The actor who played Scotty passed away today. He was quite a character, and has been the recipient of honourary degrees in Engineering from several schools for raising the profile of the profession. I remember talking to him at Gen Con (in 1995, I think), hearing his war stories (he lost a finger in WW2), and chuckling at how Canadian he sounded when he wasn't faking Scottish.
Rest in peace.
The first batch of parts (two fans and a sticker!) arrived from NewEgg today; I have to wait until Monday for the power supply, large case fan, and HD fan. I popped open my case (I love my case - one screw to open it, fan housings are largely screwless), popped in the fans - after carefully considering how to orient them (see below) - and powered it up. The new fans are UV reactive, and glow a cool blue with my case light - the system is now quite radiant! Much more importantly, case temperature dropped from 55C normal to 50C - and 5 minutes at 100% CPU usage only raised the temperature to 53C, rather than the nasty 65+C it was reaching.
Case fan orientation is a pain. You want approximately as much air coming in as going out, and being routed over the hottest components - the CPU, bridges, video card, and RAM. The fans that arrived are regular 80mm case fans, and shift about 32.5 CFM of air. I pointed them both outwards - one in the side of the case (glowing in the window!), and one in the front. Currently, this creates a vacuum of about -63CFM in the case; this is not ideal, as it forces the fans to suck outside air in, for a rather slow cool. However, I'm planning on the new fans; the 120mm fan will blow about 78CFM into the case (right over the important areas). That changes pressure to positive 15CFM, meaning that air is constantly being expelled from the case. The new power supply adds a bit more fan power (internal suck fan, external expelling fan), but not much - I'm hoping for about 15CFM to give me a zero-pressure system.
I really hate it when I have computer problems, and they aren't software related (i.e. they aren't really my fault!). Since moving rooms, I've been having a few heat problems with my PC - and now I have power supply problems too.
To give you an idea, while the idle CPU is a respectable 37C, it hits 60 or more when I really stress it out. The chassis remains at 55C most of the time, but hits 65C or more when the system is stressed. This means one thing: there isn't anywhere near enough airflow in my case right now. The CPU fan can only do so much when it is sucking warm/hot case air over the CPU - and it's a wonder my video card still works.
To make life worse, my power supply is in a really bad way. The 2V line is at 1.61V, the +12V at 10.75V, the +5V varies between 3.37 and 5.16, and the 5VSB is wobbling around 3V. It's a miracle that the system is running at all like this!
So... I bit the bullet, hit NewEgg.com, and ordered some parts. A big, cool power supply (highly rated, with alarms and a good warranty), some better fans, and a drive cooler. Now I just have to hope my PC lasts until the goodies arrive - and that I get paid on time, so as to not go broke over keeping my PC alive.
I woke up this morning, checked Slashdot, and was jogged from bleary-eyed to awake by the headline "six bomb attacks in London" (it turns out there were only four, but early reporting is always tricky). An as-yet unnamed group, probably an extreme Islamicist group, had killed 37 people, and wounded 700 more. My first reaction was great concern - family and friends in the area, and from 4,500 miles away it's hard to know for sure if anyone's okay. I freaked out for a bit, and then started emailing/calling around to check on everyone. The good news is that nobody close to me was hurt. That's a big relief, although I'm still shocked by the attack - and also glad to see that the London spirit in the face of terror remains the same: business as usual, otherwise the terrorists have won. Now, if only some of our leaders would realize that this applies to liberty-destroying laws, also!
The sheer cynicism expressed by some in the Slashdot article, and also in some Livejournals really makes me sick. That an attack was likely was well known, but that does not reduce the horror of the loss of life and injuries sustained by the victims (although it did wonders for handling the aftermath; it seems the emergency services were fantastic). That the attack was probably the end-result of Western foreign policy is also well known, but again that does nothing to reduce the overall tragedy. It is always a terrible thing when human lives are ended needlessly through violence, whether in Iraq, Africa, London, or New York. Self-proclaimed Liberal pacifists who argue anything else are neither Liberal (respect of the individual's right to pursue happiness being a central tennet), nor are they pacifist if they do not recognize that lives are of equal value, and all premature loss of life is tragic.
That said, as a Liberal (but not a pacifist) I'd still lay my life on the line for their right to be morons.
I'm not much of an idealist anymore, so I'm not entirely hopeful that the Make Poverty History demonstrations today - accompanied by Live8 - will really change things. I'd like to believe that they will, and that this mass outpouring is the start of a move towards genuine social change. Currently, 90% of the world's wealth is concentrated in just 10% of the people's coffers. Large corporate entities routinely pay billions of dollars to each other, just to keep a consumerized, environmentally unsustainable culture churning forwards in the West - while people die in abject poverty in Africa, parts of Europe, Asia, South America, and even sections of the USA (itself subject to 80% of the wealth in the hands of 20%). As an almost-comfortable professional, it's very hard to see what I can personally do about the situation: I definitely can't afford to give chunks of my paycheque (meagre by US standards, but very substantial in most of the aforementioned areas), except maybe in redistributive taxation (an unpopular concept these days, despite it's prevalence in the Western world). Something really needs to be done on a far larger scale - something I'd gladly participate in, rather than funding illegitimate wars in the Middle East with my tax dollars.
What we need are massive forgiveness of debt (itself a wealth-concentrator in the West), significant changes in the pharmaceutical industry (accept that human wellbeing is a social good, and not a profit centre; change patent laws to allow cheap access to drugs quickly; distribute drugs to needy areas as a social benefit, not a source of revenue), an acceptance that globalization is only meaningful if it applies equally to everyone (with social benefits, a smooth market, and strong international policing of corporate exploitative practicies), and most importantly an acceptance of the brotherhood of humanity. The latter doesn't need to be a religious concept (although most major religions espouse it), a Socialist/Communist concept (human equality underpins most post-Mill/Locque Liberalism!), or an anti-capitalist concept (even Adam Smith, often cited by neocons, stated that the invisible hand of the market can only help if monopolies are checked, innovation abounds, social goods are treated differently and the burden shared, and market distortions in terms of both social policy and economic policy* are to be eliminated). Equality of opportunity, a level playing field, and the fundamental understanding that ultimately, we're all human, and share this tiny planet are pretty basic concepts - it would be nice if they were paid more than lip-service.
Of course, in a world that slides between Mercantilism, Globalism, and Bloc economic theories, achieving this is very difficult. The US has strong Mercantilist tendencies: collect as much wealth as possible (somehow hoping to avoid the inflation that really killed the Spanish empire!), and play bully on the International stage. The US also has Globalist tendencies (alternating between Globalism and Isolationism, really), largely driven by corporate interests - but gradually leading to a redistribution of money and power away from the USA. The US generally really dislikes Bloc theory, and if anybody could make it work they could make themselves quite rich - at the expense of the rest of the world. Arguably, ASEAN is the world's most powerful trade bloc currently, with the EU gradually (maybe!) working on becoming another. The US probably counts as a bloc itself.
The only optimistic route I can see here is for wealth to gradually spread itself out as corporations outsource, dilute, and the world becomes considerably more interconnected. That doesn't help war-torn Africa for now, but with development it could in the future. Unfortunately, I'm really pessimistic in general. I'd love to think that the world will change for the better, but I'm not sure that it will in my lifetime.
* - Unfortunately, the largely illiterate neocon & modern Libertarian club tends to regard "distortion in social policy" as meaning "eliminate social policy, particularly safety nets." We saw how well that worked in the early Industrial Revolution, and it isn't what Smith said at all.
