Like the title says - I have finally finished rebuilding Jack's PC! It has been quite a long while, I think I have had it for months now. I have been so amazingly busy these last few months, and have had several of my older PCs break too. I gave him 256 MB extra RAM and an ATI graphics card from one of my old PCs.
I also bought him a new 80 GB hard drive, as the old 10 GB one was nowhere near big enough now they are playing with digital pictures too. I have put Windows back on to it, as well as Gentoo Linux! I know they need Windows for games, and I have secured it as much as possible by using Thunderbird, Firefox, Kerio Firewall and an antivirus program.
Can't sleep at the moment though... Hence up working at this time. Anyway, I am going to get back to it and finish off this PC. I should be able to get a fan for the old PIII slot 1 PC I have, and get that working again soon too.
I have gotten so many new toys in the last few weeks. My credit cards are feeling it, but I think it is worth it. In my quest for the ultimate office I managed to get two LG L1710B 17" TFT screens for my office! They are great too, I got the nVidia TwinView stuff working in Linux really nicely - although it wasn't as easy as I had thought.
One is coming from DVI, and the other from VGA. I am using Xinerama, and thanks to the excellent AMD64 nVidia driver both displays are still hardware accelerated and perform very well. I also got Dual View working in Windows, but rarely use that any longer.
Then I also got an NEC 2510A Dual Layer DVD writer. It is very good, and fully supported under Linux too. Wrote a few backups of all my photos, all my data files and when I get chance I am going to make one with all my ripped MP3/OGG tracks as it took ages to scan them all in!
Then Louise surprised me too, and had saved up to get me an SLR camera! I didn't expect that at all, but I have been after one for ages but never thought I could spare the money for one. She got me a Nikon F80 with the 28-100 mm and 70-300 mm G lenses. From the first roll of film it all looks great - and we are going down to London this weekend too. That should give me a chance to really get some good shots out of it hopefully.
Still managing to prove that I am not very good at writing regularly... It was quite successful over at ILL, although very intense. We got an extra half day on D17, but that meant that I had to go in to ILL at 6PM after arriving in Grenoble at 5PM!!! I think we worked until about 12:30AM that evening and then went back in the following day for about 9:30AM.
The runs had to be quite long, between 5 and 6 hours. This meant that we couldn't run anywhere near all the samples I had prepared - so I had to pick the best ones to go on and leave the rest. We only had two days on D17 but I learnt so much in that time. Andrew explained how to operate the instrument, and showed me LAMP and how things can be automated by scripting them in LAMP.
Altogether we only got reflectivity profiles of 7 samples - one gold nanoparticle sample right at the end along with mainly C16O3 with and without Li ions, and one C16O4 sample. Now the task of analysing all the data begins - Andrew was very helpful though and explained how to use Cosmos to extract profiles from the raw data.
Also managed to get a TFT screen finally! It is a very nice 17" LG TFT screen that arrived on Friday. I will be getting one for home very soon too - it is so much nicer to work on than even my Iiyama 19" CRT screen (and so much smaller).
It would have been Aaron's 21st birthday on Monday, so I have been feeling pretty down about that... It never seems to get any easier. Mum seems to be taking it pretty hard too - I hope she is OK.
That is it for now anyway...