Blog entries from January, 2006

This morning I picked up the two new SGI systems to add to my collection. The O2 is very cool and I will need to take photos of them and then work out what to keep and where to keep it.

However I an envious of this acquisition of sun hardware, the sorting of which is being tracked.

I am currently on leave from work for two weeks and this morning I remembered that I needed to send an email with some information that would keep a project moving while I wasn’t there. In the process of doing this I noticed an email sent a scant four minutes earlier in which four SGI Indy systems and a single SGI O2 system were offered. For free! I quickly responded asking if the O2 and R5000 Indy were available… they are now mine, once I can organise some time to collect them…

Following on from my update earlier today I have also put up some meaningful descriptions of the photos of the PS/2 50z.

On the first day of my two week break from work I didn’t really do much. I did continue to discard unwanted items from my collection but mostly I relaxed and while I was doing that I realised I needed to move toward a more template based system to make the editing of each item’s page easier which led to the update of the IBM JX page.

Tonight was the first Melbourne Perl Mongers meeting of the year. Normally the meeting is on the second Wednesday of all months except for January. As the December meeting was overshadowed by OSDC 2005 and the February meeting will actually be a OSDClub meeting it was felt that a casual meeting with a few lightning talks would be appropriate.

Back in December while on the train to the third day of the conference I had an idea for a lightning talk: use photos to tell the story of why I scrape eBay into an iCal file that is then sync to my phone so I automatically get reminders about auctions I am watching or bidding on. Around about 95% of the talk would be gratuitous photos of my computer collection.

Now I actually spent about fifteen minutes on Tuesday night taking semi-random photos of my collection with the intention of taking the remaining photos (such as a screen showing the end of an eBay auction) sometime today. That did not happen. However when I saw that there were only three people prepared to do talks this evening I for some unknown reason (suspicion is placed with the two pints of pre-meeting beer) stuck my hand up with the intention of winging the actual perl related parts of the talk.

So after a minute or so flipping through the photos I had taken on Tuesday I ended up just browsing through this site to bring up the detailed photos of the interesting items in the collection. I have no idea how well the talk went but it did spur a couple of conversations about old hardware over dinner at the pub and I may end up getting a few new items…

As I mentioned on Friday, the others have arrived. Today was very disruptive as the boxes were first brought in (by the removalists) and then unpacked. It was pretty much all done by lunchtime at which point the small round table in the kitchen simply could not cope…

Also since it will also be a week or so until furniture arrives for the photocopier and meeting rooms we will still have to deal with the random assortment of junk in and out of boxes that is currently our stationery area…

Since the last change in the office dynamic (I am not counting the most recent arrivals as they moved into the far side of the open plan area) it has pretty much settled down and everyone is getting along. I suspect this may be because people are starting to take greater advantage of headphones and music, I know I am…

However on Monday the remainder of the people who we shared a basement floor on campus with many many months ago will be moving across on Monday. While we will outnumber them three to one in the open plan area I predict that they will be, at least at first, much more distuptive as they get the desks in the middle. ie there is no buffer and one of the two paths from my desk to anything else is through their area. That said I am being optimistic by thinking that the disruption will only last a couple of days until our routines are integrated.

Now although it won’t affect those of us in the open plan area much I suspect that those people in the smaller open plan area (three people in five desks) and the offices at the front will be in for a much bumpier ride. Why? Because the renovations are slightly incomplete (in the grand scheme it is only little things like the desks being assembled and partitions put up…) and unless it is done over the weekend (highly unlikely) it will get done while they are trying to work…

Three books by Lawrence Lessig were waiting for me when I arrived home today:

• Free Culture
• The Future of Ideas
• Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace

I expect these to be very interesting to read. If I can find the time…

Since my decision last week to start being ruthless with what I keep in my computer collection I have been constantly dumbfounded by what I thought was worth keeping. Just some of the items that ended up on the discard pile were:

• An entire box (around 20) of old ISA I/O cards that ranged from 8-bit cards that provided two parallel and two serial ports, to16-bit cards with parallel, serial and IDE.
• Another box packed full with the connectors mounted on backplates for the aforementioned I/O cards.
• Yet another box of video card. These were more varied than the I/O cards but in this case I did keep the more unusual ones (eg an 8-bit VGA card) and one or two others. It is highly likely that the ones I did keep will also end up with the rest…

On the last day of my break before I return to work I decided that I should get started on sorting out my computer collection. The first step was to at least move the empty boxes and other junk that had accumulated on the floor … which didn’t get completed…

However it was a productive afternoon as I now have four piles in the area outside my room:

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