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Busy, busy, busy.
Friday, worked in the morning. This went well.
Started building the new machine in the afternoon. This did not go poorly, exactly, but there were enough small bumps and scrapes along the way that I did not quite enjoy the process. Cases in point:
1) I have large hands. Tolerances around the processor slot are tight, and heat sink vanes are large, metal, and sharp. About five minutes after finishing the install of the CPU and its heat sink, I noticed that my left index and middle fingers were damp and red.
2) The new screaming graphics card I bought has a two-page installation guide. Helpfully, it is mostly photographs. Unhelpfully, the photographs are not of my graphics card, or of any similarly-recent graphics card. The pictured card's auxiliary power connector has a single block of six contacts. The actual card's auxiliary power connector has two blocks of contacts, one with six and one with eight. The auxiliary power cord coming from the power supply has three blocks of contacts: two with six and one with two. Ideally, the product documentation would make this a non-issue by showing you a properly connected card, because nothing wrecks a nice day faster than shunting twelve hundred watts through an expensive electronic component backwards, but since they didn't bother to show me the right card, their pictures were not much help. I'm just sayin'.
3) The card reader is smaller than your average hard drive, so needs an adapter to fit in a hard drive bay. Not a problem; the case came with one such adapter. Unfortunately, the gap between the panel that screws to the side of the drive and the panel that screws to the side of the hard drive bay is smaller than any finger on my large hands, let alone any two of them.
4) The new case has a window in the side, and interior illumination. Presumably, this is to allow your friends to look inside and be awed by the size and awesomeness of your components. In actuality, it allows your friends to look inside and be appalled at the mass of spaghetti that results from sixty-bazillion different components all needing their own specific power and/or data connection, and no space (nor sufficient cable length and flexibility) to route those cables cleanly out of view.
5) When routing those power and data connectors through the case, it is vitally important that every connector be firmly seated at both ends.
6) My 6TB RAID 5 array dreams died in the face of the fact that "system drives cannot be greater than 2 TB."
Now, granted, none of these problems were insoluble. In the case of 1 and 4, the solutions were "go ahead and bleed" and "buy a can of Krylon" respectively, but they were solvable. Number 2 I got through with superior Google-Fu--I found an in-depth review of the card with copious pictures, and discovered that there is only one correct way to arrange the three power cord connectors with respect to the two on-card connector blocks. 3 was merely a case of finding someone to help me who has small enough fingers to hold the screws in the holes while I started in with the screwdriver. What I'm going to do when he's twelve, I don't know. And 5 was easy, really. Two hard drives (of four) and three fans (of six) wouldn't spin up, but as soon as I opened the box, I found the unseated power cord. 6, I just gave up on the RAID 5 and now I have 2 RAID 1 mirrors for a total storage capacity of 4 TB.
As yet, all I've had time to actually install on the machine is the OS and all the drivers and utilities to support the rocking hardware. Next week should see actual games and applications. And maybe pictures, if I get around to rerouting the cabling more (less un-)attractively.
Alas, building the machine was not a sit-down-and-get-it-done affair, as we also had errands to run. Seattle Lighting in the morning, to talk about how to light the library. We have some specific and non-standard needs there, not least of which is avoiding putting any lights in the ceiling, because M. has some very nice ceiling paper going in that would not be enhanced by holes. And since we have floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on all four walls and then some (library, remember?), avoiding the ceiling means wall lighting, and so the fixtures have to play nicely with the shelving, and the vertical gaps between shelf units are narrower than the standard size of an electrical junction box. Fun stuff, but the lady at Seattle Lighting was competent and helpful, and we appear to have ended up with a solution that meets all of our requirements.
Also Costco. I do not like Costco. Too crowded, and the prices aren't *that* much better anymore. Still, it's what we have, and it has what we get there. Yes, I can recognize a tautology when I see one.
