At home, taking up a LARGE portion of my desk… is a monster!
I’m not sure exactly when my computer left my grasp and became a mutant, something which should not exist… but it has, and I was blind to this… until recently…
I have two 20" Sony Trinitron Monitors on either side of one 17" Trinitron. This three headed monster, is terribly powerful, he is fuled by half a GB of RAM next to a 1.4Ghz processor and 128MB of video RAM… his appetite is enormous, 80GB of HD space. Surround sound started to grow up the walls, they attached themselves like some sort of roots, and a large sub-woofer began to shake the room, as if to announce the prescens of something terrible.
And what do I do with this terrible fiend, how to I harness his power, and use it for my own gain? I surf the net, e-mail… Check the boards… MAN, what a terrible waste…
Yeah, somehow I managed to convince Mr. Athena that I needed a 2.53 Ghz machine with a 21" monitor, Ti4600 video card, and 120 Gig hard drive in order to do my work. And what work is that, you ask? Could it be 3D modelling? Compute intensive mathematical processing? Managing databases containing 5 billion records?
Nope. I’m a tech writer. I use MS Word. I also surf the net a fair bit, and write some email.
(but all that power sure does come in handy when I start up the games! whoo-hoo, does GTA ever run FAST!)
In my home now is currently a network with 3 (MS, Novell, and Linux) servers and 6 workstations. 2 boxes for me, one for each brat, one for the wife, and one in the guest room. Links are provided by a cisco 24 port 10/100 switch, all connected to the internet via cable. There are 3 printers in the house, all hosting on JetDirect cards.
I’m hoping to add a new box soon so I can start playing with AFS.
Mine sort of creeped to the left and invaded my entertainment center. Now my computer and its extended borg-family occupies one entire wall of my living room and the adjacent corner. At least I recently moved one of its monitors to the other side of the room…unfortunately, it was an act of mitosis as I just hooked up to another computer. There is no escape. Resistance is, uh, you know.
Yep I’ve got a full wall, with a twin headed, twin boxed monster, riding high upon a rack of about 30 pieces of audiogear, and about 12 speakers dotting the landscape in front of me. The spaghetti of hundreds of cables would make even the most hardcore geek weep with joy.
I’ve got servers, workstations, scanners, CD burners, switches, routers, hubs, 2 17 in. monitors, 2 19’s, 1 flat screen monitor, laptops, and at least four boxes of miscellaneous spare parts.
And none of it is hooked up. Just my laptop, issued by my employer. I’m the Anti-Geek.
I have a scanner on one side of my G4, a 17" LCD monitor (I hope to add a second monitor eventually) and a Firewire CD burner, Firewire 80 gig external drive, and a cable modem on the other side. I added 1 Gig of RAM (so it now has 1.12 gigs of RAM) and had a 120 gig internal hard drive added (to compliment the 40 gig hard drive that came with it). There’s room for another hard drive, and several PCI slots for who knows what. There’s room for an Airport card, but that can wait too.
I’ve got another sooped-up PowerMac coming soon, it’s got Firewire, 80 gig hard drive, double monitor card, and more. And then there’s my old PC, which I still enjoy using from time to time, and hope to eventually replace with a newer, spiffier PC.
Why do I need all these computers? Well, I do a lot of Photoshop work, so the graphics files do take up a lot of space. (They do! They really do! I can easily make a 100 MB Photoshop file in one sitting.) But it’s just because I have to have them.
I just got back from Korea, and not all of my toys have made it back to me yet, but this is what I’ll have when they arrive:
Pentium 4 desktop, 1.7 GHz, 784 MB RAM
Pentium 3 desktop, 750 MHz, 512 MB RAM
Scads of hard drives in removable racks
Three 17" monitors
Two printers (I’ll pass one on to a nephew, I think)
A six feet tall stack of audio components - mixer, amp, effects, audio interfaces, etc.
What do I do with it? I’m really good at finding rationalizations for more CPU power.
My current favorite software toy is Reaktor, which is a modular software synthesizer. More processor power means I can create more complex synths.
And I just saw the movie “Waking Life” and I’d really like to try breaking a video into individual frames, applying Photoshop or Painter effects to each frame, and then putting the movie back together again. (I believe both Photoshop and Painter have batch processing capabilities.)
And when I’m not using my computers, I run Folding@Home, A distributed computing project from Stanford that models protein folding.
Oh, and I’d really like to get a third computer to add to the entertainment center to act as a TiVo/DVD recorder. It would also let me mix my own music in 5.1 surround. I’m gonna put that off until DVD recording technology matures a little more. Not to mention that my bank account needs a break.
My computer stays out late, does drugs and locks its keyboard when it goes out. I don’t know any of its friends anymore, except that one is called “H@1<3rD00d”, and last week it got a tattoo that says “SDBM - Born To Cite.”
I’m gonna put that off until DVD recording technology matures a little more. Not to mention that my bank account needs a break.