Wooho!

Well, apparently my good luck is holding, or my bad luck hasn't gotten here yet, because despite pulling them out of a fried motherboard, it looks like my cpu/memory/cards are all a-okay! They are running along happily in their new home and seem to be zippy fast, and pretty stable (although I'll only know this after I leave the system running benchmark things all night).

The ASUS A7V600 motherboard I replaced the dead one with seems to be pretty snazzy. It has a bunch of nice features including BIOS recovery from CD in event of a power failure while flashing, and a nice temperature gauge with logging features. Despite this, it pales in comparison to the huge dual Opteron board we just got in at work (I'll try to post a photo eventually) that thing is AMAZING. It even screams at you if you forget to plug in one of it's hot-swappable power supplies.

Meanwhile, I've been pleasure-reading as fast as I can for the last few weeks, knowing that the storm which is school is coming, and that I might not be able to read for fun again for at least 4 or 5 years. I have been reading a number of books by Ursula K. Le Guin, very possibly the author who has influenced my life most strongly. I read her book, The Dispossessed, when I was very young. Either it fit with who I was already meant to be, or molded me into who I am. I don't know, but when I read it again this spring, it felt deeply rooted in my psyche. About mid-summer I read The Left Hand of Darkness, and over the last few weeks I have finished all but the most recent book of the EarthSea series. Unfortunately I don't have this final book which is horrible because in just 8 days I'll be taking O-chem, physics, TA'ing the bio-informatics part of a molecular bio class, hopefully working in Dr. Ayers's lab a bit, and trying to get 20+ hours of work per week. It has been my experience that school always looks harder going in that it does coming out. Hopefully this observation holds up (and my books get here in time!). At least I won't be bored....