phik

What is it with motherboards with 2-pin power led headers, and cases with 3-pin power led connectors?

I have been breaking my back working on the OS X port of the Lustre client for a few days. It is coming along nicely, though.

I had an electrician come by the house today, because I’m looking to pull 200 more amps to build a little machine room in my house. He told me that the goddamn building code, or some such shit, says that a building can only have one electrical service. So instead of just pulling a second 200 amp line to complement the existing 200 amps for the house, he has to replace that with a 400 amp line, and the equipment for anything over 200 amps is apparently really expensive. I haven’t received his quotation yet.

I bet I wouldn’t have to put up with some arbitrary bullshit housing code in China. They would take my money and fucking do what the boss man orders. They just finished digging up the street for us, in front of our office, to run fibre for our internet. China is going to own us, until the regulators bring that country to its knees just like ours.

I am putting together a few computers. But it is not going all that smoothly.

First I learned that I will never be buying cases from Antec again, because they are only 95% good, and that last 5% can be really painful. This time the 12″x13″ giant motherboard, while it did technically fit, was not compatible with such esoteric luxury items as drive bays. Rejected.

Now I got this totally sweet case from Lian Li. Those 3.5″ bays are unbelivably cool. It took me about 6 minutes to mount those 12 disks, compared with about 90 minutes to mount the same number of disks in this other enclosure that I have.

Then I found, buried deep in some Tyan/AMD errata, that only the Opteron 246s — in other words, the overkill super expensive ones — support PC3200/DDR400 ram. Which probably explains why I can’t run the dual opterons for more than a few minutes without getting a machine check exception, even though memtest86 passes with flying colours. sigh.

Today was insane, and tomorrow will also be insane. I am not on a pre-IPO road show, but I will not hold it against you if you got that impression. You would not be the first to ask me.

My flight left Boston at 6 this morning, and I had a lot of stuff to do, so I didn’t sleep until I was on the plane. This was probably not a great way to start a week which will almost certainly be chiefly characterized by sleep deprivation, but perhaps another way to look at it is that I am just getting a head start, and that anything worth doing is worth doing well.

I can hardly remember the last time that I wasn’t working, or at least thinking about work while I was pretending not to work. I am completely bi-polar about it. I love it. I hate it. We are going to be outrageously successful. We are past the point of no return on the road to abject failure. I will need to hire a person just to count my money. I will need to sell all of my belongings and move back in with my parents.

If I didn’t talk to you, I wouldn’t have anyone to talk to at all.

I’ve been in 5 cities today, and there will be 4 more in the next 2 days. I wish I’d thought to take more pictures, but I’m so very, very tired…

I’m just too tired.

It’s interesting that blizzard mentions the prominent Daley-related signage in Chicago’s Midway airport. Although I have spent a total of one third of my life in Chicago’s O’Hare airport, I have never actually been to Midway. But I am reading a fascinating book about Daley right this moment, which contains this relevant gem:

“His mind was made up. The [Democratic National] convention was going to be held in Chicago, and not just Chicago, Illinois, a large midwest, industrial city, located on the shores of Lake Michigan, with ample hotel facilities and public transportation, the jet crossroads of the nation. It was going to be held in a place known as Daley’s Chicago.

“There could be no mistake about whose city they were in. From the airport to their hotels, the name was everywhere: “Mayor Daley Welcomes You to Chicago . . . You Have Arrived in Daley Country . . .” When they picked up the phone next to their beds, his face, on a card pasted to the phone’s cradle, smiled up at them. “Welcome,” it said, “Richard J. Daley, Mayor.”

– Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago, by Mike Royko. Highly recommended.