Posts Tagged ‘geeky’

University! I’m gonna be a grad student…eventually!

Saturday, February 16th, 2008

Woke up this morning with a sore neck and back, stormy weather and a cold bedroom.  But that’s okay, I am going to be a grad student.  Well, one day anyway…

 Finding a school that fits me wasn’t exactly the easiest.  I don’t want to attend full time and I especially do not want to physically be at the school.  I do not mind taking exams at the university physically, but finding a university that allows the use of a proctor is always a plus.

Well, good news, I found a school!  I am not 100% sure what I want to take, but I’m looking at the Engineering-Computer Science camp.  We shall see how it goes and see how much I can get done :)

Start date: August 2008 :)

Car accidents, messing with metermaids and snow

Friday, February 15th, 2008

I wont get into details in this post about a nasty car accident today (trying to get the pictures off my phone…), but I will make a post about it soon enough. 

On a positive side, let’s talk about fun ways to mess around with metermaids!  Back in Ottawa, there is a LOT of snow.  Plows are fairly active, but it is not uncommon to find 5-6 feet of snow on the side of the road with a car under it.   Generally, if there is room, they send a towtruck to drag the car from under the snow.  Before they tow, they usually ticket the car.  This is where the fun starts.

 Required tools:

  • snow shovels
  • car door
  • snow bank on the side of a street

Essentially, you will be building a snowman, just a lot bigger, and shaped like a car.  Our first step is to place the door in the snowbank; you really want to get this at least 1 foot deep in the snow.  After the door has been placed, you want to shape it properly to give a “natural” look. 

Once you are done the door, you can easily start working on the rest of the car.  What you are working on is a simulated car under this snow.  Always assume a foot of “grace”, so it will be a bit bigger, and way more believable.  If you are successful in pulling this off, add some random car parts to give it a more real “feel”.  Also, spray as much water as you can to really harden up the snow.  Getting a 2inch think layer of ice will ensure guarenteed laughter.

That’s about it!  Sit by and keep and eye on the “car”.  Make sure to have a camera ready to capture the fun!  I will post pictures tomorrow, too late tonight to get anything clear.

Evolutionary games…evolve or go extinct!

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008

Back in high school and college, I hosted these role playing-type evolutionary games.  Essentially, the game is started by the leader (usually me) giving a topic, a few details about the surroundings and a few rules/limits.  This game was played offline on paper and it lasted 7 days per round, usually with a quick meet-up mid way through.

Before I give an example of a round of this game, I must warn: It is a very geeky game and it can become very addictive. 

Example of my last round played, that I can remember… You are brought from the year 2000 and placed in 50,000 BC.  You have no tools with you and your task is to generate electricity.  You do not have to power anything fancy; you just need to create electricity with some amperage (no static electricity).  You have plenty of firewood, stone, unrefined steel, natural earth magnets, and copper ore. 

There is not much else to it: find a creative way to get the task done.  There are many ways of getting the job done and you do not always need to use all the items that were given to you.  You cannot make up items, but natural resources should be assumed to be available (in this scenario).  Discussions with other players are frowned upon, but confirmation with the leader is generally ‘okay’ to make sure you are on the right track.The above scenario was simple and involved creating a stove, forge, developing advanced foundries and finally refining the ore.   From there, you would create some form of simple generator and you would have an output in AC.  Normally, most rounds are not laid out this easy and the results can be much more “random” and unpredictable.    I have never attempted to put this game online or attempt it in a digital format. 

If I get enough requests (say, 10+?), I will create a separate page and post rounds there.  So, people coming in to geek out, do not have to catch a random and useless article!

Please welcome a new server to this world…

Tuesday, February 12th, 2008

I’m proud to announce I brought up a new server.   As always, this is a remote, geeky, for the hell of it type of server.  It is self sufficient, requiring no external help “per se”.   The server is powered by a bank of golf cart batteries, 6 of them to be exact, in series and parallel, giving me 12 volts.  From there, we have a 480 Watt inverter.  Quick tests/math guesses give me 25-32 hours of power without any external sources.  To recharge the batteries, I have a 500 Watt turbine connected directly to the batteries.  The turbine has a built-in overcharge unit to keep from killing the batteries.  The server runs idly at around 58 Watts and 190 Watts at full load.  I had to use an external video card because the onboard card added an extra 12 Watts (vs 2 Watts for an older ATI card).  The CPU was declocked 12% and that saved another 2-14 Watts (depending on load).  For internet access, I am currently using an RJ45 cable running over the side of an apartment building to a cable modem running with a 20 meg connection and no blocked ports!  I am building 2 cantenna’s as we speak, so it will be upgraded to a 108MB wireless connection tomorrow or the day after.  So, it will be an almost 100% self reliant server!  The cost of the turbine was totally not worth the electricity savings; but the geek factor makes it all so special!

What do I plan to do with this server?  I have no idea.  I put in 1TB of storage on a RAID 10, 4×500GB drives, SATA2.  There is about 2GB of ram and it is running Windows 2003 Server as its host and VMWare server running another Windows 2003 Server and Debian J  I will most likely use it as a form of storage and offload my web traffic on it when my other servers are overloaded. 

Nothing like hosting your own backup solution, just need to upgrade my encryption algorithm:  3DES (encrypt/decrypt/encrypt, 1 KEY).