Geek Toys
A piece of a new toy arrived today. As some of my readers know I have been getting by with a old AMD Thunderbird 900 system at my desk, soon that will not be the case. Today UPS delivered a new motherboard, to go in that new case I got about a month back. Unfortunately it will be awhile before it gets populated as almost nothing from my old system will fit on it. All I need is a couple of Opteron processors, several sticks of ram, a new video card, heatsinks, and hard drives and it will be a working system. What I would like to stick into it is
2 Opteron 290 x2 processors.
8 sticks of 2gb pc3200 ecc reg ram
1 Dual monitor Fire GL video card (I am not a gamer, Photoshop is my most intensive use)
8 1tb sata-3000 drives (Yes the board as a 8 drive on board sata-300 raid controller)
etc.
As you can tell from that shopping list the board will support a very high end workstation. Unfortunately I can not in my wildest imagination afford that stuff, so it will probably end up like this:
2 Opteron 246 CPU, used
4 512mb sticks of ram, used
1 ATI X300 video card, used
2 hard drives, used
Still it will be the fastest computer I have ever personally used. Of course the excitement is somewhat blunted by seeing this:
Tyan Personal Super Computer
Update from web journal
Since I kind of left folks hanging on the old journal with my last post being 5 Mar 05, I thought I would start out with and update for those who might be interested.
My doctor gave me a drug called neurotin for the phantom leg cramps that I mentioned in that last post. It completely eliminated that problem, and helped with several others. None of my doctors know why.
Turned out that I did not have NPH. I got a second opinion on that, and a third. The second (another local neurologist), and the third (a neurologist at Duke University) diagnosis, after $20K or so worth of tests, agreed. As best as I can translate that into normal english it was, “Duh, I dunno”. Interestingly that seems to be easier to deal with than a wrong diagnosis that does not work.
Six months of physical therapy and a couple of Tai Chi classes have helped my balance problems quite a bit. Over all I keep improving, but it is so slow that I have to look back at least a year to see it.
The reason I quit posting on the old journal was because I felt that it had gotten so that all I was doing was whining, so this will be the last post about my health unless some substantial improvement comes about.
Hey, I’m a blogger!
Set WordPress up today on my website. Now all I have to do is learn how to use it.