Travels and Images
WEEK 18 2004
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Picture of the Week
Saturday 1 May
2004
Saturday - went to some yard sales in the morning and napped, read, and watched tv for the rest of the day.
Friday 30 April 2004
Friday - started a new
set of test cases - all four machines running unsteady simulations.
Putting the little four port router onto one of the firewall/router
ports works - now all four machines can see the network and each other.
The Win2k boxes can share with each other and the WinXP box. I put the
machines back together, put the covers on, put them on the rack and
generally cleaned up the dining room area so that it is possible to
walk without stepping on a computer component of some sort. A full days
work...
Thursday 29
April 2004
Thursday
- saw a review of Washington's Crossing that intrigued me. It may be a good read - family tradition is that there were Hessian's in our past...
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
At the core of an impeccably researched, brilliantly executed military
history is an analysis of George Washington's crossing of the Delaware
River in December 1776 and the resulting destruction of the Hessian
garrison of Trenton and defeat of a British brigade at Princeton.
Fischer's perceptive discussion of the strategic, operational and
tactical factors involved is by itself worth the book's purchase. He
demonstrates Washington's insight into the revolution's desperate
political circumstances, shows how that influenced the idea of a
riposte against an enemy grown overconfident with success and presents
Washington's skillful use of what his army could do well.
The specs say the new motherboards should run the memory at 333Mhz. What gives? Maybe P4-Celerons only run at 266Mhz? Hmmm.
I picked up a case fan for the last machine. I had the choice of a fan
with a blue light at 35dba, a Antec fan without a light at 30dba, and
another Antec fan without a light at 21dba. I got the latter - and man,
is it quiet! I may just
replace the fan in my main unit with one of these. I put a thermometer
in the case, since the software temperature monitor utility doesn't
work properly, and the air temperature seems decent, 80-85F sustained
during ten hour long jobs running at 100% CPU utilization.
Several jobs are running right at this minute, a couple of unsteady CFD aeroelastic solutions and a steady solution. It's nice having multiple machines, though the room is a bit of a mess right now.
I painted a bit more today. My arms hurt - to minimize moving the
ladder (it takes a lot of time) I tend to reach out and paint at arms
length on either side of the ladder - and after a few hours you know
you've been working certain muscles ( isn't there some torture where
one is forced to hold heavy objects at arms length?). But I've done
half the eaves for the remaining side - it's too warm to do more today,
and it's also turned windy, so maybe the rest this weekend.
Winds generally run in a three or four day cycle around here - I expect tomorrow to be even windier than today.
Wednesday 28
April 2004
Wednesday - working away. Finished "The Confusion", Tuesday night, alas. Now I'll have to wait for part III.
On of my router's ports has failed. Arrgghh. So now only three machines
can be on the network at one time. Though I do have an old four port
router with an uplink cable. I wonder if I connected it up, would
everything be copacetic? Hmmm. Have to try it later.
Tuesday 27 April 2004
Tuesday - more fooling about with the
testcase. It seems that the CFD interface has been changed as well.
Grrrrr. Things are supposed to get easier with time for the user, not harder.
Feature bloat is hard to combat. I downloaded part of the new
up-to-date ( hah! ) manual so things should get easier there. But of
course late in the day it got even better - I'm running the wrong
testcase - the one I should be running is similar, but not identical!!
Back to the drawing board, after I've finished running this one, just
for the sake of completeness.
Beautiful weather - in the morning. By afternoon it was pushing 100F,
rather warm. Early in the evening I got a call to come and swim in a
friend's pool. They upgraded the solar heating system to glass enclosed
tube, and the water was up to 80F - not really warm, but definitely
swimmable. Generally the pool doesn't hit that temperature until June,
so the new system is a doozy!
Monday 26 April 2004
Monday - back to work. I spent a lot of
time bashing my head against what turned out to be a change in the
input data to a code I've used for years. My manual is woefully out of
date...
Also putting together the Celeron 2.6Ghz system. Much to my dismay it
seems that this cheap EBAY motherboard doesn't support DDR at 333Mhz,
just 266Mhz. Sheesh. It's only about 2/3 the speed of my old Pentium 4
at 2.4Ghz, using as a comparison the OSU Case Lab Agard Benchmark-
question: is it the slow memory or the limited on-chip cache of the
Celeron - or both. Doesn't matter I suppose, I'm not going to run out
and buy new stuff right now!
Sunday 25 April 2004
Sunday - I took the day off,
computer-wise, and didn't even check the email. Watched a bit of TV,
but really it was just sort of a 'down day'. Also did some mowing and
laundry...
Also started on Neal Stephensons "The Confusion" - it's fiction, but what type? Adventure: it has pirates. Science: Newton and Liebnitz have rolls. Economics: money and economy. And History: kings, queens, electors, tzars... And Geography: England, France, Austria, Egypt, India, Japan, California...
Photo Notes: My Dad's dog really likes his new laptop. In particular the touchpad is easier than a mouse for critters without fingers...
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