Drury, Fines, and Bricks
Posted by J.D. in Uncategorized on February 1st, 2010
Photo of a free brick (not from Drury)
This morning I received an email from my alma mater, Drury University. Leave it to them to try to sell you a brick (from a demolished building) for $20. Note, you will need to go pick up the brick and pay $20, it is not shipped to you 
.
While I have fond memories of my classmates at Drury as well as the majority of the faculty, I was never a fan of Drury’s financial policies nor their “security” policies. Especially the University’s penchant for giving students as many tickets as possible.
Do they not understand that: aggressively fining/ticketing people when they are poor college students may cause hard feelings that will prevent those same people from donating money (when they have it) later in life? Of course rules generally have reasons and I understand that fines are sometimes necessary, but IMHOÂ not to the extreme that I encountered in my four years at Drury….
Regardless, here’s the letter. I think I’ll pass on paying for a brick.
PS If Drury were offering to let alumni people come pick up a demolition brick for free, I wouldn’t be writing this.
A PIECE OF TURNER HALL
Turner and Belle Halls have been razed to make way for new and exciting building projects at Drury. Many alumni have cherished memories from their time in those two buildings. You can keep a piece of Drury history by purchasing a commemorative brick!
To reserve your Turner or Belle Hall brick, call [...], graduate assistant, at 417-873-[....].
Bricks cost $20 each and can be paid by check or credit card.
Bricks cannot be delivered or mailed.
The pickup site is at the Facilities Department main office on Clay Street.
Bricks can be picked up from 8am-5pm.
Favorite homebrew computers: 1997-2010
Posted by J.D. in Building, Computers, Daily Updates, Work on January 31st, 2010
Some people enjoy building hot rods, or building model airplanes. I enjoy building computers.
The first PC I built was in 1997, I was a sophomore in HS. I can still remember researching all the parts, using a computer in the HS science classroom (I didn’t have internet at home at that time). Tom’s Hardware and Anandtech were my primary sources of motherboard and CPU reviews. Those two sites helped me immensely in choosing the best components for my “first build”.
Since that time I’ve built around 35-40 computers. Some for friends, some for family, a lot for clients and a lot for myself (for business use and personal use). Some of the machines are rather forgettable, but there are others I’ll always remember .
So, here are some of my favorites spanning from 1997 to 2010:
3.1GHz Quad Core System on the Cheap: $200
Posted by J.D. in Building, Computers, Daily Updates on January 31st, 2010
The need for cheap speed!
Yesterday I read a nice little article over at Anandtech about unlocking the extra two cores in AMD Phenom II X2 555 CPUs. This lets you take a dual core CPU and turn it into a quad core CPU*.
*The extra two cores aren’t guaranteed to unlock and be 100% reliable, but it’s easy to stress test and see if your particular CPU can handle it. Reading other people’s experiences it looks like the success rate is 70%+ which is good enough for me to give it a shot. Worst case I’m left with a nice dual core system that could still be overclocked even if it couldn’t be unlocked.
I’ve been wanting to build a nice little system when I return from Hawaii, but I didn’t want to spend much money on it. This build looked perfect so I decided to bite the bullet!
CPU: X2 550 $90.99
I couldn’t find the X2 555 anywhere so I went with the AMD Phenom II X2 550 from NewEgg. That CPU is one step down from the 555, so a 3.1GHz CPU instead of 3.2GHz. The cooling fan was a bundle special on NewEgg, ending up only being $4.99
Memory: DDR2 $0 (already owned this)
I’m using spare DDR2 RAM that I already have at home. I should have at least 4GB and maybe even 8GB.
Motherboard: ASRock for $69.99
This was the toughest choice. I wanted cheap, reliable, and compact. I think I found all three . The ASRock A785GMH/128M. It supports a wide variety of AMD CPUs: AM3/AM2+/AM2 AMD 785G, has HDMI out (with audio passed through I believe), and is a nice small Micro ATX format.
