The subject of momentum came up for me a couple times recently. Once was during a very good speech that I had the privilege of attending this weekend. And the second was while listening to a Lenswork podcast titled "The Value of Momentum". This particular Lenswork podcast is anecdote describing the author's childhood experience with his first car and some very good advice given to him by his father: It's easier to turn the wheel, to change direction, if you're moving forward even a little bit.

Maybe it's a coincidence, or maybe it's a sign. But it's certainly pertinent. Like sailing into a headwind, I've lost most of my momentum.

Just after (I quit) college I had a lot of fun traveling with the Renaissance Festival and then truck driving so that I could see the country. But as that got old, it was soon apparent that I needed a career. And more than that, I wanted to be really good at something. Computers were an obvious choice. The Internet was just becoming very mainstream, IT jobs were increasing in demand, and computers were in my blood. Heck, I started tinkering with programming on a Commodore 64 before I even knew the periodic table. (This particular comparison comes to mind because I actually learned the periodic elements via some educational software on the C-64 two or three years before it was introduced to me in school.)

It took just a couple tries to get my foot in the door with my first IT job. And then as Nik once said I "hit the ground running". I worked during the day, took courses some evenings, tinkered other evenings, and did more work over the weekends. I dedicated my life to learning, and it paid off. "I got good." My salary approximately doubled with each new job I took. And I didn't slow down at all until the dotcom company began to fail and started to burn out.

Really tough jobs are more than just long hours. They're fast paced, involve tough decisions, lots of responsibility, and brutal politics. That was the dotcom company. I've never had a job like that before or since. And I'd say that was probably the highlight of my career. I learned more there, about more things, than any other job. And I had mad momentum.

But as the company started to hit some very serious walls, I finally grew tired. I needed a break. And when they went under I was determined to take a break and not work for few months. That is also when someone first introduced me to EverQuest (EQ), the crack cocaine of video games at the time. (Currently replaced by World of Warcraft.) EverQuest was the kind of game that I might have wished for when I was really young, "Maybe in a hundred years from now they'll have a fantasy world where you can actually go!" The first time I played EQ, I played at least 40 hours straight. I remember there was at least an eight hour period where I didn't eat, drink, or go to the bathroom. I know this because I remember being very surprised when the sun had come up, and then being surprised again when the sun was going down. "Holy crap! We need to order pizza or something!"

These Massively Multiplayer Games (MMOs) were the first of two bad things to happen to me on the heels of my burnout. The second thing was my current job, which landed in my lap thanks to a friend. I was sleeping one afternoon when he called and asked, "What are you doing? Do you have time to talk to my manager?" I was more or less employeed later that afternoon, though it took several weeks for the paperwork to clear. I was tired, but my momentum was still going strong.

There is nothing inherently wrong with my current employer. In fact, there is quite a bit of prestige that comes from working there. But it was too comfortable: I got to work from home. I sometimes had weeks when there was very little to do. (Though those were offset by 60+ hour weeks.) And I no longer had to do anything myself. The job would have been just fine if I'd left for something better in two or three years, improved myself. Instead I stayed. I found myself in a comfy and unlikely position where I didn't have to improve. But like sailing into a headwind, my career was soon stalled. And worse, I haven't found it easy to course correct.

I could write pages and pages about my work situation. I've glossed over lots of details, nuances, and events. The last eight or nine years can't be summed up quite so simply. But those details really aren't important for this entry. In addition to the sailing analogy, I've often said my career is stalled like a whitewater rafter caught in a hole. I'm trapped, and I'm taking in water.

Perhaps though I'm being a little too hard on myself here saying that I have no momentum at all. I've picked up quite a bit of recognition in my new department. I've charted a new course in the company that I think may be fruitful if I can stay focused. And I have hopes of making a quantum leap with an external opportunities eventually. But I want to pick up some personal momentum as well.

