Archive for October, 2008

Weighing responsibility (and workload)

Monday, October 20th, 2008

A few weeks ago I posted in a panic about missing a homework assignment, I got an email and IM from people telling me that it’s JUST a homework assignment…that I should not fret over it…You know, it’s so true, there are much larger issues I should be worried about. However, I think this goes to say a lot about my mindset, If that’s what you want to call it.

Since then, I have spent some time evaluating my life, at 20, and comparing it to my peers. It’s strange to think that I have never compared myself as a whole against others, its an interesting concept, and a blow to my ego, haha. I am not going to compare myself to others here, but what I saw, kinda scares me on several levels, not only about myself, but as far as society goes, how are we surviving as a society today with the work ethic of our citizens?

I am sitting here with so many thoughts and angles where I could go with this blog…It’s more like a journal entry, should I even be posting this stuff? I should? Hmm, well, where do I go from here? Do I continue on the political tone I started to take in the last paragraph, or do I swing back to my orriginal intention of this post and explain why I despise myself for drowning myself in responsibility? Or should I find a happy medium in there and talk about my insane workload and how I need to tone it down for health reasons…

(After a two hour break doing homework)

Hmm…you know, I will just get to the point, its 5:30 in the morning, I have 4 tests at school I am studying for on Tuesday, I have a project I am thinking about for work, I have 8 freelance websites in progress right now, not to mention my personal projects and my businesses that I am trying to keep running/develop.

There is absolutely too much on my plate. I should be out having fun, not working, I have been so stressed with it all I have watched myself age a decade in the last two years…

Quick psychological evaluation here, but I believe I pile all this work on myself to hide from social problems I have from my childhood. I think I work to avoid social confrontation whither it be going out with friends, or meeting women. I am not sure what it is that is making myself distance from these relationships, but I would rather work than go out for some reason.

I believe as a rush to be successful and a mature, contribuiting member of society I have taken on to much, and its a part of the maturing I should ballance my workload with the rest of my life, I am asuming that is a pivital part of professional life, but I ned to fuigure it out fast before I kill myself from exaustion.

Well that blog post went horribly wrong, night I have a whole two hours to sleep!

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Renderfarm Part 3.9.1

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

So, while I was sitting in my biology class Tuesday night, I checked my email and noticed I had one from someone I emailed on craigslist a while back. This guy had a 1U server on craigslist for pretty cheap, however, at the time I didnt want to buy another machine for the farm, this was around the time I was doing my first build…Anyway, he needed cash and was willing to give it to me half price if I picked it up that night…Really good deal, so after class I drove an hour over to fort worth, met him, and picked it up…Its a 1U 3.2ghz Celeron with 2gb of ram, and a 80gb HD, and I got it for less than what the case for it costs retail, and I should be able to upgrade it in the future…It runs strong, I put a webserver on it, for tesing purposes, and I also put backburner on it, so the machine will be my dedicated rendering job manager. Basically it tells the other machines on the network what to render when, to get stuff done in a timely manner. The hardest part of the whole deal so far has been networking, and permissions, there are a lot of config files I have had to tweak…but now I can render on the render machines and they will put the files on my workstation, and all the computers recongize eachother…so thats good…

I will either be adding another Xeon machine or maybe a storage server in the future, we will see. The downside to only having 3 machines rendering, (the two in the rack, and my desktop), is that even though its fast they can only do so much. For example, if I had 10 dual core machines, it would take twice as long to render a frame on each machine, but since there were 10 of them they got that much more work done. Oh well, I dont think it was feasable to go with older dualcores now, it would only be $200-$300 cheaper per machine, and it would be old technology.

Anyway, heres the machine:

And here it is in the rack all hooked up.

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