August 16, 2006

It is a beautiful today to be working from home. The sun is shining and the breeze is cool. For the first time in a long time we decided to pull open the living room drapes and enjoy some natural light. That only lasted so long though because a gang of local kids all came and pressed their faces up to the glass and watched us. No I am not kidding. Yes it is unbelievable. But four kids ranging from five to thirteen years old just stood on our porch with their faces literally touching the sliding glass doors just looking in to our house. They wouldn’t even stop when I gave them a dirty look. They didn’t even leave while I was pulling the drapes back. They kept staring right up until I couldn’t see them anymore and heaven only knows how long they kept trying after that. I can’t believe the kind of people who live around us. It is awful.

I took my laptop out and Dominica and I were able to spend a nice leaisurely hour or two at the Omega Diner having breakfast and coffee while I worked. Boy is it nice to be able to work from the diner sometimes.

It was a more or less relaxing day. Dominica got a call about an interesting sounding help desk position over in Nutley, New Jersey for a pharmaceutical. That would be a good fit for her background, I think.

This evening we watched several episodes of Ballykissangel before going to bed at midnight. We have to make it through the second season this week so that dad can take the DVD back with him. Dad is coming down to visit for the weekend and to celebrate Dominica’s twenty-eighth birthday on Monday. He is coming down on Friday night and leaving in the early afternoon on Monday. He is staying at the Ramada right across from the apartment.

I spent the evening piecing together a low cost, low power consumption PC to try out for the school in Castile. I am interested in seeing how the AMD Geode processor will perform at the school. The reason that I am interested in the Geode processor, even though it is only 32-bit, is that it uses only fourteen watts of power under a normal load and far less at idle. That means far lower power costs for the school as well as less heat and noise being generated in the computer lab. I would really like to use the slower and less powerful Geode NX 1500@6W processor that is so power efficient that it does not need a cooling fan. But, that processor appears to simply not be available on the market. Hewlett-Packard is using it in one of their thin client machines but I can’t find anyone selling just the processors or the processors combined with a motherboard here in the States. The somewhat slower processor really seems like it would be the perfect chip for us at the school where even it would be significantly faster than most of the CPU’s that we are currently using. Our fastest machines are currently Intel Pentium III 1GHz boxes. The AMD Geode that we are putting in is a 1.4GHz unit that will use 333MHz memory instead of the PIII’s 133MHz.

Leave a comment