I was reading the Wikipedia page for Richard Feynman recently and was gobsmacked by how much he accomplished. Plus, in the article I was captivated by a description of him as an eccentric: "He was regarded as an eccentric and free spirit. He was a prankster, juggler, safecracker, proud amateur painter, and bongo player. He liked to pursue a variety of seemingly unrelated interests, such as art, percussion, Maya hieroglyphs, and lock picking." This is a guy that I would have loved to hang around. (Alas! If I only I could have taken physics at Caltech in the 60s instead of, well, not being born yet. I guess I was lazy even back then.) His biography makes me want to do more with my life.

I've been thinking that I want to go back to school for advanced math and to combine that with computer programming. I'd love to do research into artificial life, neural networks, and the like. I'm not sure how to do that in my current situation though. Nobody offers an online degree in mathematics. My current job is far too hectic to try to schedule a mid-day course for a couple days during the week. And actually my current too hectic to much else at all. I haven't even gone out to take pictures recently, or to shoot, and definitely not to exercise. Even my weekends are impacted at the moment. And for what it's worth, I wouldn't be allowed to leave my current position to pursue the new career path I've charted at work either. I'm definitely stuck in that whitewater-like hole.

I was actually hoping get laid off last month; severance packages are still being offered I think and that would allow me to go back to school. I thought about changing my tag line at work to "Choose me! Q1 2010!" But since it seemed unlikely I would get chopped (I can't be easily replaced at the moment), it seemed a garish thing.

Getting a sailboat out of a headwind involves a bit of current and some patience. (--In my limited experience.) And that's definitely how I feel right now. I let my ship stall and now I can't get it angled to pick up the wind. I'm stuck, waiting patiently. Hopefully I'll get turned around eventually to pick up the next wind; at least now I'm paying attention, watching for it.

They say if you want something right you have to do it yourself. I hate taking the time to research and buy my own computer, but the big name manufactures skimp and the custom builders are too expensive. My attempt at getting a deal on an "open box" system failed miserably. So the only way to get what I wanted was to build my own system. And it should be here midweek.

If you're looking to build your own system right now and have a budget of 3k (which I consider to be solidly average for a good computer), I recommend this setup to you. The link above has all the parts except for the hard drive, which I already have. You can save yourself $400 by going with the 940 version of the i7 processor, and another $150 but using the Asus P6T Deluxe Version 2. Save yourself $80 and just use the stock CPU cooler that comes with the processor if you're not going to overclock. And you could save $100 or so with a smaller power supply.

Upgrade the system by adding one or two more graphics cards (and leaving the current power supply.)



The base of any system is the motherboard. I was going to go with an Asus PT6, which would have been just fine. But I haven't been wild about Asus support in the past, and I kind of hate their website. I know everyone loves them, but I'm ready for a change. I went with wildly overpriced, packed with awesome overclocking features, X58 Classified by EVGA.





The brains of course is the processor. I can't really use a NVIDIA Telsa Personal Super Computer at the moment, so I went with the Intel i7 Extreme Edition. Slightly pricey at $1000, it's a power house that is going to make all my photo editing much faster... I suspect that with 8 blazing fast processors, Deep Rybka will run fairly well too.




I'll be overclocking, so I needed more than the stock cooler that comes with the processor. The Noctura isn't the coolest looking aftermarket cooler on the market. But it's one of the top performers.

Mind you, I was very tempted to go with water cooling for this system. But I have a problem with going a little overboard sometimes, and if you try to add water cooling for more than just your processor (i.e. your memory, video card, and hard drives), things get a little more complex -- and expensive.

Not only that, but companies keep threatening to come out with an affordable, usable phase change cooling system. We might see one in the next year or two, and sub-zero CPU temperatures are really sexy to think about. Anyway, it was easy to talk myself out of the water cooling system for now. I may change my mind later, and with my case, I'll be able to.




I decided to go with 1600MHz memory instead of just 1333. The 1600MHz memory doesn't do much for you that the 1333 Mhz memory doesn't already do, unless you want to overclock...

