The Screaming Viking

Mjollnir has been upgraded to 4gig of RAM. It appears though that torrentflux will expand into just as much RAM as it can find….piece of shit. I had to compile a new kernel with “bigmem”, and I had to reconfigure vmware. Both seem to be working fine though.

So, I am once again looking through the listings of available houses. So far I haven’t been terribly impressed. There is one place in Minn about 30miles or so out of town, 140 acres nice wooded area with a lake….bastards want 650k for it though…crazy. All I’m looking for is 80 acres with 5 buildings for 130k around 20miles or so out of town…is that really too much to ask? Housing is so crazy here. We look at places and think 200k is a lot, but in other parts of the country 200 gets you a place the size of my apartment…here though it gets you a pretty damn nice place. A guy can do well in the 130-150k ball park as well. There is such variety. What kills me as I look through these listings…there are places that seem like nice places for what I would judge a reasonable price given the market…then there is another place that is so much less of a place for about 10 grand more. I don’t think people look around much when they list these places. I’m hoping to be in a position to buy around April and move in the end of May beginning of June. I’m getting pretty sick of this apartment bullshit.

Me thinks Mr. Vick is pretty screwed. A co-defendant taking a plea does not bode well for him. The feds are going to be all over nailing the high profile Vick to the wall and one is forced to assume that information on him is the only way they give a plea to anyone. I love how every sports reporting feels the need to voice their disdain for dog fighting. I wonder how many of them really feel strongly enough about it to do something other than talk. I don’t much care either way honestly. It’s not something I in which I would take part…but I recognize that people are in to some pretty screwy shit. The bottom line is it’s illegal and if he (they) took part in it they need to be punished as far as is applicable. What is really disturbing is hearing some people turn it into a race issue. How Vick is already guilty in the white community but the black community is still awaiting trial. This really has dick shit to do with race and quite frankly very few things do involve race as long as the media keeps their god damn mouths shut. The media is like that drunk woman at the party who won’t shut the hell up and keeps eggin on the guys. Be careful honey, your boyfriend just might watch you get your ass kicked…

Bonds needs to have a heart attack here in the next day or so. Nothing big, just enough to keep him out of the batters box…forever. Talk about tried and convicted in the eyes of the public. It’s such a shame that we won’t ever really know if he juiced or not. To me it seems that there is a 95% chance that he did…but you just don’t have that certainty. Would you vote him into the baseball hall of fame? I sure wouldn’t. Many people have said over and over they would not vote in McGuire. Part of me feels kinda bad for Bonds. If he didn’t juice, there is utterly no way for him to ever prove it in the eyes of the public, the only thing that will provide resolution to us is proof that he did cheat. Why did baseball handle this whole thing so shitty? Why didn’t they institute a weekly piss test for everyone for awhile to redeem themselves in the eyes of their fans? Baseball needs a new commissioner…maybe goodell would like an evening job.

Looks like KG might be a Celtic here in the next couple of days. Keep your eyes on this one boys and girls…

I’m soooo tired today. Didn’t get to bed till 1 last nite.

I damn near bought myself a thinkpad R61 yesterday. They had 10% off and a good deal besides that. Configured decently it would have run me 666! (no shit) then take10% off that….600 bucks. That gives it a 1.6 core2duo 1 gig RAM, 60gig, DVD-RW, 7 cell battery…then wireless and all the standard blah blah. For a thinkpad that seems like a good price. I had the CC# punched in….then decided not to. I don’t absolutely -need- another laptop although it would be nice. For the past couple of weeks at work here I’ve been doing a lot of banging away on a think pad in a conference room, seems like a good little machine. Plenty snappy, light and decent battery life. In any case, I didn’t get it. I promptly handed my CC’s to sara and told her to only let me have them while I’m paying bills. I got one taken care of….but I can’t seem to make much headway on the other. I’m throwing plenty of cabbage at it, the problem seems to be that I like to use it as well. I have 3 months to get it knocked down significantly…then I’ll reward myself by buying hunting gear!!!!

So I thumbed through Cabela’s master catalog the other nite. I’ve determined that I need boots, thermal underwear, some woolies, good gloves and thermal head gear. I found what look to be a good pair of boots for around 80 bucks. They seem to be a decent compromise between snow pack and hunting boot. Wonder how the woman will react when I tell her I need these boots PLUS a pair of snow packs. Honestly, she better not say much I’ve seen her shoe selection!

So many toys…so little time!

johnny 5 alive!

