Me & My Blog are Sick

For Me:

325 mg Acetaminophen
10 mg Dextromethorphan HBr
5 mg Phenylephrine HCl

For My Blog

K2.0 theme is in surgery right now for a couple include() corrections

Sorry for the mess Its what I get when I don’t test the waters before diving head first.

Piss Poor Peepage

I was recently going through a lot of the posts here on my site, updating dead links and putting the magical lightbox on images in the posts I ran across the post I made about 8 months back when I got myself on 25peeps and I decided to hop on over there and take a look at the new blood.

I was completely disappointed though. It seems that the half naked images and blogs about sexually adventurous women has taken over.

Dont get me wrong, I like half naked pictures and blogs about sexually adventurous women. But thats not what I expect, or want to see when I go to a site like 25peeps. To me, its a sign of the downfall of a great idea. Its become a shock contest, which I dont think was ever the intention.

It’s On!

I like to stop in the KB Toys store when I’m in that shopping area here in Elk Grove to look over the Die Cast cars. Over the weekend, I did just that. But instead of walking out with some new Die Cast cars, I bought an RC Boat. Nothing fancy, it was only about $25 but I’ve always wanted one so I bought it. Its pretty cool, again, nothing fancy. All electric but it steers and goes forward and backwards.When we were running (well, when I was walking), Cody and I were talking about it, and how we could make it go faster. When we got home, we started playing with it in the pool and Cody brought up a challange. Each of us gets a budget of $20 plus the cost of the boat, and 1 week to see who can make the fastest boat.

I can’t reveal any of my secret plans, but just know… ITS ON!

90°+ Just about everywhere

The following image from AccuWeather.com just about sums up everything. For the record the thermometer in my car (which is parked in the shade) is reading 108°, KCRA reports 106°.

A few point of interest about the extreemly high temperatures. Saturday, Death Valley had a high of 125°, and then 126° on Sunday. About 40 cities had an all time high on Saturday, and 20 on Sunday. The following is from Jesse Ferrell’s Blog on AccuWeather

Other records of note are below. Probably 100 records were tied this weekend, and I couldn’t include them all, but I tried to include anything over 115 (120 for Cali), any records which were shattered, and one high from each state. Yesterday’s record list has been integrated into this one). Some but not all of these are all-time records and the previous records are indicated by parentheses ().

Death Valley, CA: 126 (125 Saturday)
Indio F.S., CA: 122 (117) (Saturday)
Cathedral, CA: 122**
Near Usta, SD: 120***
Indio Jackson, CA: 117**
Pierre, SD: 117 (107) (Saturday)
Blythe, AZ: 117 (117)
Borrego Desert, CA: 117 (117)
Milesville, SD: 116 (115) (Saturday)
Cottonwood, SD: 117 (116) (Saturday)
Philip, SD: 116 (113) (Saturday)
Fort Pierre, SD: 116**
Mobridge, SD: 116 (109) (Saturday)
Imperial, AZ: 115 (114)
Chadron, NE: 112 (102)
Valentine, NE: 113 (107)
McCook, KS: 110 (106)
Alliance, KS: 109 (102)
Utah Test Range, UT: 109 (105) (Saturday)
Hayward, WI: 105
Casper, WY: 102 (99)
El Cajon, CA: 102 (100)
Rome, OR: 102
Denver, CO: 103 (102)
Albany, GA: 101
Williston, ND: 101
Gainsville, FL: 97 (97)
Los Angeles, CA: 88 (87)

**Not verified by NWS. Reported by government Mesonet which may include amateur stations which could not be correct.
***Unofficial; see yesterday’s report.

RagingWire

Raging Wire is a datacenter out here in Sacramento that EDC has had the oportunity to help design and, now, expand. They are a three-nine datacenter, which means they garentee 99.999% uptime to all their clients. To put that in perspective, thats about 5 miniutes of downtime every 365 days.

