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a) loree and I went to see Boondock Saints 2. It was good when it was good, but it had some annoying bits.

b) we stopped at B&N afterward. They had no nooks to play with, which was disappointing, BUT they had /three/ of the hemp-cover-and-rough-paper notebooks that I've been trying to find more of. They've got nature (read off-white) covers, instead of the black, but that can be fixed one way or another. More importantly, I have a brand name, so I can try to find them on the internet.

loree dragged me into watching Castle, and I do love it.
Especially the flak jacket that says "WRITER".

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From the article "Helpful Hints for Dealing with Martian", in the March 2005 issue of Alien Invasion Quarterly:

If, say at a party or something, I have something you want - some bit of kitsch or whatever - which is obviously of little value to me, and I tell you to make me an offer.. seriously, just make an offer. If it really is of no value to me, odds are the offer alone will be an adequate price. I just want to see what kind of offer you'll make. Mind you, you should be serious and sincere in your offer, 'cause I might accept it. But, despite intentions to the contrary, I tend to be at least somewhat reasonable in what I expect someone to give for something I don't care about. In the worst case, I'll tell you your offer is boring and make you come up with something better.

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I really need to get around to building my own hotbits machine. My servers don't get enough action to generate enough entropy. I've just written a little script that will fetch random bytes from the internet and pump them into the entropy system to help beef things up, but I feel bad draining public randomness resources like that.

After pulling both video cards, cleaning the heat sinks, and reinstalling them, I can play both Supreme Commander and Fallout 3 without anything failing. As demonstrated by my 1:30am bedtime on a work night. ::/

Sooo, yeah.


Tho I still need to upgrade the 1900 some day.

1) Fallout3 still fails on the new Nekkar (now a Win7 system), even without installing ATI's driverrs.
2) Supreme Commander ALSO fails, in exactly the same way.

So. Not fallout specific. I begin to wonder if it's the card.
The ATI Radeon X1900 is a dual-width card sitting in slot 1. I've got an HD 2600 sitting in slot 4. I won't put the 1900 anywhere else, because it's dual width and it would have to be in 2 or 3 and could only run at 4x (currently it's at 16x and the 2600 is at 8x). So, what I'm thinking I might do is replace the 1900 altogether, keep the 2600 as the secondary card, and put something newer and nicer in slot 1 to be primary.

Apple's online store only sells video cards for Early 2008 or newer Mac Pros. Arc is an Early 2007 (the first 8-core model, introduced Apr 2007, ended Jan 2008). So, I can't tell if they would work with Arc (they specify compatibility by model and memory speed, and all want faster than Arc's got). So, I can't buy one from them.

Went to Fry's, to see what they had. They've got lots of things, but they sell no video cards for Macs. I stupidly neglected to ask what they have that supports EFI, since that's what it needs to work in a mac, and I suspect if it doesn't have a big flashing sign saying "MADE FOR MAC" they wouldn't realize it's mac-compatible.

By the time I was done there it was too late to go to the apple store in the mall. Maybe I'll go tomorrow or something, see what they suggest.

In the mean time, I've cleaned out the heat sinks on both video cards, and will experiment to see if maybe that helps the problem any. I am not hopeful.

So, I'm shopping for a microserver. I need a decent amount of power, as it's going to be a dedicated rails+mysql box (I might change db backends eventually, but not right now. frontend will be either apache or nginx, I haven't decided), but not a /huge/ amount. I'm planning to run a minimal Ubuntu install on it, and again, it'll just be web server + rails + db server + a few shells, and the website isn't likely to be handling more than a dozen simultaneous users in the foreseeable future. (users. not requests.)

I have a hardware raid array I want to use for the main system drive. It fits into a 3.5" drive bay slot, and I'd /really/ prefer it be externally accessible, so I don't have to open the case if a drive fails (this is not absolutely required, but very strongly preferred). The system must support SATA internally.

I want something with multiple processor cores. Multiple procs is fine, tho that's out of style these days. Two is fine, I don't need much more. I just want more than one.

Very important: I said /micro/ server. I want something small and portable. Something I can shut down, pull the cords, stuff in a bag, and take with me. It'll spend 99.2% of its time in my basement, but I don't want a giant hassle for the three days a year it goes out.

It should have at least one USB port. It should have a VGA or DVI port, preferably, or /some/ video port that I can connect to a standard VGA monitor thru some set of adapters which do not cost a lot of money.

Also important: I'm paying for this out of pocket then getting reimbursed from a limited budget. So, I'm looking for /cheap/ but good. I'd prefer the entire thing, with all requisite add-ons to get it going (not counting the system drive(s), since I already bought those) will stay under $300. I'm willing to go to 4 without crying too much. More than that and I'm gonna be looking for ways to strip it down further.

I'd originally been excited about the Shuttle X27D, until I realized it only has a 2.5" bay. Disappointing. But, that's the sort of form factor that would be ideal.
My stack of DECtops are, sadly, woefully underpowered and inadequate to the task. (Still looking for people to house them for me, tho. Offsite servers are a nice thing to have.)


So, what I'm looking for here is some advice: What do I buy, from whom?

I'd prefer something that comes with ram and cpu, but 'complete system's tend to run outrageously expensive for no good reason, so I'm okay with buying a barebones system and adding the cpu/ram to that. But, I'll also need advice on cpu, as I haven't paid attention to the ever deepening pile of marketing crap surrounding the processor market for at least five years.

So, if you recommend a shuttle, which one, and where do you think I should buy it? And, since a lot of them support several different CPUs these days, which one do I get?
Do you recommend something other than shuttle? They're the only name I know in this niche, tho I know there /exist/ others, so recommendations are welcome. Same questions hold.

So, I bought Arcturus in October '07. The issued a refresh of the hardware a week or two later, as I recall, and the Mid 2006 models are listed as having the same processor options as Arcturus, which implies Arc is a mid06 series. Which Apple has announced they will explicitly NOT be supporting for win7 bootcamp when they release support for it later this year.

Awesome.

It's a $5000 computer, two years old today, and it's already obsolete crap in the eyes of the manufacturer. That makes me feel good about my purchase. An EFI firmware update would /really/ kill you?


I've been pondering a wipe-and-reinstall of the OSX partition for a while. Two years is a lot of cruft. I wonder how much I could get selling it to put towards a new one. Probably not enough to make it a viable option for at least another 6 months or so. On the other hand, I just went and looked, and the best CPUs you can get are /slower/ than what I've got. Newer, sure, but slower, and $2600 extra! Oy. I understand why Psystar's still in business.


Meanwhile, I'm installing the 32bit version of win7. Yay.

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I'm having a salad. 480 calories. 300 of them from the bleu cheese dressing.

Anybody wanna build me a little table with a single spherical wheel on the bottom, which self-balances like a segway, but in two dimensions? I'm thinking about 4' tall, about 10" to a side.

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