Sold!

Yay.

Last night the Athlon's processor sold for $200. Some guy in Oregon decided to skip all the bidding shenanigans and did the buy-it-now. For some odd reason my ebay toolbar in firefox got logged out, so I wasn't alerted of it the second it happened. When I did catch it Ian, Tyler, and I were in a Skype conference and I had a bit of a random outburst. Though, for the first time ever I listed an auction as as-is instead of providing a warranty, so that I could buy my new stuffs right away! Except! No. Paypal/eBay decided to implement another "protect the buyer" feature that that causes paypal to hold all funds transferred if the item sells for over $100 by a seller that has less than 100 feedbacks until either A) paypal gets delivery conf. on the buyer's end, B) the buyer provides positive feedback, or the questionable "three weeks have passed." I'm not really sure about the last one, like as in how it protects the buyer or whatever. They make it sound almost like "no matter what, after 3 weeks the seller will get their money."

It doesn't matter at all though, because I'm not a scammer, the processor works fine (as does the HSF,) and dad shipped it right after he dropped me off here (comm co) via priority, so it should get to Oregon around tuesday or wednesday. As for my other eBay items, one set of RAM currently has a $20 bid, and the other does not. I'm getting ready to write up a post for the motherboard but I just realized I can't actually post anything from here on account of the fact that I only moved part of the athlon backup to the thinkpad.

So!

Now that the processor is sold and gone, the Athlon is pretty useless. Realizing this, I went ahead and stripped it down and set all the parts aside. While I was doing this, something occurred to me- I don't really need the massive space that a tower provides. I mean, it's not like I'm about to run out of places to put a tower in my room; but when I can get a new smaller case for cheaper, why not check it out? And check it out again. On TigerDirect I found a really, really, really nice barebones shuttle system. Basically a 12" deep by 8" tall and 8" wide box with an AM2 motherboard providing PCI and PCI-e, as well as two RAM slots, three sata, two esata, lots of usb, 7.1 audio, firewire, etc bundled with an AMD AM2 5000+ processor, which is epic. Plus it was only $220! Unfortunately the sale ends in two days so I'm not going to be able to get this specific one but there will always be more, but at least I have my sights set.

Though that kit would need another $30 at least, for RAM and shipping. This is where the RAM on ebay and the work I'm (hopefully) doing this saturday kicks in. I'm not sure what exactly I'm going to be doing on saturday, but I know it involves my NET225 teacher, who's an awesome guy, and a lady moving into a doctors office and needs computer stuff set up, and she things she has a bunch of networking equipment set up or something. I don't really know, but I should be finding out this afternoon, as today is another all-dayer.

All in all I'm predicting that within the next two or three weeks I'll be setting up some sort of new system or another. If I /do/ go with getting a shuttle, then I'll have no use for the athlon's case or PSU, both of which are very nice. So I have to decide- sell them, or keep them for a potential later computer! I don't know! If the funds from selling crap and working level it out I'll probably just keep them around. Here's to waiting.

eBay fun!

I've put the Athlon's processor and ram up on ebay, and am preparing to post the motherboard as well. If all goes as planned I'm going to replace them with new intel core2 stuff and ddr2 ram. Normally I wouldn't do this because the athlons current spec is more than suitable, but there are crazy people paying slot of money for those so I figured I may as well sell while it has some value. The ram and mobo are worrth a bit less but I suppose selling it all is a good idea. Eventually I'll get a new video card as well but that's much less important than having a good prod to me. Especially If the processor has those fancy virtuliZation features.

iPod post! Sorry for typos and no tags...

new watch band!

Mom and I are at the greenville bojangles now, just back from target where we picked up a nice new watch band for $5. It's much better than the one that came with my watch originally, it's all black nylon instead of bulky and plasticy like the other one. We're off to b&n now, then at 5:15 were going to go see step brothers.

Yay for free wifi!

Stranded at the Library

I'm officially stranded at the library. It's 12:48 now, and I've been here since roughly 8:10. I was going to try and get a ride with someone after they got out of their class (which would be right about now) but unfortunately I wasn't able to ask them before they left for class and I have no idea where said class is so I can't exactly get up and go ask. That just means that I'll be here until somewhere between 3-5. And for some reason, who knows why, when I was packing my bag this morning I figured "Eh, I'm not going to need the thinkpad" unfortunately I don't know /why/ I didn't think I'd need the thinkpad, but here I am, thinkpadless, in the library on a really nice Dell Optiplex 755. I was using the touch for a while, browsing the webbernets, but it occurred to me that not only is that sort of uncomfortable, it kills the battery in case I want to listen to music some time later on.

Several things I'm noticing about these setups are- the LCDs are really nice (of course) dell 1907s. At least three people are on stations that have the LCD tilted (they're made to be able to tilt 90deg for portrait work) by about 4-5 degrees. I don't know if they're aware of that fact, but it looks like it would be incredibly uncomfortable. Or at least really hard to use. Also, I absolutely adore these keyboards. They're compact, very tactile, fancily stiled, and very sturdy feeling. I could easily get one of these (* Prepares to open ebay...) to work alongside the Model M, or I could get two and replace the keyboard on the optiplex and athlon. The mouse on the other hand is absolutely horrible. It's a weird hourglass shape, way way way too narrow, and the scrollwheel is too small. Now that I think about it I've actually never really been a fan of dell mice. The PS/2 trackball one I have has the widest steps imaginable. Think if you were writing something, and wanted to move the mouse to a specific area in the text to highlight a section for re-placement or deletion or whatever. When you panned over the text instead of nicely sliding along, the steps are literally an entire letter wide!

