Watt's Up Musings of an original geek

I decided to sort three banker boxes of Lego blocks this weekend. These blocks were given to our children and had collected over the years. When they left home we bundled them up, and put them in the garage. Overall I consider this job a way to reduce the randomness of the “system”, that is, to reduce the entropy of the hundreds of mixed pieces into a more organized system. Based upon thermodynamics it always takes more energy to accomplish. Well it has been hours and I’m still doing it. So it sure has taken a lot of my energy and I’m still not done.

First I started on the miscellaneous bags of blocks. I sorted them into brick, plates, and special pieces. Then I sorted the bricks and plates into specific sizes, for example, 1×2, 1×3, 1×4, 1×6, 1×8, 1×10, 1×12, 2×2, 2×3, 2×4, and so on. I then packaged each group into their own ZipLoc bag ranging from massive gallon ones (for the 2×2, 2×3, and 2×4 bricks) to sandwich ones (for the 1×3, 1×4, and 1×6 bricks) to small snack ones (for the rest). I have yet to sort the special pieces further so they are just in five large ZipLoc bags for now.

We have four kits that were special and I like to keep them separate. There are now websites, for example, peeron.com and brickset.com that provide both the inventory and instructions of many of the Lego kits. The first kit I worked on saving is the 8865 Auto Chassis, the second will be the 8854 Power Crane, the third is a yet to be identified castle, and the fourth is another yet to be identified train. I printed out the inventory and began to sort the pieces. I slowly got the Auto Chassis under control. I cut up the inventory sheets and put the Lego pieces with their inventory slip into numerous ZipLoc bags. I also printed out the 38-page scanned instruction manual, punched holes in it and put it in a folder.I’m going to leave the Power Crane, castle and train for another weekend. I’m pretty sure I have most of the Power Crane, but I am not so sure about the castle and train, because they were already broken apart and spread into many miscellaneous bags.Update: Castle is 6085 Black Monarch’s Castle
Update: Train is 7720 Battery Train Set

Over the past few years I’ve been collecting old computers. Some have been mine and others have been my children’s. They have now gotten to a critical mass of four and I think it’s time to get rid of some of them.

Left to right: my cream-colored Gateway 300Mhz, Justin’s silver homebuilt from his college days, Matthew’s black Dell Dimension 8100 from his college days, my cream-colored homebuilt 800Mhz AMD AthlonI’ve selected one (Matthew’s old desktop machine) to be my next Linux system (previously I was using my Athlon machine). However, Matthew’s machine only has 128MB of memory and is seriously strapped performance-wise because of it – for example, no X-windows. Yet it’s the best of the bunch since it has a 1.3GHz Pentium 4. The downside is that it requires PC800 RDRAM memory which is expensive. While doing other things I’ve been sitting on eBay today bidding on 1GB (2x512MB sticks) of memory for it.

Now I have to get rid of the the other three junk machines. So today I’m also sitting here running Darik’s Boot and Nuke program from a CD on the Athlon machine. Running this program is not just a simple minute or two process. So far a 40GB drive took about 3 hours whereas two 20GB drives took about an hour each. Right now I have started a 20GB drive, and have a 30 GB and a 6GB still to do. You have got to have patience doing this.

We spent the last two days in Wimberley, Texas at the Creekhaven Bed and Breakfast. We ate, watched DVDs in bed, shopped, slept in, and ate some more. Breakfast was a buffet each morning, and Sunday’s french toast was especially great (done as a casserole). Also this was the first Saturday of the month, so that meant it was Market Days in Wimberley. We spent a few hours there touring the hundreds of booths, but we were good and didn’t buy much “stuff”. Kathy got some small stitched pieces, and I bought a DVD. It was so nice to just spend a few days together, just us.

Sorry for not posting in so long. Although things have been busy, I’ve not had the desire to post anything. Why I don’t exactly know…

I’ve been to my Dad’s 90th birthday in Buffalo, N.Y. in mid June with my family. I had a great time both at the party seeing my relatives and with my own family at a great bed-and-breakfast.

It was so nice to be with my grown children and their friends. Best wishes to my Dad. I’m so impressed with his longevity. I wish I lived closer to him so I could see him more often. Love Ya Dad!

Then I’ve been working. I continue to develop software for the Cell Broadband Engine. Development is almost done for my current project, and we’ll soon enter formal test. It’s interesting and challenging work. The other people I work with are great – smart, and hard-working.

Yesterday I goofed off. I did my long run in the morning, I watched two movies (Sicko and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix), and had lunch with Katie. Today I did various chores around the house: washed the kitchen floor, mowed the lawn, trimmed the garden bushes, and did the grocery shopping.

Two weeks ago we missed putting out the recycleables. By the time we got them out to the curb the containers were overflowing. So today I also bought a soda can crusher to help reduce the recyclable bulk.

It was fun using it.

Kathy and I went to IKEA today and bought two bookcases.

Then we got home and put them together. By that time we were exhausted and took a nap – not from the bookcases, but from my running and her yoga. Now she’s starting to fill it up with books and stuff.

Well I borrowed a game for the PS3 in my office. It’s called Resistance: The Fall of Man. It’s a first person shooter. Since I’m not a gamer I set it on “easy”. Well it wasn’t. Within a minute I had died and the game restarted from the beginning. After about 20 times I was still trying to get used to the controls and past the first obstacle. I was almost ready to give up. Yet one time I got just a little bit farther. So the next time I died I was reborn further on in the game. This gave me hope. I still don’t fully understand the controls and that’s a major source of frustration to me. Just to move forward, and backward is a struggle – aiming the gun is almost beyond me. I have to get to the point where I think and I automatically move the controls to match. This is a major limitation for beginners. After about 30 to 45 minutes of playing, my son phoned and asked to go see a movie. I found it very easy to call it quits and leave. Now I need to figure out how to turn the game off. Each button I push operates the game and so far none sent me back to the PS3 menu system. Something else to figure out.

I’ve been renting Blu-ray Discs and watching them sometimes before work, at lunch, and after work. So far I’ve rented three of them and watched two of them on the 24″ LCD panel in my office. I just rented the last one this weekend and I look forward to seeing some of it tomorrow. It takes me a couple of days to see the whole thing depending upon how busy I am at work. I turn off the office lights, plug in my headphones, and watch it. The 1920×1080 high-definition imagery has been spectacular. There was one movie which had some additional scenes in standard-definition and they were obviously not as good. I could get hooked on this quality. I consider this a technology investigation into what the PS3 provides – or at least that is what I’m saying and it’s true.
Update: Finished the third BD tonight after work. I borrowed “Resistance: Fall of Man” game from one of the people in my department at work. Need to keep investigating…

This weekend I installed Fedora Core 6 on the PS3 that I got a bit earlier. I used the following:

1. How to install Fedora Core 6 Linux for PS3
2. Documents of Linux for PS3
3. PS3 Linux – The void has been filled..Full install instructions for Fedora Core 5!

In addition I installed the IBM Cell Broadband Engine Software Development Kit version 2.1.

Kathy is bringing two Freebird’s Monster burritos to Katie and one to Kim. I bought them, froze them, removed the foil from them, and vacuum sealed them.

I took off the tin foil so the TSA would not get nervous when searching the luggage thinking it was some sort of explosive device (however, considering the amount of beans in these things this might be partially true).

Today I was given 2 surprise toys to play with at work: a 24″ LCD monitor (1920×1200) and a PS3.