Month: October 2022

Yesterday I got my new PC build in, and spent most of the afternoon setting it up. It took longer than I anticipated — of course — as the Win10 image I was using didn’t have storage support for my mobo, and I couldn’t load it manually. A fresh download and new ISO did the trick.

I’ve been using the same gaming machine for almost eight years. I bought it before the release of the Oculus CV1, which would have made this last build somewhere around Thanksgiving of 2015. It’s served me well over the years, the only upgrades I’ve done were storage and a RTX 3070. It became apparent after this GPU upgrade that the CPU was terribly behind.

So yesterday I pulled out all the old components out of the case, and spent some time cleaning every fan blade with my little DataVac. I really haven’t built a new PC since this last one, and I was a bit overwhelmed with all the fan and PSU component and connections. I had another miss because the CPU I bought, a i9 11900 something-or-other, didn’t have discrete graphics support, meaning it needed a GPU. I try to fire up the mainboard with as few components as possible, and couldn’t for the life of me figure out why I had no video! So I figured that out, and finally got everything setup late in the evening, and managed to get in a session playing Terra Invicta. I also played Tarkov, but didn’t mess with any of the graphics settings. With vsync off I was getting well over 170 fps, but I didn’t have all the bells and whistles turned on. The one thing I did notice is that my stash pulled up faster, there’s usually a second or two where all the items have to load and it seemed noticeably quicker than usual.

It’s funny because CPU speeds haven’t gotten that much faster. 3.5GHz is about the same as I had before, but the number of cores is a lot more. I didn’t notice things being that much faster, but the system should be able to handle a lot more. I may try running Stable Diffusion on it and see whether it’s faster than my Macbook or Google Colab studio.

So I’ve still got a new case here that I bought. Simpler than the Thermaltake one that I was using before. I’m going to take my old PC components and load it up in the case, then pull the GPU out of Elder’s machine and shuffle them around. Old parts are going to Goodwill. Or maybe Younger, I’m not sure yet.

Right now my office is a huge mess, there’s boxes everywhere, my desk is a wreck, so I need to get busy cleaning that up and putting things away. I’ve got some important meetings this afternoon.

After work we’re loading up the car and taking a road trip, heading to my FIL’s. There’s a fall festival where he lives, and we’re meeting my mom up there as well. I’m also hoping I can get some mountain biking in while we’re there, but we’ll see how that goes.

Younger was being very challenging this morning. She said she was tired so I was content to let her sleep in. I was tired also. She didn’t stay in her room for long, I caught her trying to slide out of her room on her belly. She was trying to stay below my line of sight — I can see her doorway and the hall as I lay on my side on the edge of the bed. I just had to raise my head a few inches and there she was, with her tablet, trying to sneak downstairs. I tried to coax her back to the bathroom to do her morning chores instead, but she fought me every step of the way. After I finally got her to school I saw that she had thrown sand and mud on the car in the one minute she was outside without me.

So the whole morning was thrown off, although it wasn’t really her fault. I stayed up late last night “doing research” as I call it now, culminating with a thirty dollar purchase on Steam. Today should still be productive though, I have plenty on my to-do list that I’m ready to get to.

So I’m officially an old man now, I kid. I went to get new glasses a few weeks ago and they sold me bifocals, or as they’re called, progressive lenses. Whatever.

Fall is officially here, with weather in the forty to sixty degree range. The first day of fall the temperature plunged from the mid-eighties down into the forties. I joked that the weather looked at it’s calendar, said “it’s fall y’all”, and cranked down the thermostat.

I’ve started meditating first thing in the morning again. I’m not quite sure why I stopped, although if I’m being honest with myself it’s probably due to cannabis. So for the last month, month and a half I’ve just been getting up and getting straight to work. I’m trying to get back to my practice. So here I am.

I finally tore down my mining rig and disposed of it, I gave it to my friend Ed. The equipment is still good but it wasn’t worth my time to try and sell it off. GPU prices crashed — rather returned to normal — because of the ETH merge to PoS. So the rig is gone, and I finally repurposed my Alienware laptop. It never really ran Ubuntu really well, and I moved the last of my scripts off of it, wiped it, and put Win10 back on it. It’s going to replace Missus’s current desktop.

I ordered a new build gaming PC yesterday. The one I have currently is holding up well, but I’ve got a 3070 in it and the CPU and memory are the bottleneck now, so I built a modest rig (sans GPU) for under $1100. It should be here tomorrow. So I’ll be shuffling them all down the line. My current one will go to the girls, and that one will get donated or something. I don’t even know how old that last one is. I think I’ve had it at least ten years or more.