And then, after we picked the boy up from school, we went and checked out some more paint chips and picked out our hardwood floor. Which is gorgeous. You will be jealous when you see it.
Because of the house errands, building the computer actually spilled into Saturday; I got everything hooked up (I thought) before (an extremely late) bedtime on Friday, but didn't turn it on until Saturday morning.
Saturday is when I found the problem with the fans and drives. No time for troubleshooting, though--the boy had a guitar recital at 1:00, and we can't miss that. Also, the boy is growing out of his clothes again, so we had to go to the mall to get him new ones.
Back home for lunch, which is when I finally grabbed a second to pop open the case and check the power connections. Happily, that was the only hardware problem, and I kicked off installing Windows after futzing with the RAID array unsuccessfully for a bit, then deciding that if the BIOS utility wouldn't give me a bootable RAID5 array, maybe the OS utility would. (Turned out it wouldn't, but at least it gave me an intelligible error message, so I could stop futzing with it.)
Oh, and we've had four rhododendrons sitting outside the workshop for a month now, just waiting for us to plant them. Time to get that out of the way while Windows installed. Except installing Windows only took about ten minutes--I've got some seriously fast hardware going on there. So it had to sit while I planted.
Planting was not much fun either--the ivy has taken over that bed something fierce, and rooting it out was just not happening. In the end, we did the best we could and hoped like hell that the rhodies would establish themselves faster than the ivy could choke them out.
Then dinner, drivers, and utilities. Then an earlier bedtime, figuring to get up and start installing things Sunday morning.
Alas, the poor sleep I'd gotten all week caught up to me Saturday night, and I didn't get up until 10:00 on Sunday, which put us late for all the things we wanted to do that day. First was a trip to the site with tape measure and chalk line, to lay out the soffit we're planning for the boy's bedroom, to see if it was the right size. (It was.) Then a scramble around the house because the windows they're in the middle of installing were not what we'd discussed with the builder. (This turned out to be a combination of us not being crisp in our requirements, and him not updating us when the windows we'd originally discussed turned out not to have as much insulational advantage as we'd thought they would. All solved, or heading that way, by this morning.)
Next in the plan was a Tacoma Rainiers baseball game, because the Mariners' newest pitcher (2008 AL Cy Young winner Cliff Lee) was having his final rehab start before joining the team and (hopefully) resuming his dominating ways. But the window issue caused us to a) be in a bad mood and b) need to get an email off to our builder ASAP, so we went home instead. Crafting the email took a while, and we almost decided not to go to the game after all. But then we thought, we can either sit around the house and stew about the windows, or go see a nice distracting baseball game. Distraction won.
We knew we were cutting it close, but we thought we were going to be OK--only a couple minutes late--until we actually got off at the ballpark exit. Sat in the traffic, time ticking away. Got almost to the parking lot and saw that they were turning cars away because the lot was full. Uh-oh. Found alternative, more distant parking, got to the gate probably about the same time as the end of the first inning. Huge line at Will-Call, which is where our tickets were waiting. Turns out I wasn't the only guy who decided to go see Cliff Lee for twelve bucks a seat rather than fifty. Usually Will-Call is only one of the six ticket windows. Today it was five of them, and they were turning people away from the sixth because they just didn't have any tickets left to sell. Uh-oh. Still, got through the line and through the gate probably about the time the second inning was ending.
I don't know about y'all, but I needed something to eat. My blood sugar is an unforgiving master, and a full house is exactly the kind of thing to set it off. Fortunately, the sausage grill takes plastic, so M. and L. could go stand in the Little Caesar's line with our minimal supply of cash to get the boy some 'za, while I stood in line to get brats for myself and M.
Along about the time the fourth inning was ending, M. and L. came back with the 'za, and I gave them their tickets so they could go sit and watch the game. I was only two guys back from the head of the line by then, so I thought my chances were pretty good of eating and seeing some baseball pretty soon. Turns out they were out of: ketchup, Polish sausage, and large buns for the jumbo sausages. M. reported that they were out of breadsticks and most varieties of pizza over at Little Caesar's. In the fourth inning.
