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Recent life (warning: IT geeking)
11 years ago
General
Luna and I have been doing very well. Gigi, our new dog, has been settling in very nicely and has been cooperative and snuggly. I suppose I should upload a picture of her, eh?
Finally upgraded to smartphones... ended up with iPhone 5c because I couldn't afford anything else. Still not completely sure I'm able to afford it... we'll just have to wait and see how bad the bills are.
Luna has been drawing and creating art (though those iPhone games have been distracting us both >.>), and she's been doing fine. There's a possibility that she might start doing some commissions at some point; if that happens we'll probably create a joint site profile with myself as the caretaker and her hiding behind the curtain where she's most comfortable. Her own personal project still moves forward, and I'm helping.
Work's been great. This year I've been moved from an isolated lab to a new, larger lab at our largest complex (the only location we have other than the main office that has a domain controller!) and I'm basically the sole resident tech there.
Because this was such a big responsibility, I created a monstrosity of a work terminal to support me - being the primary IT bench tech at a location has perks. I cobbled together a dual terminal setup with three monitors for my work - twin Dell Precision 690 "power desktops" (that is, large desktops with server motherboards in them) that I software linked over the network (I can control them both with one single keyboard and mouse). One half does most of my work (Gemini Alpha) and the other half is a dedicated A/V transcoding system, video database, and burner (Gemini Beta). After realizing the agency's entire video database was on one single and very droppable external hard drive, I said "Yeah, we need a dedicated video storage server."
So Gemini was born.
She's probably the most powerful terminal(s) I've ever created (she consumes 1400W of power!). Precision 690 motherboards are equipped with integrated RAID controllers (I'm not actually using them though), eight RAM slots, and two chip sockets. Between her two identical halves, Gemini boasts a total of eight Xeon cores (two cores in each of the four chips, two chips per half), 16 GB of RAM (eight on each side), and four hard drives.
Alpha has two monitors and Beta takes the third. The interesting thing is that I installed XP on Beta and Win7 on Alpha - primarily because of the transcoder. In an agency that uses primarily outdated and donated parts, our transcoder only works in XP. I have Beta permanently connected to a VCR for VHS conversion.
Beta's monitor can also be switched to a video feed from the diagnostic bench on the other end of the room, which itself has a four-port KVM switch. I can keep an eye on any machine on the bench while sitting at my terminal.
Because I decided that such a powerful admin terminal needed some flair, I also customized both of Gemini's halves with a full LCARS interface. While I did enjoy Star Trek a lot while I was younger, I chose this less because of being a fan and more because I find the LCARS system to be an elegant and official-looking interface. Gemini is an important terminal, and needs to look the part. She does talk, but it's not the computer voice from Star Trek; I chose Savant's voice from the old Sierra game Outpost 2. She has a much smoother voice.
The next step? I plan to scavenge a microphone and teach Gemini to respond to voice commands. The LCARS interface software actually already has functionality for that. I'm pretty damn proud of this machine - so much so that I took a picture of her :P
Annnnnyway, hope you all are doing well. The diagnostic bench is trying to get my attention - I've got work to do.
Finally upgraded to smartphones... ended up with iPhone 5c because I couldn't afford anything else. Still not completely sure I'm able to afford it... we'll just have to wait and see how bad the bills are.
Luna has been drawing and creating art (though those iPhone games have been distracting us both >.>), and she's been doing fine. There's a possibility that she might start doing some commissions at some point; if that happens we'll probably create a joint site profile with myself as the caretaker and her hiding behind the curtain where she's most comfortable. Her own personal project still moves forward, and I'm helping.
Work's been great. This year I've been moved from an isolated lab to a new, larger lab at our largest complex (the only location we have other than the main office that has a domain controller!) and I'm basically the sole resident tech there.
Because this was such a big responsibility, I created a monstrosity of a work terminal to support me - being the primary IT bench tech at a location has perks. I cobbled together a dual terminal setup with three monitors for my work - twin Dell Precision 690 "power desktops" (that is, large desktops with server motherboards in them) that I software linked over the network (I can control them both with one single keyboard and mouse). One half does most of my work (Gemini Alpha) and the other half is a dedicated A/V transcoding system, video database, and burner (Gemini Beta). After realizing the agency's entire video database was on one single and very droppable external hard drive, I said "Yeah, we need a dedicated video storage server."
So Gemini was born.
She's probably the most powerful terminal(s) I've ever created (she consumes 1400W of power!). Precision 690 motherboards are equipped with integrated RAID controllers (I'm not actually using them though), eight RAM slots, and two chip sockets. Between her two identical halves, Gemini boasts a total of eight Xeon cores (two cores in each of the four chips, two chips per half), 16 GB of RAM (eight on each side), and four hard drives.
Alpha has two monitors and Beta takes the third. The interesting thing is that I installed XP on Beta and Win7 on Alpha - primarily because of the transcoder. In an agency that uses primarily outdated and donated parts, our transcoder only works in XP. I have Beta permanently connected to a VCR for VHS conversion.
Beta's monitor can also be switched to a video feed from the diagnostic bench on the other end of the room, which itself has a four-port KVM switch. I can keep an eye on any machine on the bench while sitting at my terminal.
Because I decided that such a powerful admin terminal needed some flair, I also customized both of Gemini's halves with a full LCARS interface. While I did enjoy Star Trek a lot while I was younger, I chose this less because of being a fan and more because I find the LCARS system to be an elegant and official-looking interface. Gemini is an important terminal, and needs to look the part. She does talk, but it's not the computer voice from Star Trek; I chose Savant's voice from the old Sierra game Outpost 2. She has a much smoother voice.
The next step? I plan to scavenge a microphone and teach Gemini to respond to voice commands. The LCARS interface software actually already has functionality for that. I'm pretty damn proud of this machine - so much so that I took a picture of her :P
Annnnnyway, hope you all are doing well. The diagnostic bench is trying to get my attention - I've got work to do.
Also, thank yourself that your not doing realtime encoding of 4:2:2 1080p SDI to MPEG2 ASI, Ive been working for months on getting that machine to work well. Right now its all chunky.
Also, you might have LCARS but I have the uniform: http://www.anovos.com/products/star.....suit-pre-order
Beta's transcoder is laughably basic - a domestic USB-based one. I still get good results though, and that's all that matters. The issue comes up with the Roxio DVD authoring software I've got... the damn thing can't even handle HD resolution from one of those old discontinued FlipShare cameras. It took me a WEEK of tinkering to figure out that the resolution needed to be reduced before the software would even load the files. But that's why I built Gemini, to deal with these things.
I like my uniform in STO better. :P
It runs over the top of Windows. Have fun :) There are others, but they're all dummy interfaces. This is the only one that actually gives you a practical interface for everyday use.