from monday…

Clunk, clunk…

Here I am… typing on the Big Grey Toshiba Brick… and why? Well, it’s time once again for my laptop’s bimonthly migratory flight back to Cupertino for “repairs”, and I use that term loosely, since half the reason it’s being sent back this time is to fix the thing they didn’t fix the LAST time I sent the fucker back. (The HD problem.) Now it has ANOTHER major hardware problem ¯ the fourth for those of you keeping track. When I bend the screen back more than about 100 degrees, the backlight goes out and the screen goes black. Fucking hell. Anybody out there know anything about computer “Lemon laws”? Does four-hardware-problems-in 6-months entitle me to any kind of reparations? Fuck.

And as if this week did not start off sucking quite enough… we are supposed to get 4”-8” of SNOW today. Check your calendars people… we are well into fucking APRIL right now… is there something WRONG with this picture?? I guess as a scientist, I’ve always wondered what it would have looked like during the Ice Ages, when the half-mile thick glaciers descended across what would one day become Canada. I guess now we get to see it first hand. Sorry Canadians! There’s still lots of cheap real-estate down here in Alabama and Mississippi that you can probably get your hands on before the catastrophic climatic changes kick in full-force.

Despite the approaching blizzard, Spring Cleaning has begun in our house. I spent much of yesterday afternoon hauling construction debris up from our basement. It’s been down there for about 2 years… this big MOUNTAIN of drywall scraps and electrical wire and garbage. It just looked so daunting! It took exactly an hour to get rid of it all. Imagine that. So I cleared all that out of the “Storage Room” (which isn’t so much a room as it is just the un-finished part of our basement) and moved a bunch of crap out of the laundry room into the storage room, so that we can one day finish tiling the floor in there. Next weekend, I’ll probably take a crack at the attic (which isn’t so much an attic as an unfinished upstairs bedroom… next time we are buying a house that they’ve FINISHED building!). It’s definitely time for a yard-sale, I must say… lotsa, lotsa crap in the house. Some is eBay-worthy… other stuff is more suited to the “give me 2 bucks and just get this crap out of my house” kind of thing. Dining room tables… old televisions…inflatable furniture… big boxes crammed with random computer parts… Actually, I could probably sell some of those old Macs that are clogging up my basement, but… well… I’m not sure I can bring myself to do that! I still have this fantasy of hauling them in to work and setting up my own little outdated-supercomputing-cluster in a corner of a lab or my office. I need to get on some of the Mac newsgroups and get some ideas… what would YOU do with four 200Mhz Macs?

What I really need is a RESEARCH program. Christ, if I had some calculations or something I was working on, I could use these Macs for number crunching. They aren’t super-fast, but they would be dedicated machines, so I could have them running 24/7, working on numerical stuff. But I have NOTHING going on in the research department. No projects… no ideas! And being where I am, I have nobody I could possibly collaborate with, cuz I’m the only physicist in the university! I should be doing some networking… I need to renew my membership to AIP, start reading journals again… I need to get off my lazy ass. I have 3 ½ months off for the summer, and a light and easy courseload in the Fall… now is the time to get this ball rolling. Well… once this semester is over, that is. Which is soon. I mean… REALLY soon. I have about a month and a week of school left… that’s it!! Crap… I really need to get moving!

This has been a really rambly entry, hasn’t it? I’m really fucking tired…

Dave