Ok. So I went to WCG2006, worked hard, had a blast and made it back alive. Reality sets in and blah I’m back to where I was a few weeks back.

Some quick WCG highlights/lowlights/ammusing memories; Buying a baskin robins shake in Dubai; Complaining endlessly about public transport and walking 2km in Monza; Hotel Black and Decker; Nic getting drunk; Ghosting 120 pc’s from usb hard drives; Applying a minor change to 120 pc’s several (7 or times because it wasn’t thought through properly first; Walking to McDonalds in the rain only to find it was closed by the time we got there; Doner King (Kebab shop); Video’s of Nic being drunk; The hotel lifts vertical speed, and size; The hotel room size; The hotel shower size; Parking in Italy (anywhere goes); Nic never shutting up; NiP beating Team3D on stage live to Korea (gg NiP); The Germans; The Slop box (players lounge); Missing out on the Race Taxi because I was reffing the playoff for 3rd/4th place;

Out of this I think I found a new way of thinking, fun before work. I missed out on a once in a lifetime opportunity (the race taxi) because I was doing what I was told to. Not only that, people I was told to use went off and rode the race taxi WHILE they should have been reffing. *grumbles*. Now to apply this to my current employment, I simply need to stop going to work, since work is no fun at all.

After I returned to .au the post travel depression set back in, I first noticed this after the brief Sydney trip, and not so much after the Qld trip. I think it’s because I notice that I have so much fun while being away and realise how little fun I actually have at home. Don’t get me wrong, Perth is great, Australia is great and after seeing Milan/Monza I have to admit we are very lucky to live where we do, but I still seem to lack actual fun here.

A few weeks later, I managed to get hold of the Areca 1220 raid card (8 port, pci express 8x), and a 150GB raptor. Of course the raptor was dead on arrival, and that screwed up my plans slightly. But the good thing was the Areca works on my tight ass microatx board. Yes, this $940 (AUD) raid card worked flawlessly on my Geforce6150 (nforce4 with integrated video) mainboard, specifically the Asus A8N-VM-CSM board (yes, the $110 board). Preliminary benchmarks are awesome, read speed around 340MB/s, write speed around 178MB/s for a 7 drive raid 5 array configuration. (8th drive is elsewhere until RA’d raptor returns FFS.) Next step is to play with bonded ethernet to see if getting more than 100mb/s via NFS is feasible on this hardware, which I hope it is. I also found a MSKB article detailing how to install Microsofts Services for Unix (SFU) NFS client, without the rest of the services, though sadly you still get the telnet server included.

Watched a few new movies lately. More stuff soon, maybe

It’s not a lie. It’s the truth with lossy compression.