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Hugh Blemings's Blog, A Diary and Miscellaneous ramblings
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Sat, 19 Feb 2005
Week before last was a corker on the work front, specifics are prolly IBM internal really so not appropriate to dig into in too much detail. Can say though that the whole team was recognised for their work on the Power5 program and Paul and Anton received corporate level technical awards for their work on LinuxPPC64 - all well deserved. Was nice to have Ralph, our US based manager out to do the recognition personally.
Another, unrelated work event saw me wearing a suit and tie for only the eight time since joining IBM. Can you tell I'm counting ? Didn't mind though, was nice to be able to represent the company at this particular event. Only downside for the week was not being able to get out with the Mob on Wednesday morning on account of an after midnight bedtime the evening before :(
To the week just passed, mostly playing catchup and getting some HR stuff done (nothing dramatic). Woke up on Friday morning feeling only slightly better than death warmed up so stayed in bed, doc has since confirmed it's a return of the resperatory lurgi I had earlier so will take it easy and squash with antibiotics. (Note: I'm not a fan of antibiotics, avoid them wherever possible but advice on this one is that they're worthwhile)
Heading off this afternoon with Michael to the Central Coast Amateur Radio Club Field Day, better known colloquially as Wyong Field Day This is by far the largest Amateur Radio meet/field day/junk sale in Australia - first time I've got organised to go. Will be cool to do a road trip too :)
I've long been wanting to upgrade my home desktop machine, portnoy. The old configuration (ABit BP6 Motherboard, Dual Celeron 400 CPUs and 768M of RAM) had served me well but an update was in order. I'd had a lot of fun playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein and had decided that I'd wait until Half Life 2 was released and get something that would run it decently.
Quite a bit of reading and research later I've ended up with an AMD64 system - wanted to go 64 bit and PCI-Express to get some amount of future proofing. Went for a Socket 939 3200+ Athlon 64, 1GB of Dual channel RAM, an ASUS A8V-E Deluxe Motherboard and a XFXForce XFX 6600GT video card.
On the software side have basically ended up running a x86-32 Debian installation for now as there are issues with the XServer for x86-64 which I couldn't be bothered dealing with for now - downside of running fairly bleeding edge hardware. What is working nicely is Transgamings Cedega software to allow me to run an unmodified HL2 binary under Linux. I get a few artifacts with the graphics/fonts which am working on but the game is completely playable - getting around 50fps at 1280x1024 with the majority of the graphics options set to "High". Still tinkering basically
Half Life 2 is just amazing and am looking forward to playing some Counter Strike with Cam on Monday too!
Great commute in on Monday then an even nicer one Wednesday as was able to meet up with the Mob for the customary ride then breakfast. Big turnout and was nice to see everyone after having to miss last week.
Ian eschewed his "usual" GT3 for the morning and rode TriSled Gizmo which he's selling off - think it's a demonstrator/second hand but at $2,500 was very tempted as they're a nice trike. Sorta figured a present for Lu but decided appropriate to gauge her interest first. If you're after a trike tho, worth considering.
Picked up some White Lightning chain lube from Ian and applied it that evening. It's wax rather than oil based and got good reports from a couple of other mobsters. Short ride with Rachael this morning was encouraging, cleaner and quieter shifts.