Oh yes, I will overclock...

I also like the heat dissaption on the Corsair Dominator memory. Twelve GB of fast DDR3 memory can get really hot. They're taller than other memory sticks, but I have a ton of room in my case. I even bought a fan which to go on top of the bunch; hopefully that will keep me cool enough.




I bought a second set of these to bring me up to 12GB. So I'll just add an extra picture here. . .




The motherboard was an upgrade from my orginal design, as was the memory. My last upgrade is the graphics gard. I was going to go with a GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 card, a great value offering blistering speeds. But I decided to spend a little more money on the Radeon 4850 X2 instead.

The X2 performs a little better and has 2GB of memory to help support the big resolutions on my monitor. But maybe more importantly, it has four montior ports allowing me to hook up a third monitor again without having to buy a second card.

(I would have three monitors now, but when I upgraded to 64 bit Vista, Asus didn't offer the bios upgrade I needed for my motherboard, and a second graphics card was causing my system to crash -- hence my move to the EVGA motherboard this round.)

I was going to buy two of the Core 216s to get the third monitor, so buying a card with four ports actually saved me some money.



Note that I do not have three of these. But I could.... Oh but I could!

Only running one graphic card, so 1000W power supply is a little overkill. But, I like being able to upgrade. And even better, while running at just half capacity the power coming out of this thing is super clean.





Assuming you have plenty of memory, the biggest bottleneck in a system is usually the hard drive. Though I'm going to try running this system with no paging file on the hard drive, I opted for a fast drive anyway -- specifically the 300GB Western Digital 10,000 RPM VelociRaptor. It's fast, it has great reviews, and the name is just awesome.

The RAW files coming out of digital SLRs today are pretty huge (especially if you remember to "expose to the right"), and they're only getting bigger. This machine is really a graphics editing (chess analyzing) machine when you get down to it, so I do think the drive upgrade will be worth it.





Though it would be impossible to say that the best part of this machine is NOT using a sound card from Creative Labs, I think it's one of the many high points. The Clario Plus is actually cheaper than my current Creative Labs sound card, which as I write this, is sitting in a corner somewhere collecting dust because of the pops and clicks associated with 64 bit, 4GB systems.

I upraded my current computer to 4GB of RAM last year and a 64bit OS, and basically I lost my overpriced Creative Labs sound card. Lost of people have had this problem with clicks and pops on 64 bit systems with 4GB of ram, that is the Internet is to be trusted. And how Creative Labs hasn't fixed this yet is beyond me.

But it's not my first gripe ever with them, and I've decided it's my last. I'm not alone. Sites like New Egg have tons of reviews where people are proclaiming their joy and freedom from Creative Labs.

Besides, the HT Omega cards are getting outstanding reviews in their own right.





Last but not least, I needed a case to put everything into. I needed something that gave me plenty of room for massive graphics cards, lots of drives, and the extended ATX form factor of the X58 Classified motherboard. It needed to have great airflow and also support a water coooling system in case I want to upgrade in the future.

There are a lot of great cases out there, but I settled on the Thermaltake Armor+ full tower case. I love Thermaltake products and case designs, so decided to stick with them.


That's basically it. Turns out that double sided Blu-Ray burner have become affordable at some point while I was sleeping, even though the discs really aren't. It will be great for off site backups eventually though, so I picked one up.

I'm pretty darned excited. It's not going to "process the unique entity [referred] to as John Henry" from Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. (A Great show that I really hope isn't canceled in May.) But it'll do for another few years.

RRRRRRRAAAAWR!

I wonder if it's just me, but every Western Digital "My Book" external drive product has failed on me. As we speak, I'm copying my last remaining My Book onto a new drive, hoping to get all the data before it fails completely.

To be fair, it doesn't seem to be the actual drive that fails -- it's the USB connection. They get to a point where you have to wiggle the usb cable to just the right position for the drive to work. I'm not sure how or why this happens; I don't move these around or travel with them.