All of my classes are going along really nicely, my English 112 class with Dr Davis is really nice, it's pretty much the same as ENG111 except it's much more thorough, and I like that. Right now we're writing a paper that's pretty basic, it's just a simple analysis of ourselves for him so he can examine our current writing capacity. The topic is of course argument, and arguing weather or not the writer (me/other students) agree that "grades you get in hichschool are an accurate reflection of your strengths and weaknesses in college." An easy enough topic. The hard thing for me is that I was never technically in "real highschool," I left Terra Ceia after 8th grade for homeschooling, and in homeschooling I was never technically graded. I suppose I could conjure up (in a much less connivery sense of the word) what my grades more or less would have been, had I been graded. The problem with that is that other students in my ENG112 class that have been through real highschool know that part of the reason your HS grades don't reflect your college strengths/weaknesses is that often (so students have claimed) HS teachers make mistakes when inputting grades, and the environments of many highschools can effect the performance of a student. None of that would be relevant for me because I was homeschooled. However for 8th grade, which was spent at a real school, I would agree that yes (or no?) my "HS" grades don't reflect my strengths and weaknesses as a college student. Though if I was to write entirely on the subject of my highschool grades then I would say that yes the "grades" from that do reflect my strengths/weaknesses as a student in college because I'm working almost completely the same here at the comm co as I was/am in homeschooling type situations.

Above I mentioned getting one of these fantabulous dell keyboards for my optiplex, and that got me thinking about my other optiplex, as I have two. Last night Tyler and I got to the conversation of routers, and how modern "home use" routers are nothing more then Systems-on-a-Chip with five ethernet ports and a wireless network adapter slapped on there. Because of this, when subjected to higher loads, such as when businesses with 20-30 computers run all their network activity through one, they fail. What Tyler was telling me was that what he does, and suggests for his clients, is to use an operating system called Smoothwall, running on a computer with two or more NICs. It sounds fairly amazing, supporting very controlable proxying and QoS, and neat things like scanning the first few packets of, say, a file sent over AIM to check for anything ominous. Similar to Tomato it supports in depth bandwidth monitoring and control, which is really cool. I popped it in virtualbox and played around with it for a bit, but since I didn't really read the manual or anything beforehand I was mostly stranded, but the principal sounded pretty great.

How I plan to [eventually] use it is pretty simple. Take my spare GX1, with the PII 400Mhz processor, put 256MB of RAM in it, and a 10GB HDD. Plus another 10/100 NIC to work alongside the onboard 3com. My cable modem would go to one of those, and then either my cisco 10/100 switch or another switch would be connected to the other. I'd set the current router to work in WAP mode only (don't you just love router firmwares that are versatile!) and connect it to the switch, and taadaa you have a fancy router! The main thing I'm wondering about though is alternative switches for direct connection, because I'd only need one with five ports, so the 12 port cisco switch would be overkill. I'ld probably put a test version of it into effect one of these days when dad is in Raleigh for a while, because it will cause a few hours of downtime at the least.

I'm going to go ahead and wrap this up for now, I might start another post in here later on today, but I have a few other things on my mind that I'd like to peruse.

things!

Haven't blogged in a few days, I guess that sorta ruins my "Whee, let's blog every day!" idea. Regardless of what I haven't said on here, several things have happened that are worth mentioning. I helped Landon move into ECU a couple days ago, and he gave me his Optiplex GX1 and a nice Logitech 6.1 system. The Optiplex is rather nice, decked out with an incredibly fast SCSI card and a 15k 36GB eServer drive, as well as a 7.2k (if I remember right) 9GB IBM drive. The 6.1 system is also very nice. Right now I have it set up as a 2.1 system because I don't have good placement for the rear speakers.

I also got my Cisco books for this semester, which starts today at 6:30pm with my NET225-50 class. The books we had to get are a little weird, so I'm not sure what's going to happen with that, but I'm not really concerned.

My room is finally 90% clean too, including the closet. I now have an empty closet which I may organize things into, what fun! While cleaning it out I came across my old electric typewriter. I got it a few years ago but when trying to clean it I was unable to get the top hood back onto it, so I just closeted it. This time around however I just decided to yank out the hood and use it with an open top. Working with it like this is a lot of fun, you get to see all the action. Plus setting pages is much easier. I'm getting closer to moving the server downstairs, as I don't really need full gig-e on it and it's starting to take too much space.

Another stack of computers in the same place.

[Random need to blag more pictures]



The only change is that the SE was replaced with the topless ultra5, which I'm not installing Solaris 10 on.

NetBSD & Server!

So thanks to Tyler, I'm like all into NetBSD now. I've got 4.0 on my GX1 and SparcStation 5, and right now they're both compiling software at the speed of fun.



That's my SparcStation 4, Centris 650, and Mac SE. The GX1 is off to the side and I didn't feel like taking a picture.

Also! I've decided to turn my dell poweredge SC420 into a full on server. Samba, NFS, SFTP, apache2, php, mysql, all that crap. The base page right now is aeroraptor.homeip.net:88. But there are alot of other weirdo pages hidden all over, mostly IRC stats pages.

Having to use a nonstandard port really bugs me though. Oh well, can't have everything.