I guess the previous bitcoin post was a bit of a wake up call again. About 14 days after that post one card's fan stopped spinning and died. Fortunately I was alerted and shut things down before any damage was done. The card was returned for RMA. I'd hope for a new one back - considering the fan stopping could have damaged the GPU, however I was at the mercy of the supplier. And I'm still at their mercy as this friday will be 4 weeks since it was returned and still no word whether it will be repaired, replaced or refunded. A lot changes in 4 weeks. BTC2USD for example, is down from 12 to 4.5. Hmmm. I did get the PCI-E extenders and they do work a treat.

Thursday this week is RUOKDay 2011. So I've been listening to TripleJ's hack program a bit lately and it reminded me of about this time last year when an episode dealt with RUOKDay which was very interesting to me at the time. It raised a very important point which wasn't immediately obvious. Don't jump in and ask someone if they're ok unless you truly and honestly are ready for any answer.

Speaking of listening to things, at work we've taken a liking to listening to the CFox. They seem to play lots of music from when I was in high school, which is cool, mixed in with some new stuff and more metallica/nirvana than most stations would play. The ad's are funny too, being from Vancouver it's all Canada-ay. After noticing they seem to play the same tracks multiple times in a day (like all commercial stations) we started tracking it. Pumped up kicks had it's day, and is dwindling now, it's still funny when it's heard around the place though. It makes me laugh.

Minecraft. What can I say. There's a reason I didn't play WoW and this could be it. So far I've only lost one whole evening to it (and built a Nyan cat). It's fun to do stuff in, but is a massive time sink. I also built a weighted companion cube, 35x35x35 too, only another 5 or so hours. Oops.

Storage. I've got the sata port multipliers I wanted, out of China which went as smoothly as could have hoped. I did take precautions on paying by credit card by obtaining a prepaid mastercard to pay with, which was fine. The Woolworths ones have the best fees of the ones I looked at, and was easy to buy and use. Highly recommended. So far I've only done basic testing with them on the doomed (bitcoin) AMD board. I need to get a wriggle on with this project, because the new tv shows all start this week.

"Not all those who wander are lost." - J.R.R Tolkien

Ok so with the surge in price of bitcoins in june-july spiking to USD30 each and then crashing back to about USD12 it got some decent media coverage.

Perhaps I was in a vunerable situation, looking for something hobby like and a decent distraction. See I needed a distraction from storage as that's a problem still sort of wrecking on the rocks waiting to sink. Mix into this the lack of a vmware box and I've sort of lost the plot again.

So I sank some cash into a box to mine bitcoins, which was fine, or would have been fine if the hardware didn't have issues. Basically I rushed into it and opted for something available right now vs shopping around for a quality product. So the Gigabyte board I have has a fault which took about 2 weeks to isolate, and one of 2 dimms is also faulty. Now I really hate returning stuff, and after dealing with gigabytes useless and slow support decided to never buy a product from them ever again, and I still have to convince the shop that there is a fault. So that will be downtime, and in bitcoin mining - all downtime costs money. Real money.

A further complication came from a software hang issue caused by ATI Catalyst drivers, OpenCL code and an accelerated video layer (or GPU call) on Windows. Basically a major bug in the ATI drivers causes a hang of the machine if a video plays while OpenCL code is running. This was after realising the driver bundle with control center caused crashes itself, so switching to the driver only pack at least let me isolate the problem. Oh and the fix has been committed for the driver release due out AFTER the next one. So October apparently. Thank's AMD/ATI. I'll never buy your products ever again too. For reference, this card was released in NOVEMBER last year.

The memory fault isn't such a problem now, but once this fad wears off (or becomes unprofitable due to the price of power going up due to failure of the government (to cater for population growth or restrict immigration)) I was hoping to use this box as a vmware host. But alas, it's again apparent that I'm not allowed to have things go well or to plan.

Further proof of this was the build up to the final Harry Potter film. My glasses broke, and not having spares anymore (long story) left me without sight. Skip forward a week and I'm still without, and now without more money too. Health insurance is such a scam. It barely covered 25% of the cost of replacement glasses. Sigh.

I'm not allowed to win. Someone please remind me why is it I try at all.

Perhaps I should move to some far away land which is cheaper than here. Perth's now in the top 10 most expensive cities to live, and it's higher up the list than New York. What the hell am I staying here for (apart from America being filled with americans).

Hmmm

HALP