I know how hard it is to keep warm in the winter, in fact me and my boyfriend Sean had the power fail in our San Francisco love nest last winter and it was dreadfully cold while we waited for things to be restored.
Luckily, we had each other to keep warm with, so after a while things sort of worked themselves out;-)
As for the computers and other powered devices in your house, I would recommend getting a gas-powered generator. These are popular with my friends in North Carolina who have to deal with hurricanes and the power outages they bring, and they seem like a sensible enough solution, i.e. they are readily available at most hardware stores (at least here in the U.S.). Plus they are ready to use and don't require any sort of electrical engineering knowledge to use safely (unlike some idiot here who recommended hooking up a bunch of deep cycling marine batteries in series, LOL!).
If you really want to geek it out, get a biiiig gas turbine and fire that sucker up when you need power. Nothing says "I have power!" like the high-pitched scream of a jet engine.
With my boyfriend. Well, not quite on as large a scale, but right after the Gay Pride parade happenings in San Francisco a few years ago, he showed me this really cool bar called Chaps. So all these hot men were there, dressed up in leather cowboy garb, and there were also a couple of computers running Linux in the corner.
We played Quake III for hours! It was a blast. My boyfriend, Sean, even showed me how what Nethack was all about. How kewl! Anyway, I had a great time and it was a kewl LAN party ^_^. I hope this is more of the same going on in the Netherlands.
So isn't that the guy of phreaking fame who found out that the cereal whistle hit 2600 hz?
My boyfriend, Sean, used to be quite the phreak himself. He took me out to a payphone one night after fooling around and he showed me how to get a free call! It was so kewl!
Anyway, staying on topic, I hope this turns out for the best for Cap'n Crunch. He sure taught us a thing or two about phones!
I don't know about rugged computers, but my partner, Sean, who works for Cisco, says that Cisco is working on water-tight routers for people such as yourself. Sean said I could join him for a super weekend testing his equipment for Cisco aboard a luxurious sailboat. I bet this thing would even survive most watersports!
So anyway, I hope that we don't break any equipment or anything, because Cisco gear is so nice. I brought my whole Celine Dion collection to pass the time while Sean does the submersion tests and stuff ^_^.
Even in these times of economic hardship, myself and my friends have been able to find internships in various technology companies around campus, usually during the summer. It works well with our class schedules and we even have time to go out clubbing at night ^_^
Besides, having a formal education in the first place already gives you a pretty solid resume. There are many people in the field of CS who are just starting out and are jumping right up from high school because they believe that they are "talented". Believe me, college pays off very quickly.
Just remember kids, college is an important part of your life. Not only will you gain valuable knowledge that will undoubtedly make your life more enriching, but you also get to pursue the social aspects of living on your own without partaking in the rat race (a lot of people get good life experience in college. I won't regret getting aquainted with "the boys," as we know each other in our fraternity.).
I have always found fan noise annoying in the past while I was trying to listen to my N'Sync MP3's (Justin Timberlake is *so* cute!). It would always interfere with my thoughts and was generally a nuisence.
Since I run an Athlon XP machine with lots of hot hard-ware in it, I found that underclocking to take a few degrees off of the CPU temperature was futile. It made about 10 degrees F of difference with the fan still on, and that just didn't seem like enough to risk my investment by running it without any active cooling.
So, I went with a water cooling solution. Although I decided to roll my own system using components available over the Internet, there are several cases that come with water cooling built in. Some of them don't even require a water pump, which is a super big plus if need absolutely zero noise, like me. I've been quite satisfied with mine so far, however, your milage may vary.
Sure, it's great to have another alternative to M$ Media format. Especially in the hotly contested arena of streaming multimedia. After all, the open source movement is based on the idea of having a choice in what software you run.
However, why would people really bother with this when they can stream Ogg Vorbis for Free (as in speech)? It's not as if there is anything currently on the market that has better quality than Ogg anyway. So why do people bother developing commercial software in this area?
