Slacr

So my new machine is up and running. Quite nicely in fact. I'm especially fond of the modular power supply, as it is built like a tank. My only real worry is that the motherboard sags quite significantly (about an eighth of an inch) under the stock Intel heatsink. It is hard to tell if the sagging is from the weight of the heatsink itself or the pressure I had to apply to install it. Honestly not sure which scenario would be worse. I can't imagine the stock heatsink would be so heavy as to cause the motherboard to sag, but it's not like I pushed that hard on it either. So far everything seems to be running stably, but it just worries me.

The case itself is pretty tight, especially when I had to lace the IDE cable for my DVD drive. For that reason I returned that drive and got a SATA version. The SATA cables are nice and small.

Gentoo installation has so far gone well. All my hardware seems to be supported and I got X correctly configured the first try. The quad core seems to make compiling faster, but I haven't actually tried an objective comparison. Right now it is chugging away on OpenOffice, Firefox, Pidgin, and Conky. When I get home I'll sort out the Java mess and get Eclipse, Ruby, Rails, and Erlang compiled. Then I'll set up Samba and Cups. I know the printer sharing works, but still have to figure out the automatic driver serving. At the moment the client machine has to have the driver preloaded, which isn't a big deal for Ben or Kathy, but it'd be nice if it worked for any visitors too.

I'm also looking forward to trying out AzSMRC and Virtualbox. Hopefully I'll have enough time tonight to mess with that. If not, I guess I have all weekend.

Got new tires last night. Car = smooth as silk now.

Only other real focus at the moment is turning the financial situation around. I have been on a huge spending spree since I got home (computer, tires, apartment, shoes) and don't get my first paycheck until September 7th, which will immediately be passed on to American Express. I look forward to the day when I am putting money back into savings, which should be around October 5th by my latest estimate. Bonus points if harry and I get that side gig, which would move up F-Day quite a bit.