The last time this happened, I excavated the physical drive from it's failing plastic cage and popped it into an external drive enclosure. Saving the drive for an extra $40 was a deal, never mind the ability to use the enclosure for other drives if needed. (Right now, the drive I'm actually copying to is the rescued WD in the Thermaltake enclosure.)

So anyway I think this will be the last "My Book" product that I'll buy -- though with drives, it seems to vary over time which manufacturers are putting out the best product

I don't mean to complain all the time. I just had some hummus, and it was quite good. And traffic wasn't bad today while I was doing chores!

--Still sitting here pondering away on colors and the meaning of life. I have iTunes' new visualizer going on my other monitor. Up until this very moment I've been lukewarm about it. The effects are good, but the "AI" remains a little dim witted sometimes. And for some songs it just doesn't jive at all.

Well, I stumbled (virtually speaking) across "Arjuna: into the another world" in my library and gave that a turn. Wow. This album is making the new visualizer do things I haven't seen it do yet. Very, very nice. The algorithms seems to work very well with this music -- nice transitions and such.

Doesn't look like you can buy it anymore, so I have a copy if anyone wants it. Dawn calls is "space alien whale music," but it's actually pretty good. This YouTube clip has a couple of the main themes; I especially like the one toward the end of the clip. The whole album is different though from song to song. Very diverse, fantastic album. The amine itself, well it's no Haibane-Renmei, but I'm game for anything that doesn't have shooting mech robots.

(Check out the "part two" clip for the type of music Dawn is talking about.)

If you live and die by the Delicious bookmark manager like I do, you'll be happy to know there is a beta update for the Firefox 3 plugin at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/delicious-firefox-extension/ It's under the "files" section. You have to log into Yahoo and join the group to get the beta, which is a pain, but worth it.

If you don't use Delicious and you're drowning in bookmarks, I recommend it highly. Very highly. Tagging is awesome. Tagged clouds are awesome. Being able to sort by frequency is awesome. Having access to the same set of book marks on multiple computers is awesome. Instantly refined results from the search bar is awesome. And if you'd like to keep your 500 and still counting bookmarks private, you can click the little box that says "don't share" whenever you create a bookmark -- which is what I've done on all mine.

Right now I'm creating some links that are tagged with "news" so that I have a quick place to go to all my favorite news sources. I also have a tag called Election2008 for election research. I have another set tagged for work, which is amazing helpful. I even have a "toread" for things I want to go back to, but never will. And the great thing is, you really don't need to be conservative with your tags. Clouds keep the signal to noise ration pretty darn good.

I have 177 photography bookmarks, but if I want to just see the ones specific to "lighting" (let's see, I have 12) it's easy done! If I'm feeling froggy I can then sort those by, last added, site, last visited, most frequently visited. . .

Brilliant, brilliant product when used with the Firefox plug-in. (There is a plugin for IE too, if you're not a Firefox baby.)

This picture is how I feel about computers most days, especially doing anything at work where we actively strive to crush innovation and good ideas at every turn. Nothing specifically has happened to cause me to write this tonight, only that I came across this really, really, really cute video and I giggled hard at the particular scene above.

I have to say that not only is this video cute, it's really well done. There are great nuances in the facial expressions throughout the whole thing: a shift of the jaw after "do you know why you're here," and a twitch of an eyebrow after, "it looks like you're witting a letter!" Brilliant, brilliant stuff.

And if you didn't catch it on Twitter, the video below is also wonderful. Aside from the voice actress getting a little too close to the mic/loud after at the end of the robot bit, it's perfect. I showed it to Dawn and told her I imagined her like this as a little girl. I didn't get much of a response on that, so who knows. But what a cute video!







The voices aren't the same, but somehow the voice actress in this short reminds me of Kirsten Dunst in Kiki's Delivery Service. (Which she did an amazing job in.)