rate and my attitude towards overtime changes immediately, heh). Got a reasonable amount of studying done (could’ve been more, but still a fair amount), which even though the example problem sets are somewhat tedious doesn’t really feel like work so much as highly directed fun. I’m hoping the most recent death march project is pretty much put to bed.
Thinking of Boston (see last post), I received our copy of The Social Network on DVD a few days ago. Highly recommend this for anyone who enjoyed the film in the theaters, it’s only $13 on Amazon and the extras DVD is packed with some fairly interesting content, e.g. a long-making of vignette, lengthy interviews with Reznor, Ross and other people critical to the look and feel of the film, and so forth.
Thinking of Facebook itself, I’m kind of creeped out by them opening up home address and phone number info to third parties. I put that stuff up there to help out friends who happened to lose my contact info, but at this rate I’m thinking some of that needs to come off for security reasons. I’ll handle keeping friends updated via other channels. Increasingly glad I have this blog set up as an alternative to Facebook as insurance against them going completely into the shitter regards privacy and security.
Really looking forward to this coming weekend; I’m taking a trip to Boston to hang out with friends up there courtesy of cheap airfare on JetBlue (less than a hundred bucks round trip, cheaper than Amtrak and not all that much more than BoltBus while being considerably faster than both). I just have to make it through this week at work (urgent project that’s turning into a bit of a train-wreck for a number of client-related reasons that are too tedious to get into).
I think this is my favorite quote from Franz Kafka:
“You do not need to leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Do not even listen, simply wait.
Do not even wait, be quiet still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked,
it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
I figure LJ was my home for long-format writing (or at least, longer than 140/420 characters that twitter and facebook respectively support in the standard post) for several years, so I might as well mirror whatever I write here back over there for tradition’s sake (and who knows, there might be people who only ever read my LJ). This is mostly a test post to see if the mirroring plugin I’ve installed is working. Right now only my p3rlm0nk LJ is set up as a post mirror but if any other users on perilouscodpiece wish to set this up I’ll be happy to (of course, so far I’m the only one using this blog…).
I ran across this fun series of videos on youtube by Savage Henry a while back and decided I’d share:
The Edge (part one)
Hell’s Angels (part two)
Mint 400 (part three)
I was accepted into UMBC for the Spring 2011 semester as a special/non-degree-seeking applicant (their nearest classification for a post-Baccalaureate student such as myself), and received in-state tuition status as well. I’m super super excited, because there’s quite a number of things in the computer science and mathematics areas that I would like to gain more formal exposure to. Of course, I can (and do) read about these things on my own but a classroom environment and access to learned advisors (professor and TAs) will I think greatly help my absorption of the material.
Registration capacity permitting, I plan on taking CMSC 203 in the spring, their Discrete Structures course (mathematics that’s particularly relevant to computer science, more or less, at about the level of calculus without being directly an analysis course per se). I’m half-tempted to see if I can take STAT 355 as well (calc-based probability theory and stats for scientists and engineers). Both of them form the sort of mathematical core theory underlying two course I care very much about taking and doing well in, namely CMSC 341 (Data Structures) and 441 (Algorithm Analysis).
My first term back in school unfortunately puts me in the very last registration bucket on the calendar, in late January a few days before the term commences. Though I’m not required to undergo academic advising (as I already have a BSc), I’m hoping to go in and catch a bit of time from one of the CS dept’s advisors before then regardless to talk to them about where to come in on their course sequence (e.g. I don’t think that I really need to take their intro year of programming courses given that all the topics listed in their syllabuses look quite familiar after a decade of programming in industry) and might use some of that time to see if there’s any way for me to “sneak” in and register earlier. ;) Probably a no but you can’t tell until you ask, hehe.