The family and I are in a really good spot right now, I’m making more money than I know what to do with. I’m buying about three grand of crypto a month, doubled my rent payments into the house fund, am tucking another four grand a month for auto and home, and still paying off the CC bill every month. And then this weekend I found that I had an extra $500 in my paycheck. Apparently I hit some Social Security maximum, so I’ll be getting an extra three grand before the end of the year.

So yea, money has been burning a hole in my pocket. So far I’ve been able to keep myself from doing anything quite so stupid with my cash, like buying a sport car or motorcycle. I have gone kind of crazy with groceries and some small subscriptions for things, but besides windows for the house, I haven’t made any large purchases.

We are going to Costa Rica for Christmas. We had flight vouchers for the Hawaii trip that we needed to use, so we went ahead and booked a trip. We’ll be staying at an all-inclusive, and even that isn’t costing us that much because of travel miles.

So yesterday’s “flood” was anticlimactic. Ian, or what was left of it, turned, sparing us from any threat. This was after I went into full fledged daddy-bear mode, and wound up trying to prepare for the worst while my wife looked on bemusedly. D. wound up buying sandbags and a load of sand, so I helped him, even though he lives several houses further away from the river than us. I figured if he was going to need them then we were going to be hit very bad, but I gave him a hand anyways, filling bags to put in front of his garage doors. He even went back out and got a second load of sand so that we could put them down in front of mine. They were totally unnecessary.

So now I’m the proud owner of about thirty-odd sandbags, still laying in front of the garage. I’ll probably stack them up inside the garage somewhere — I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before I’ll need them again.

I wasn’t able to do any work yesterday with the girls and D.’s kids stuck in the house all day. They weren’t too bad, but even on their best days I’m unable to concentrate on anything important, so I had to cancel my meetings for the start of the sprint. So that’s first on today’s agenda.

The last 426 event was a smash success. Our DAO update went off without much trouble, the team had prepped things well and we ran into a few wet paint issues that we quickly took care of. In all, we had almost one million dollars of ATLAS locked up within twenty-four hours of launch. I spent the last week working on some data analysis; the team knew what they had to do so I didn’t have to spent much time with my PM hat on, but I did want to have some basic metrics in place. I used Flipside Crypto’s SQL index of Solana transactions to pull data into a Colab notebook where I could manipulate it with Pandas. It was fun, and I’d like to do more with it, but I think I’ll be tied up with other tasks this week.

So the remnants of Hurricane Ian have stalled off the coast, causing Nor’easter conditions. We’re expecting an afternoon storm surge five foot above sea level, which may be enough to flood the entire foundation of the house. I expect the backyard shed and front garage to flood, so I’ve got some work to do the next six hours.

D. has already picked up some sand and bags and is trying to protect his garage. He’s much further down the street that we are, so if he’s flooding we are definitely fucked. I think we stand a much better chance of moving our stuff around, his garage is packed full of stuff. I’m going to go help him load up his bags, then I’ll try to front run the flooding to keep any chemicals or tools from getting ruined.

Missus seems somewhat nonchalant about the situation, which is surprising as she’s usually the anxious one. Who knows, maybe it’ll all be for naught, but it does go to some higher-level anxiety that I’ve had since we bought this house. It’s going to flood at some point, the question is when. I’ve been a bit crazed lately over the global macroeconomic situation, mainly with interest rates in the US. Who knew that the baller thing to do in 2021 was lock in a two percent mortgage?

Part of me has long been anxious that we would never be able to sell this house. It already had minor flood damage before we bought it, and I just anticipate having a hard time trying to sell it after we’ve scored a direct hit from a real storm. That unease has been further exacerbated by the fact that the housing market has cooled down now that rates are at seven percent or whatever.

I’m going to try and clean up the garage and get a couple more things out of the shed. If the garage floods I will have a big mess to clean up, so I’m going to try and get things off the floor as much as possible.

I’m not concerned with personal health, we’re not in danger. We’ve got plenty of emergency supplies and non-perishable food. We’ll be fine. I just don’t want to have to spend days or weeks cleaning up the mess and throwing out ruined construction materials or whatever junk I’ve got laying around. And the last thing I want is to have to deal with FEMA flood insurance. That would be the real disaster.