Moving and Stuff

How much stuff does one need?

I'm not sure, but I know I've got more than the minimum. This is what I learned while packing up to move to Boston. I thought that I lived light... hmmm, reassessment is needed. It does make one consider how much crap there is floating around in people's lives, probably without them even knowing about it.

I'm going to make an effort to prune the crap in my life... hopefully to some small benefit to myself and my environment.

Dave

Heading to Boston

Wow, it's been forever since my last post. Well, I'm back!

Life has kicked into gear. I completed my doctorate studies and am now officially a Ph.D. I am going to have a T shirt made up: "I spent 6 years in school and all I got was this doctorate!" :-D

So, I set a move-out date on my apartment. Aug. 31 and I'm gone... heading back to Montana and then Boston. I accepted a post-doctoral position at the Harvard Medical School. Life is going to get interesting, real fast. I look forward to it!

-- Dave

Amazing Technology

I am posting to my blog from my blackberry. It's amazing how people can communicate these days.

A brain implant would probably be better though... Guess I will have to wait a few years for that.

-- Dave
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld

Vista Post 1-Month

I've had the Vista operating system on my machine for the last month or so and have become familiar with the OS' quirks and workings. In my honest opinion, Vista is a downgrade in just about every sense of the word.

My system is a mid-level box with a dual core processor, 2GB of memory and runs on a dual 10K Raptor raid. XP was much faster than Vista is, even with all the graphical bells and whistles turned off and the system optimized for performance. The most irritating thing is my backup box that I just formated with a new XP install is noticeably "zippier" than my main Vista box. The backup system should be about 2/3 slower from a hardware perspective.

My biggest irritation is that the file handling in Vista is molasses slow. Opening a folder with fair number of subfolders takes seconds to resolve where XP handled it almost instantly. Transferring files is also much, much slower than XP, both locally and via network.

I did a clean install of Vista (and deleted the restore files), and I'm too lazy to reformat and upgrade from Vista to XP. Maybe I will take care of it in a month or so.

-- Dave

Oh Noes!

I have a somewhat sophisticated computer system. There are multiple boxes with specific purposes (MMOG macro programs running, media center, primary workstation, etc.). Well, I ran into a problem.

The fan on the video card on my media box died. This means I'm without television until I can get it replaced. /cry

Fortunately, it's not a huge deal. I grabbed an after market VGA cooling system and hopefully it will arrive today. The bulk of the "enthusiast" part means that I have to rearrange some key inner-workings to make room, but I am hopeful the problem will be minimal.

Dave

Sleep - A Wonderful Thing

Yesterday, I held a meeting with my lab and associates concerning my latest data set. It went well, but the whole process was a bit exhausting. I think I am going to be able to squeeze out a third publication with the new data that I have.

This morning, I am feeling pretty good. Ten hours of sleep is wonderfully therapeutic after a long day. :)

David

Windows Vista

I've finally taken the plunge and decided to upgrade from WinXP Pro to Windows Vista. Yesterday, I went down to the university bookstore and grabbed a student copy in the Home Premium flavor.

I have built my own boxes since the early days of the Pentium. In fact, my first hand-built box was a 100mhz Pentium 1 with a whopping 32MB of ram and a (gasp) 1GB hard drive. Over this time, I've installed every OS one can think of from OS2 to DOS to every windows OS under the sun.

My migration to windows Vista was the easiest OS install I've ever done. My raid drives, Inet sharing server, dual video, motherboard devices, everything had the latest drivers automatically installed and worked! I'm impressed! The eye candy is kind of nice too, even though I will probably turn most of it off eventually to squeeze out a few more cpu cycles. I'm really digging the widget panel and love the desktop RSS feeds.

I'll keep you posted on more developments.

-- Dave