I got to my seat just as last out of the fifth inning was being recorded. Cliff Lee pitched six outstanding innings, so I got to watch him for three outs anyway. M. and L. got to see six each, so among us we saw five innings of really good pitching. Or maybe it was one-and-two-thirds, the math confuses me.
Mental note: Cheney Stadium is not equipped for a capacity crowd. Arrive early, get food early.
Sadly, the rest of the Rainiers' pitching was not really good, and Tacoma lost the game 4-1, all five runs scoring after the sixth.
We bailed after the eighth inning, not wanting to get caught in the post-game traffic crush, especially since we had a long walk through the traffic area to get back to the car. Too early for dinner, we elected to drive over to Point Defiance park and see what we felt like doing until we got hungry. Turns out we felt like walking through the woodland rhododendron garden. You'd think that after Saturday, we'd've had enough of rhodies for a while, but I guess not. We kind of picked a random direction every time we hit a trail junction, and ended up with a pretty nice walk in the woods.
Dinner was at Tacoma Szechuan, a place that we'd seen to get good reviews online. The Hot and Sour soup was very good (but very hot), the Mongolian Beef was almost as good as the best we've ever had. The Garlic Baby Bok Choy was good, but there was too much of it and it would have been better if it had been sauteed rather than steamed. The General Tsao's chicken was bland and too sweet. All in all, though, a good dinner, and we'll be going again if we're in Tacoma at dinner time to try different things. (It'd make a great stop for on the way home from Mt. Rainier, for example.
Whew!
Friday, worked in the morning. This went well.
Started building the new machine in the afternoon. This did not go poorly, exactly, but there were enough small bumps and scrapes along the way that I did not quite enjoy the process. Cases in point:
1) I have large hands. Tolerances around the processor slot are tight, and heat sink vanes are large, metal, and sharp. About five minutes after finishing the install of the CPU and its heat sink, I noticed that my left index and middle fingers were damp and red.
2) The new screaming graphics card I bought has a two-page installation guide. Helpfully, it is mostly photographs. Unhelpfully, the photographs are not of my graphics card, or of any similarly-recent graphics card. The pictured card's auxiliary power connector has a single block of six contacts. The actual card's auxiliary power connector has two blocks of contacts, one with six and one with eight. The auxiliary power cord coming from the power supply has three blocks of contacts: two with six and one with two. Ideally, the product documentation would make this a non-issue by showing you a properly connected card, because nothing wrecks a nice day faster than shunting twelve hundred watts through an expensive electronic component backwards, but since they didn't bother to show me the right card, their pictures were not much help. I'm just sayin'.
3) The card reader is smaller than your average hard drive, so needs an adapter to fit in a hard drive bay. Not a problem; the case came with one such adapter. Unfortunately, the gap between the panel that screws to the side of the drive and the panel that screws to the side of the hard drive bay is smaller than any finger on my large hands, let alone any two of them.
4) The new case has a window in the side, and interior illumination. Presumably, this is to allow your friends to look inside and be awed by the size and awesomeness of your components. In actuality, it allows your friends to look inside and be appalled at the mass of spaghetti that results from sixty-bazillion different components all needing their own specific power and/or data connection, and no space (nor sufficient cable length and flexibility) to route those cables cleanly out of view.
5) When routing those power and data connectors through the case, it is vitally important that every connector be firmly seated at both ends.
6) My 6TB RAID 5 array dreams died in the face of the fact that "system drives cannot be greater than 2 TB."
