April 30, 2006

shaken upgrade

well, i finally upgraded my home server (shaken). it used to be an old Sun Fire V120 with a 650 Mhz UltraSparc IIe processor. now it's a tyan S2865 dual core 2.6 Ghz opteron system. man, does this baby scream. it was a PITA to move all my existing services over to a new server, but it's nice to finally have a fast and responsive system. it's also nice because i designed the new system to be extra quiet. the old v120 used to put out about 60 dBA, which means that you didn't ever want to be in the same room as the system. i designed the new server to be as quiet as possible and i think it worked out pretty well since when i started it up i couldn't hear it over the noise from the fridge.

April 23, 2006

makers fair

so today i went to the makers fair. it was pretty cool and there were lots and lots of cool creations to stare at, admire, and talk to their creators about. i also picked up a subscription to make magazine. (because, you know that i don't have enough existing magazine subscriptions or pending books to read.)

April 1, 2006

same, same, but different

welding class was canceled today so instead of wasting time melting random pieces of metal together i decided to do someting totally different. i brewed some beer. this time it was a wee heavy scotch ale. this is gonna be another beer that has to age for at least three months, so the beer pipeline is really filling up. this morning i also transfered my snowflake smoked porter into a secondary fermenter and i had a chance to taste it in the process. it's really good and the smoke flavor is really noticible. (this is good since i tried the wort pre-fermentation and the smoke flavor was undetectable under the overwelming sweetness of the malt.)