A lack of everything

It’s been quite some time… (n’yah, yet again another post that starts with this lame excuse) …but I haven’t actually found the right amount of enthusiasm to write. And last but not least, nothing worth writing about happened.

For the those of you interested in my “sports career” I can tell you, that it is currently not existing. I’m pushing the gym appointment in my schedule from one week to another and it’s frustrating. On the one hand I feel the lust and passion to get to gym again, but on the other side I’m just sick and tired of this stuff. Right now, there’s a massive need to actually do some sports because I – once again – gained a lot of weight and my nutrition in the recent has been more than just wrong. According to my BMI and a look in the mirror I’m obese.

But like I said, it’s some sort of a battle of conscience in my head and I wonder who’s going to win. My next appointment for gym is set for tomorrow afternoon and I’ll tell you in the near future if I made it or dumped it.

Yet another hobby of mine that got a little abandoned is the photography. But that’s basically a problem with everything that I currently have no real drive or creative inspiration to go out and take pictures. Right now it’s just the comic books that give a little bit of satisfaction and enthusiasm.

Well, that’s not the real truth. I’ve bought a new notebook a couple of days ago. Actually it’s a refurbished one – an IBM ThinkPad with Core 2 Duo processor. I’ve added a few more gigs of RAM that I had around and replaced the HDD with a faster model by Western Digital and this baby runs like hell with a Linux Mint installation on it. That’s basically why I bought this notebook, because I felt a little “disconnected” with Linux and everything what’s going on in the scene.

I’ve rented this vServer for TeamSpeak several other net related things, but the maintenance is not that intense, that I’ve to work with Linux on a daily basis. And in my current job I do more IT management that actual IT administration, but hopefully this will change during the next two years.

So as you can see, there isn’t anything special going on at the moment. I’m having this serious issues with my sports activities – or the lack of it. And my creative inspiration is still gone and missing.

Time to start it over

It’s pretty much a week now that my new gaming rig is up and running and my first summarization is: “I’m happy and satisfied”

The performance increase is so massive it’s such a pleasure to work with this system. I’ve done several benchmarks and lots and lots of stability tests and the final setup is far beyond my expectations. I didn’t wanted to have ultra hardcore settings these times for one simple reason. I did not want to burn my rig as fast as possible. I was more in a mood to find a good 24/7 setup. A balance between performance and green IT. Something between strong overclocking and energy saving. I finally found the settings I needed.

Additionally did I also change the heat exchanger in my water cooling circuit to get a much better results in cooling. The old dual fan heat exchanger was far beyond its capacity and the water was pretty much near the boiling point. After stressing my system for a couple of hours the CPU was finally at 72°C and the graphics card was something around 50°C. I ran Prime95 and Unigine Heaven Benchmark at the same time for over two hours. The outside temperature was around 25.5°C on these stressing days. I still don’t understand how people can get cooling results of 35°C with air cooling on their CPUs like you always find them in forums and review pages on several discounter sites.

Anyhow, the system is finished now and everything is totally up and running, but I’ll start things over. It’s like an old tradition that I never stay on a system for month that needed, let us say, a little exploration time. I’ve exchanged lots of software versions and drivers during the setup and I’m not a big fan of having orphans on my system. Additionally, the game explorer is not working a 100 per cent and this is because of one irreversible mistake I’ve done during setting this rig up. It’s going to take me like another 20-30 hours of work time, but it will be worth it.