welcome back

I would like to welcome back the Tennessee Titans back into my life after a long summer of waiting for the strike to be over with. It's done, it's gone, it's out of my life forever.. or at least for a few more years when shit hits the fan again.  *sigh* Be greatful you appear to have survived the strike.  I can't say the same for major strikes in other sports.  They recovered, sure.. but they never really shined the way they used to.

So the Titans welcomed Donavan McNabb to LP Field along with his new friends the Vikings.  They played well, but the Titans defense had a very strong showing from start to finish, and the offense looked sharper than I expected as well.  I still know that this is a year of change and transition, so there will be plenty of growing pains, but we'll get there. :)

it's raining.. bitcoins?!?

Worked a lot with my new bitcoin mining rig this weekend.  It's running pretty smooth and trending around 800 mhash/s.  I've got another nice fan coming tomorrow to improve the air flow a bit inside the case which should bring down the temp a few more degrees.  What's next?  It's an Ubuntu system, but I think my next step is I need to boot into windows long enough to unlock the bios limitations.  Generally this is useful for overclocking, but I'm actually looking to do the reverse.  I want to underclock the memory and voltage since I'm not actually using those aspects of the video card.  This will generate less heat, thereby allowing me to raise the core clock speed of the gpu.  The end result?  More mhash/s at the same temperature.  At least that's the goal.  We'll see how that works.  Not looking forward to putting Windows on the box though.. might just borrow a hard drive with Windows on it long enough to do the unlock.  Hmmm.... (BTC 14M8MSf67FvqGpXBU3QJaYjzd9enT9nKbd)

Is the pool open yet?

Is the pool open yet? The short answer, no.

At the start of the pool season I was on top of things. I got an early start, got the cleaning supplies I would need, started working. The waterways blue and looking good. There was just one problem. After a few days water started leaking out of the pool pump. *sigh*

Unfortunately I was afraid this might happen. The first big freeze last fall caught me by surprise and I had to do a rush job on closing the pool. I figured something would go wrong.

Back to the spring opening, water leaking out everywhere. I called around to the local pool shops. They either only deal with in-ground pools or they were currently booked solid with openings and were not accepting new customers. Damn.

I finally found a guy using google local search. Excellent! I gave him a call, explained the situation, and later that day he came out to take a look. After taking a look the pool guy said he thought he could fix the motor, he would pick up the part he needed and come back the next day. I tried working with the guy, he seemed nice and genuine enough. At this point he has basically disappeared with the money I gave him for a new pump (after the repair did not resolve the issue), and the phone number he was using has been disconnected.

I contacted a couple other local shops again and there's not much help to be found. *sigh* I give up. I'll figure it out. It's not rocket science or a complex software development issue. It's PVC pipe, some fittings, some wrapping, and a motor. Ordered a replacement pump online (1/2 the cost of what I was taken for locally) and I'll install the darn thing myself.

The pool WILL open. :)

crazy year

What's that? It's been a hot minute since I've posted? Yeah, it happens. Deal with it. :D /hug  Ok, now for some rambling! Yay!

I've recently swapped jobs, a full time salaried employee after six years as an independent contractor.  I tell you, I don't mind at all having benefits and knowing exactly when and how much my next check in the bank is for. Sure, there are tradeoffs but so far I've definitely made the right choice.

Currently exploring my first real world usage of Moose. I can't say enough good things about how easy it has been to work with. There is a learning curve away from the freedoms of tossing around refs of this and refs of that, with no type checking and total freedom. Yeah, that chaos usually ends up badly so I'm ok with the learning curve. ;) I still need to look more it roles and traits and get to using them properly.

After a couple weeks of refactoring and rewriting, yesterday had my first hands on experience testing my code changes against the hardware I'm interacting with.  The code ran into a couple issues, but those were pretty quick and easy to resolve. I do have some type checking constraints I disabled during testing until I can rework those sections of code to try to work through the variations in data cleanly. It's all part of the learning process. :) Overall the first day of testing (about an hour total) went pretty well and some good results came out of it. I fixed and diagnosed what I could while we were testing, and the rest I made notes on things to address when we were done.

I've resolved most all of the issues that came up during testing, minus some of the type constraint rework that is needed that I mentioned previously. I'll find some time to look more into those areas of the code today or tomorrow, but ready for some more testing on Monday.

Good times.. ;)

defcon 18

Spent the weekend in Las Vegas for DefCon 18, and had a great time with some friends from work. We spent a good deal of the time at the con at various talks and events, and evenings dining out and doing a small amount of gambling.

My favorite talks of the conference were 1) the "make your own uav 2.0" talk that covered what's involved in making your own aerial reconnaissance planes and how they could be used, complete with a demo flight on the vegas strip from the night before ;) and 2) charlie miller's talk about forming a cyber army to attack a large nation.

In addition to the talks one of the events we participated was a fund raiser for the EFF called Mohawk-Con. So far I'm enjoying it, we'll see how long I keep it. :)

What ya think?

the past month

For about four weeks now things have been pretty bleak. Work has kind of overwhelmed me, while at the same time other aspects of my life have been down as well.  Why does it all seem to pile on at once?

The sad part is it's not just me. Almost everyone I know is going through a similar rough patch, one thing after another causing them issues.

What is behind this seemingly endless onslaught? Who knows, maybe it's just the spiraling of the water as it goes down the drain headed for the 2012 apocalypse.  Time will tell.

tradewars 2002

Back around 1993 or so I used to play a game called Trade Wars 2002 when dialing into the local BBS. I knew a few people that were playing, and I was pretty terrible at the game, but it was a lot of fun.

Basically you start out with a ship, in a sector you call home that comes complete with your own starting planet. Your ship has a few cargo holds on it and a small number of fighters to keep you safe.

Each day you were allotted a number of turns that you could use. Actions in the game would consume these turns, each action taking a variable number of turns based on the speed of your ship.  This was how different people calling into the BBS at different times could compete with one another.  Staying on all day did not give you any advantage, since you would just run out of turns.

Your ship and planet were within your home sector when you started, one of many sectors in the galaxy that made up the game world.  The galaxy size depended on how the operator set it up, anywhere from 1,000 to 20,000 sectors.  This was pretty much dictated by the number of players you expected to be in the game.  Too little and everyone runs into each other, too large and the place is desolate.

For whatever reason I have an itch to play again, so I have setup a Trade Wars 2002 server for my friends and I to play on. The ANSI graphics are as terrible as they ever were, and the game is still fun. :)

Let the fun begin!