The facility was designed and built between 2000 and 2001, shortly before I started at EDC. However, I did get a chance to tour the facility as it was under construction when I shadowed Charlie (before he was my boss) as part of a school project. When the built it they planned 3 phases of the facility, the first bing the original contruction and a data floor that took up about 1/4 of the available space. Phase two was going to take up the next 1/4 of the space and Phase III would expand the facilty to full capacity.

They are currently on the second phase, and about half way though construction. The difficulty in this work is that Raging Wire is doing this work with a live data floor, with some very big name clients, names you would recongnise but I’m not allowed to say due to a Non-Disclosure agreement. Last night I spent about 8 hours out at the facilty observing one of the critical steps in the procees, a comissioning of the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) that controlls just about everything having to do with the power of the facilty. Its the device that will automatically turn breakers on and off, in the correct sequence, as well as start and shutdown generators and other support devices to allow the data center to remain running in the event that the Utility losses power.

It was a VERY impressive demonstration, with two parts. The first step was to make sure that all the devices were connected properly to the PLC, so an operator at a computer was manually telling the PLC to switch breakers on and off (almost always in pairs to keep things running). Basically we manually executed the sequence of events that happen when the utility is lost. On semi-manual (a system liks this is rarely ever full-manual) the process from loss of utility to fully up on generators took about 10 miniutes, and less than 2 of that was on battery power. Just about everything went great, there was one breaker that didn’t respond to the PLC, but it wasn’t critical. So the next step is the big test, a fully automatic recovery from loss of utility. To do this test we actually have somebody go out to the main transformer, where the power comes into the building and shut it off. Everything when flawlessly as it was intended. And INCREADIBLY fast! The generators (they have 3) they specified take less than 10 seconds to go from dead stoped to fully operational, and the entire sequence happens in just about 2 miniutes, with the time on battery power being under 30 seconds.

It truly is a sight to behold, and I hope to be there when the commission the system when they get everything in, which will involve 6 generators and a massive amount of switchgear (the breakers). Speaking of breakers, to give you an idea of the costs involved in building such a faclity (and the resulting fees you would pay to have your computers there), one (1) of the 4000 amp main breakers (of which there are 3) costs $75,000 and weighs almost 300 poinds. And one (1) of the smaller breakers (between 1600 and 3000 amps) cost between $30,000 and $60,000. There about about 20 of these breakers in the switchgear right now, and future plans should do a little more than double it.

I could go on for a long time about how cool this facility really is, but I can tell this post is already quite long, so I’ll leave it for another day.

NIN Remix Revisited

I’ve been going though and cleaning up my gallery, purging junk and trying to resize all the images to make them consistant. The resizing has resulted an a lot of broken thumbnails, so for that I apologise. I removed Kerry’s vacation gallery completely since it didn’t really have a place here and I’m working on removing a lot of junk still from the Miscelanious gallery.

Included in this list are the Nine Inch Nails Remixes that I did that never worked in the gallery anyway. So, thanks to my friends at Industrial Light and Magic I have been able to add 8 new scents, and 5 new colors (which have yet to be named) to these remixes, and re-release them here for your listening pleasure. The first track is obviously the original, the second is the one I entered in the contest, and the third is just somehting I was playing around with and felt like encoding.

EIT

The Engineer In Training (EIT) exam (now called the FE exam) is the first step in getting a Professional Engineering (PE) licence, and I just filled out the application. The test isn’t until October, which should give me plenty of time to start studying up on the subjects that I’m rusty on, or dont know at all.

Although I’ve officially changed my Major to Computer Science, I will still attempt to get my PE based on work experience, it just may prove a little more difficult than if I had a degree in Engineering.

So if I’m not an Engineering student, why am I trying to get a PE license? Good question … Why not! I do still like Engineering, and having the PE is an exceptional thing to have on any resume. Combined with a B.S. in Computer Science I think I would be able to do something that I really enjoyed instead of having to settle with something to get by.

So wish me luck to the future, I’ll let everybody know how it goes .

Are you a Digital Expert?