It was super fun. I brought along my boyfriend, Sean, who works for Cisco and codes BSD on the side, and we checked out all the cool new stuff.
He was really fascinated with the new packet filter, he said he was coding something even better that he would release soon under the BSD license. He says it allows people to create stateful filtering of TCP connections. Anyway, there are a lot of kewl people on the BSD development team and I was surprised that more people didn't show up.
Combine this technology with the recent advent of the broadband laser, and we will be seeing some fast networking, indeed.
My partner, Sean, worked at Cisco for a while, before the economic implosion, and heard some things about 100Gbit networking projects in the works. It'll be really sweet to see this hit the market in a couple of years.
Slashdot Mirror
I know how hard it is to keep warm in the winter, in fact me and my boyfriend Sean had the power fail in our San Francisco love nest last winter and it was dreadfully cold while we waited for things to be restored.
;-)
Luckily, we had each other to keep warm with, so after a while things sort of worked themselves out
As for the computers and other powered devices in your house, I would recommend getting a gas-powered generator. These are popular with my friends in North Carolina who have to deal with hurricanes and the power outages they bring, and they seem like a sensible enough solution, i.e. they are readily available at most hardware stores (at least here in the U.S.). Plus they are ready to use and don't require any sort of electrical engineering knowledge to use safely (unlike some idiot here who recommended hooking up a bunch of deep cycling marine batteries in series, LOL!).
If you really want to geek it out, get a biiiig gas turbine and fire that sucker up when you need power. Nothing says "I have power!" like the high-pitched scream of a jet engine.
We played Quake III for hours! It was a blast. My boyfriend, Sean, even showed me how what Nethack was all about. How kewl! Anyway, I had a great time and it was a kewl LAN party ^_^. I hope this is more of the same going on in the Netherlands.
My boyfriend, Sean, used to be quite the phreak himself. He took me out to a payphone one night after fooling around and he showed me how to get a free call! It was so kewl!
Anyway, staying on topic, I hope this turns out for the best for Cap'n Crunch. He sure taught us a thing or two about phones!
So anyway, I hope that we don't break any equipment or anything, because Cisco gear is so nice. I brought my whole Celine Dion collection to pass the time while Sean does the submersion tests and stuff ^_^.
Besides, having a formal education in the first place already gives you a pretty solid resume. There are many people in the field of CS who are just starting out and are jumping right up from high school because they believe that they are "talented". Believe me, college pays off very quickly.
Just remember kids, college is an important part of your life. Not only will you gain valuable knowledge that will undoubtedly make your life more enriching, but you also get to pursue the social aspects of living on your own without partaking in the rat race (a lot of people get good life experience in college. I won't regret getting aquainted with "the boys," as we know each other in our fraternity.).
Since I run an Athlon XP machine with lots of hot hard-ware in it, I found that underclocking to take a few degrees off of the CPU temperature was futile. It made about 10 degrees F of difference with the fan still on, and that just didn't seem like enough to risk my investment by running it without any active cooling.
So, I went with a water cooling solution. Although I decided to roll my own system using components available over the Internet, there are several cases that come with water cooling built in. Some of them don't even require a water pump, which is a super big plus if need absolutely zero noise, like me. I've been quite satisfied with mine so far, however, your milage may vary.
However, why would people really bother with this when they can stream Ogg Vorbis for Free (as in speech)? It's not as if there is anything currently on the market that has better quality than Ogg anyway. So why do people bother developing commercial software in this area?
He was really fascinated with the new packet filter, he said he was coding something even better that he would release soon under the BSD license. He says it allows people to create stateful filtering of TCP connections. Anyway, there are a lot of kewl people on the BSD development team and I was surprised that more people didn't show up.
My partner, Sean, worked at Cisco for a while, before the economic implosion, and heard some things about 100Gbit networking projects in the works. It'll be really sweet to see this hit the market in a couple of years.