Now, granted, none of these problems were insoluble. In the case of 1 and 4, the solutions were "go ahead and bleed" and "buy a can of Krylon" respectively, but they were solvable. Number 2 I got through with superior Google-Fu--I found an in-depth review of the card with copious pictures, and discovered that there is only one correct way to arrange the three power cord connectors with respect to the two on-card connector blocks. 3 was merely a case of finding someone to help me who has small enough fingers to hold the screws in the holes while I started in with the screwdriver. What I'm going to do when he's twelve, I don't know. And 5 was easy, really. Two hard drives (of four) and three fans (of six) wouldn't spin up, but as soon as I opened the box, I found the unseated power cord. 6, I just gave up on the RAID 5 and now I have 2 RAID 1 mirrors for a total storage capacity of 4 TB.
As yet, all I've had time to actually install on the machine is the OS and all the drivers and utilities to support the rocking hardware. Next week should see actual games and applications. And maybe pictures, if I get around to rerouting the cabling more (less un-)attractively.
Alas, building the machine was not a sit-down-and-get-it-done affair, as we also had errands to run. Seattle Lighting in the morning, to talk about how to light the library. We have some specific and non-standard needs there, not least of which is avoiding putting any lights in the ceiling, because M. has some very nice ceiling paper going in that would not be enhanced by holes. And since we have floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on all four walls and then some (library, remember?), avoiding the ceiling means wall lighting, and so the fixtures have to play nicely with the shelving, and the vertical gaps between shelf units are narrower than the standard size of an electrical junction box. Fun stuff, but the lady at Seattle Lighting was competent and helpful, and we appear to have ended up with a solution that meets all of our requirements.
Also Costco. I do not like Costco. Too crowded, and the prices aren't *that* much better anymore. Still, it's what we have, and it has what we get there. Yes, I can recognize a tautology when I see one.
And then, after we picked the boy up from school, we went and checked out some more paint chips and picked out our hardwood floor. Which is gorgeous. You will be jealous when you see it.
Because of the house errands, building the computer actually spilled into Saturday; I got everything hooked up (I thought) before (an extremely late) bedtime on Friday, but didn't turn it on until Saturday morning.
Saturday is when I found the problem with the fans and drives. No time for troubleshooting, though--the boy had a guitar recital at 1:00, and we can't miss that. Also, the boy is growing out of his clothes again, so we had to go to the mall to get him new ones.
Back home for lunch, which is when I finally grabbed a second to pop open the case and check the power connections. Happily, that was the only hardware problem, and I kicked off installing Windows after futzing with the RAID array unsuccessfully for a bit, then deciding that if the BIOS utility wouldn't give me a bootable RAID5 array, maybe the OS utility would. (Turned out it wouldn't, but at least it gave me an intelligible error message, so I could stop futzing with it.)
Oh, and we've had four rhododendrons sitting outside the workshop for a month now, just waiting for us to plant them. Time to get that out of the way while Windows installed. Except installing Windows only took about ten minutes--I've got some seriously fast hardware going on there. So it had to sit while I planted.
Planting was not much fun either--the ivy has taken over that bed something fierce, and rooting it out was just not happening. In the end, we did the best we could and hoped like hell that the rhodies would establish themselves faster than the ivy could choke them out.
Then dinner, drivers, and utilities. Then an earlier bedtime, figuring to get up and start installing things Sunday morning.
Alas, the poor sleep I'd gotten all week caught up to me Saturday night, and I didn't get up until 10:00 on Sunday, which put us late for all the things we wanted to do that day. First was a trip to the site with tape measure and chalk line, to lay out the soffit we're planning for the boy's bedroom, to see if it was the right size. (It was.) Then a scramble around the house because the windows they're in the middle of installing were not what we'd discussed with the builder. (This turned out to be a combination of us not being crisp in our requirements, and him not updating us when the windows we'd originally discussed turned out not to have as much insulational advantage as we'd thought they would. All solved, or heading that way, by this morning.)
