You know you're at a geek housewarming party when...
A person throws an item into the air and catches it again, and asks at what point in the air it undergoes maximum accleration (trying to trick the non-physics types). The answers from the floor were (in order):

• Duh, acceleration under gravity is constant;
• We're not in a vacuum, so acceleration is most when air-resistance is zero, at the top of the object's flight, when it's stationary;
• The gravitational field is not constant, so ignoring air resistance, the accerlation is at a maximum at the bottom of the flight, when it's closest to the earth.

These answers were then discussed and unified into a single answer that the acceleration is greatest at the start of the objects flight, since the gravitation pull is strongest at that time, and the force from air-resistance is in a downwards direction.

The conversation then proceeded onwards to discuss what effects a lowering of the speed of light would have on the amount of energy present in the universe, an attempt to explain entanglement and its use in quantum communication, and deciding who should play in the first game of twister.

Geeks, all of us.

Selling items on eBay
Pentium 100MHz CPU: $5.50
Socket-7 Motherboard: $9.51
16Mb EDO RAM: $4.25

Selling the hard-drive that caught fire for more than all the above? Priceless

New machine
Discovered that hard-drives can overheat as well, especially when you have four 7200 RPM drives all next to each other. Enough heat buildup to fry an egg. Shall be investing in a case fan and some mounting brackets to avoid thermal shutdowns.

Junk that sells
Someone is buying my dead hard-drive on eBay. In fact, there's been two people bidding on it. I wonder if it's because they've realised it's still under warantee?

New machine
Have the tower case, hard-drives and RAM. Mobo and CPU are to be delivered shortly. All the other bits are coming out of our current server (a P133 machine). Starting off with 160Gb in RAID-5 (3x 80Gb drives), I figure that if I need more space it will be much cheaper adding more drives later, rather than going a full 240Gb worth of RAID now.

Very happy that woody is stable now, since potato really was starting to show its age.

Upgrade will probably happen late this week when all the remaining bits arrive. Hate having to actually touch the hardware and deal with messy heatsink compounds and cut my thumb on sharp edge cases and all the rest of it. I'll be glad when it's finished, though.

Really wanting to move the office to its new location, which involves getting some recabling done by a person in posession of an Austel license. Awfully convenient that my future father-in-law has one of them.

Backups
Tape drive still works a treat. All machines on the network are very happy to connect to the machine with the tape-drive to do backups.

My next plan is to make a big storage machine (~240Gb in a RAID-5 configuration), and hang the tape drive off that. Workstations will use the network storage whenever possible. Keeping up-to-date backups for a single machine is much more attractive than many seperate machines. I'm hoping I can do most of the set-up this weekend.

The next stage is to move the office to the 3rd bedroom (more space, better view), and put the noisy server machines in a cupboard or other out-of-the-way place. Jacinta's workstation is the noisiest machine of all, containing four fans (1 x PSU, 1 x Case, 1 x CPU, 1 x GPU) all in the space of a small shoebox. I don't know what I'll do to quieten it down.