It was a tough choice between integrated graphics or discrete (add on) graphics. I decided to get a board with integrated b/c it would cut costs and I can always disable it if I need more power. The built in HD 4200 graphics are actually decent enough for modern 3D games at lower resolutions: Sims 3, World of Warcraft (WoW) [29.4 FPS at 1280x1024 Source: AMD PDF], Left 4 Dead, etc. You can find some more gaming benchmarks here. I don’t do much hardcore gaming so this should do just fine for now .
Storage: SSD $0 (already owned this)
I’ll be putting a spare 80GB X-25M SSD in this machine, it should scream!
Case: ASUS TM-211 $25 (300 watt power supply included)
ASUS TM-211
I used some spare “eBay bucks” to get a case and power supply for $25. I would have liked to add a nice super-efficient power supply, but for now this one will do (and there’s a chance I already have a spare high efficiency PS at home). Plus I’ll be running it off of solar energy so there won’t be any adverse environmental effects if it sucks a little extra juice.
Total cost: $198.52
The total (including case) should be about $198.53. Of course I’m using RAM and a storage device that I already had. If you didn’t have those on hand then you could probably get RAM & HD for $50-$100 bucks. So you’re looking at $250-$300, still not bad for a pretty darn fast system!
Order Date: 2010.01.29
Order Summary
| Qty | Product Description | Price | |
| 1 |
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| 1 |
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| Shipped from TN, USA | |||
| 1 |
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| 1 |
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| 1 |
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| 1 |
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| Subtotal | $165.97 | ||
| Tax | $0.00 | ||
| UPS Ground | $7.56 | ||
| Order Total | $173.53 | ||
Alternatives to Drywall
Posted by J.D. in Household, Remodeling, Work on January 31st, 2010
We’re planning on turning my office into the baby’s room. That means a couple things: #1 I need to find a new place to work, and #2 we need to redo the room to be more appropriate for a baby.
Samantha already has a plan for #2, we’re putting in new carpeting and we’re going to paint the existing wood paneling.
My new office is still up in the air. We have some spaces that we could convert, but all of them will require some work. Since we don’t like (installing) drywall much, I’ve been looking at some alternatives. Just to see what’s out there. Here are a few misc links…
R.I.P. Sun Microsystems
You will be missed, but not forgotten.
Sun is no more. They completed their merger with Oracle.
I have fond memories of Sun. They were always trying something different. Sometimes with great success, other times with failure, and often with something in between.
When I was in college (1999-2003) studying CS and CIS, I liked Sun because they were pioneering with Java. Which at the time seemed to hold great promise as a “write once, run anywhere” language that might just take over the world. It didn’t quite take over the world, but it made an impact.
When I was in law school (2003-2006) I liked Sun because they were making some awesome Opteron x86 rackmount servers. I had some of those servers* (purchased used) in a datacenter in downtown Tulsa. What was particularly cool was that on my way to the datacenter I would walk past a Sun office suite in the same building. I always thought Sun was cool and I liked being in such close proximity to one of their offices.
*We still use a SunFire V20Z at Weblogs.us today. In my opinion, Sun made some of the finest server hardware ever made. Better than HP, better than Dell.
After law school and passing the bar exam (2006 and beyond), I liked Sun because they were pioneering the multi-core, low power draw CPU. Specifically the UltraSPARC T2 a.k.a coolthreads. This was an exciting CPU after the bad taste left by Intel’s high GHz, high power draw, low performance P4 series. Sun was also pushing a file system, ZFS, that was capable of some very impressive things.
In their later years, Sun was a company that was very accessible. Via their employee blogs, via their attitude, and via their push for open source. Getting to read their developer blogs and learn cool tips and tricks, as well as insights into what was happening inside the company. This was a very nice change from companies like Apple where we get spoon fed info by Steve and company at sporadic “events”. Same deal with MS where we get big glitzy shows that don’t really do much for the end user. I can’t tell you how nice it was to have a company that seemed to really be trying to be open and responsive to their customers.
Of course there are criticisms that can be leveled at Sun. Mistakes that can be pointed out… but in the end I like to think of their wins and not their losses.
Thanks for all the great memories Sun, I’ll always remember the good times…
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