Although its not the best general test, this test from Sonos (a digital audio device manufacture) is pretty fun for those who know and understand Audio and Computers. You need 18 out of 19 to pass.

http://www.sonos.com/community/digital_expert/test/

The coolest thing is that if you pass the test, and had actually owned any of the companies products they have a special support line for “digital experts” which would absolutely make my day, no more having to explain to the person on the other end of the line that I already tried the first three things on their troubleshoot list before I even thought of calling. If this sort of thing catches, it could seriously streamline support for both the user and support program.

Let me know what you guys get, when I took it last night I just scraped by with 18 / 19.

And if your’re really into this stuff it’s worth checking out their product too, if it wasn’t so darned expensive I would have them all over my house!

T for true, F for false, B for bullshit

8516I’m taking an introduction to business accounting class for my own self furthering, and last week we had a test, and not a particularly difficult test (at least I didn’t think so). Tonight we got the tests back, 99 out of 100 for me, which is great but then going though the answers I notice one question that I feel should be correct even though I was marked incorrect. I don’t have the test, it’s the business department’s policy not to let students keep them, but the question was this:

True or False: Depreciation is a method for matching the cost of an asset to the revenue it will produce

Which I answered False, because from how I understand it Depreciation is a way of matching the cost of the asset to the revenue it HAS produced, you wouldn’t buy an asset and immediately depreciate it because it WILL produce a revenue, you are going to wait until it actually HAS produced a revenue. I think there is a very strong diffrence between ‘will’ and ‘has’, enough to make the statement above, false. When I pointed it out I got an answer from the teacher that felt like a serious run-around with her final statement being something to the effect of “it’s a question about theory, not application”, well what the fuck is that supposed to mean?

So now I want to see what you think. If you aren’t sure what depreciation is, wikipedia has a pretty good explanation here. Leave me a comment with your thoughts, maybe I’m missing some point, or maybe you can help me back myself up if I decide to bring it up again. It is only one point, but damn-it if I’m right I want credit.

The other thing that really killed me about this class tonight is that toward the end of the test, she put an extra credit assignment up on the board, and after the test was over she explained that it was due at the beginning of class and she would not take it after that (we had a full lecture after the test) … so 6:30 rolls around and she collects all the extra credits. I didn’t do it because I frankly forgot. Then during our break, there are people going up to her saying “I left right after the test and didn’t know about the extra credit”. In my opinion, boo fucking hoo, its extra credit, you left class, take a little responsibility for your actions damn-it. I expected her to give a similar, if not much more polite, response. But no … she quickly states, “oh, well just turn it in next week”. YOU HAVE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME!

She even goes over the homework in detail before collecting it, to the extent of putting the full solutions up on the overhead and reading the whole freaking thing to everyone (just in case you can’t see it). So if you have a mistake, you just correct it before turning it in.

This is why I have no respect for business majors, you wine about how hard your classes are, but everything I’ve seen is a complete joke to the academic system.

Flashback to the Past

I spent most of last night and this morning rebuilding a Compaq Presario from the distant past (2000). Its been a long time since I dealt with windows 98, but from what I understand it still holds its ground with some home PC users.

For those who find a quirky hilarity in old computer specs, here is what’s under the (rather noisy) hood:

AMD K6 3D Processor (I don’t know the speed)
128MB of RAM
4GB Hard Drive (Partitioned by Compaq into a 2.75GB C drive and 1.25GB Restore drive)
Standard CD-ROM Drive (don’t know the speed)
A floppy drive
And fully dysfunctional USB 1.0

The owner of the computer has asked me to keep an eye out for a good deal on a laptop, and seeing that she likes to get her mileage out of her computers I’m not sure my typical $1200 configuration is going to do the trick.

I’m doing windows updates right now, which amounted to a whopping 40 MB, had to install a network card to do it though, had to pull one out of another dinosaur computer that I had laying around (which will someday become a VMware machine for a small testing environment).

Anyway, all is well, I just thought I would give an update to the rather slow blog.