Next in the plan was a Tacoma Rainiers baseball game, because the Mariners' newest pitcher (2008 AL Cy Young winner Cliff Lee) was having his final rehab start before joining the team and (hopefully) resuming his dominating ways. But the window issue caused us to a) be in a bad mood and b) need to get an email off to our builder ASAP, so we went home instead. Crafting the email took a while, and we almost decided not to go to the game after all. But then we thought, we can either sit around the house and stew about the windows, or go see a nice distracting baseball game. Distraction won.
We knew we were cutting it close, but we thought we were going to be OK--only a couple minutes late--until we actually got off at the ballpark exit. Sat in the traffic, time ticking away. Got almost to the parking lot and saw that they were turning cars away because the lot was full. Uh-oh. Found alternative, more distant parking, got to the gate probably about the same time as the end of the first inning. Huge line at Will-Call, which is where our tickets were waiting. Turns out I wasn't the only guy who decided to go see Cliff Lee for twelve bucks a seat rather than fifty. Usually Will-Call is only one of the six ticket windows. Today it was five of them, and they were turning people away from the sixth because they just didn't have any tickets left to sell. Uh-oh. Still, got through the line and through the gate probably about the time the second inning was ending.
I don't know about y'all, but I needed something to eat. My blood sugar is an unforgiving master, and a full house is exactly the kind of thing to set it off. Fortunately, the sausage grill takes plastic, so M. and L. could go stand in the Little Caesar's line with our minimal supply of cash to get the boy some 'za, while I stood in line to get brats for myself and M.
Along about the time the fourth inning was ending, M. and L. came back with the 'za, and I gave them their tickets so they could go sit and watch the game. I was only two guys back from the head of the line by then, so I thought my chances were pretty good of eating and seeing some baseball pretty soon. Turns out they were out of: ketchup, Polish sausage, and large buns for the jumbo sausages. M. reported that they were out of breadsticks and most varieties of pizza over at Little Caesar's. In the fourth inning.
I got to my seat just as last out of the fifth inning was being recorded. Cliff Lee pitched six outstanding innings, so I got to watch him for three outs anyway. M. and L. got to see six each, so among us we saw five innings of really good pitching. Or maybe it was one-and-two-thirds, the math confuses me.
Mental note: Cheney Stadium is not equipped for a capacity crowd. Arrive early, get food early.
Sadly, the rest of the Rainiers' pitching was not really good, and Tacoma lost the game 4-1, all five runs scoring after the sixth.
We bailed after the eighth inning, not wanting to get caught in the post-game traffic crush, especially since we had a long walk through the traffic area to get back to the car. Too early for dinner, we elected to drive over to Point Defiance park and see what we felt like doing until we got hungry. Turns out we felt like walking through the woodland rhododendron garden. You'd think that after Saturday, we'd've had enough of rhodies for a while, but I guess not. We kind of picked a random direction every time we hit a trail junction, and ended up with a pretty nice walk in the woods.
Dinner was at Tacoma Szechuan, a place that we'd seen to get good reviews online. The Hot and Sour soup was very good (but very hot), the Mongolian Beef was almost as good as the best we've ever had. The Garlic Baby Bok Choy was good, but there was too much of it and it would have been better if it had been sauteed rather than steamed. The General Tsao's chicken was bland and too sweet. All in all, though, a good dinner, and we'll be going again if we're in Tacoma at dinner time to try different things. (It'd make a great stop for on the way home from Mt. Rainier, for example.
Whew!
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Frys had 12 GB of 3x4 GB memory sticks for $499 last week. 6x2 GB memory sicks appear to be ~$320 so the premium on the 4 GB memory is dropping *fast*. It's almost reasonable.
From:
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I couldn't believe how fast Win7 installed, though. It was seriously between ten and fifteen minutes. I realized later that it was probably mostly the fact that my main optical drive is Blu-Ray, with data rates approaching 300Mbps, but having 24GB of RAM--so the whole OS disc could fit in memory at once--probably didn't hurt either. :)
I can't wait to start processing images with this thing.
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