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After much much much thought, I’ve decided to just add RAM to mjollnir. TorrentFlux is a HUGE memory pig (it gives it all back when it’s not in use though so that’s good..) and in the past couple of weeks I’ve used the VM to connect in to work a lot more then I thought I would.

I ordered another 2 gb, so that puts me at 4gb total…we’ll see how that works out. At 2gb if I was running TorrentFlux it would max it out and just touch the swap file (less then 200k in swap). If I didn’t run TF it would sit around 1.4 gb for RAM usage and not touch swap. After I added the VM with 512 meg of RAM available for it, without TF running it would use all the RAM and use less then 200k in swap. With TF running all the RAM is still used, naturally, and it doesn’t write much to swap buuuuuuttttttt the VM is a little choppy. So, more RAM it is!!!!

How does this effect you…well, it pretty much shouldn’t at all. I’m hoping I can allocate a gig of RAM to the VM and still have memory free with TF running…but like I’d let that happen. Chances are what I’ll do is see how much (if any) is free then use all the rest as additional RAM for more VM’s!!!!

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I’m sure you both are right. I’m still pretty pissed about the whole deal. I was told my complaint was forwarded to the dean so we’ll see how it works out. I’m sure I’ll get a pat on the head and a “we’ll say something to her”. I’m not sweating it anymore.

The bears and Briggs came to an agreement, or he signed the agreement anyway….which he had to do even if he is going to execute his plan to sit out the first 10 games. I really don’t think he will, but it remains to be seen. Sitting out those games and workouts would be detrimental to his career. It was nice to see the bears not cave on any demands he made and hopefully it sents a precident for future dealings with players. Things still need to be run as a business, and they did a decent job of that…in -this- case.

Training camp starts tomorrow and there’s just over 40 days till opening kickoff! I should setup a countdown timer on the website here…hrm…

And why the hell do I not have a few links to the bears on the left side there? I’m going to have to rectify that…this site needs to be rebuilt badly. If anyone is interested in the task, I need a front page that allows access to the email and still has a low bandwidth requirement (I access from the farm sometimes), then something a little flashier would be nice after that. I need an area for a couple downloads necessary for remote access. I would like to have a variety of daily comics pulled from somewhere and put up on techno….not exactly legel, but I don’t think anyone would notice. Then some sports links and so forth.

I moved torrent flux back to mjollnir because I was convinced I wasn’t getting bandwidth on dirt for some reason, turns out I was parinoid! I got the same bandwidth when it was moved to mjollnir, turns out it was a few slow torrents in a row. I’m rebuilding dirt….fawk it. I can do it for about 250. It will give me a lot more power available and future expandability. It will quiet down the computer room a shitload, throw a more efficient power supply in there…the reasons are endless. Several years ago when techno started up as a “wonder if I can do this…hrm, how do you do that…” kinda thing in a borrowed Intel 233 with 32meg of ram and a 6 gig HD. That box originally started up as a “show EQ” machine… from there it expanded to a huge PAIN IN THE ASS to it’s quite functional and rock steady incarnation today. Now, I’m looking at a second machine to backup data and offload some processing power…

Hrm…my career today with BCBS…owed to Everquest? wow, maybe those 4 years weren’t totally wasted? I need to justify that worthlessness somehow!

I read a couple articles here the other day that I should have saved the links to. One was about a developer working on the linux kernel in his spare time. He recently quit (the name escapes me, google for linux -ck should come up with his name) and he describes the trend that he has seen in the desktop computing market over the past 30 years. He described why in his opionion (which seems to be highly educated) linux is lacking in the desktop environment but thriving in the server area. How the kernel itself has so much server optimization and general crap in it that it kinda blows on a desktop…it was quite informative.

Another article was on virtual machines and how they are not going to lead to less hardware…but probably more. It was a line of thinking that hadn’t occured to me before, but if you can setup a virtual machine for each piece of software that you use, you can build an OS specifically for that software, set it up on it’s own box and save the headache of configuring it to run nicely with other sotfware. From an enterprise level configuration it makes so much sense and is an interesting approach. Software vendors send out, on a single cd, not only their software but it configured on a specific OS to just throw on to a virtual machine. On a server in this office, i configure a VM to run a software, take an image of that machine and send it to another office to restore to their VM. You could patch, configure and tweak a VM without having to worry about crashing 15 applications and crippling your company for the next few hours.

It’s an interesting train of thought anyhow. Intel investing in VMware makes a little more sense when you think of it in that context.