I’m in the process of organizing a benching day for all the overclockers in Atlanta. Right now we are up to seven potential members with a variety of experiences and equipment. All I can really hope for is a group of people to get together with and share tips and maybe bench some hardware. It’ll be a few weeks until we actually have a chance to meet up, hope in the upcoming days I can really get a nice event together.
It’s been a few weeks since I’ve been in a classroom and the lack of scheduled work is making me restless. I’ve accomplished a few things over the last month but I keep getting this feeling that I’m wasting my time. Well actually, yes, I am wasting my time in that I am not getting closer to graduating but this wasn’t a decision wholly made by me. I’m going to go meet with my academic adviser tomorrow to get caught up and make sure we are on the same page and then I’ll be filling out all the paperwork to get re-admitted into Georgia Tech. Frankly, I’m sick of this garbage and I need to be out in the real world with a degree, doing something meaningful. Instead I’m stuck here doing little things here and there while I twiddle my thumbs. Tomorrow I’m going to go buy a CSS and PHP book along with a CCNA study guide. It is time to take control of this rollercoaster that is my life.
I decided to pass on writing over at Gomeler.com about the Macbook Air as it would be downright nasty. So instead, I’ve decided to post my mini-rant here. Let me preface this by saying I am a fan of Apple’s products. I may not agree with some of their marketing tactics or their choice on configurations, but if I had the budget to buy their stuff on a whim then my desk would be cluttered with Apple gear. Now, I also appreciate appropriate performance/price ratios which is something Apple rarely ever has an abundance of. So how does the Macbook Air stack up? Well..
Here’s a shot of my Fluke multi-meter with the temp-probe reading. Typically my room is a comfortable 65F-70F in the winter as my desktop dumps a decent 300w 24/7 as it’s crunching through numbers but for the last two days my desktop has been in pieces in the garage so I have no silicon space heater in my room. Looks like I’m migrating upstairs as twenty minutes after I snapped that picture it dropped another degree. That’s just 7 degrees warmer than ambient outdoors, it is safe to say this house needs better insulation.
Over the last couple of days I’ve been preparing for a contest by re-tuning and testing my current cascade. It’s a very crude 2x 1HP cascade with propane in the 1st stage and a blend of propane and carbon dioxide in the second stage, capable of pulling down to around -70C and -65C loaded with my Q6600. Yesterday was a great day as I finally had a chance to test this Q6600 and it looks like I’ve managed to get another awesome chip. 4707MHz with 1.65vcore was unstable, 4605MHz was Super Pi 1M stable and wPrime 32M stable so it looks like 4800MHz to 4900MHz will be possible if my incoming board can hold up under the load. Sadly no pictures yet as they are all still on my camera, which refuses to operate with OS X, but I’ll update later in the week with the final results. Want to know the best part? Pulling 1900 watts from the wall split between the cascade(1450w), the computer(400w), and the peripherals(50w). I feel confident in labeling myself as extreme now. Here’s a screenshot at 4605MHz, sadly not my fastest time with SuperPi but it was untweaked on a bloated operating system. Might be able to crush 10 seconds on Tuesday.
Over the weekend I had the pleasure of reading a book for free, Republic by Charles Sheehan-Miles. Normally I wouldn’t go about parading this fact, people read books every day. However, it isn’t every day that an author willingly gives away a 350+ page novel while only asking for individuals to spread the word. I originally found this book via Digg.com and while for the most part Digg is flooded with mind-draining crap, this particular book was so riveting that it kept me glued to my Macbook for the 7 hours it took me to read the novel. To give a rough idea of what the novel is about, Charles takes off from where America stands now and then accelerates it’s advances towards a police state where witch-hunts occur in search of domestic and foreign terrorists and the Department of Homeland Security has become the equivalent of the state police in Soviet Russia. The novel really takes off as the story fills out exactly what happened to cause such events to roll in motion and by the end of the book you begin to wonder if such a future is a possibility. A thoroughly entertaining read, I must recommend at least taking a glance over Republic, it won’t cost you a cent.
Today is the beginning of a fresh new year with the option for everyone to have a clean slate of sorts. I myself have a ton of things that I plan on accomplishing with the start of this year and by God I’ll get them done. My “professional” resolutions were posted over at Gomeler.com, feel free to check them out. For less professional resolutions I only have a few simple ones. Most importantly will be consolidating my financial debt, I managed to rack up a moderate sinkhole while in college so that’ll be high up on the list. Of less concern but considerably more entertaining, I plan on running in the Peach Tree Road Race on July 4th, 2008. I said last year I’d do it but July came and went while I was fighting to get back into school but this time around it looks like I’ll have plenty of spare time to train. Considering how I can already safely run a 5K, I figure a 10K won’t be much trouble. One last resolution, slim down on the amount of clutter I have lying around my room. Who needs three floppy drives? How about a box solely dedicated to spare Ethernet and computer cables? There are plenty of oppurutinies for me to de-clutter around here so let the purge begin. Now it’s time to go out in the garage and tune the cascade for an upcoming contest, I smell victory and sizzling silicon in the air. Wish you all a happy and productive 2008!
In the Begining, there was Gomeler.com. Then I grew tired of writing solely about Technology in an analytical sense and decided it was time to branch out so ChristopherMorrell.com was born! There is still a lot of work to be done on this website but it’s mostly design work and tying up a few loose ends. Right now the site features the temporary theme being used on Gomeler.com and chances are it’ll always have a derivative of the Gomeler.com theme. The first thing I’ll be writing about here will be my Christmas Cruise into the Caribbean, have plenty of material to write about for that. Hello new blog, this should be fun.
