Today - 10 out of 10

Assuming "today" started at midnight, rather than when I got up this morning, anyway.

Today - 3 out of 10

Well, that's how good today has been so far. I'm too depressed for details right now. Maybe later.

New Star Trek Movie

Wel,, we went to see the new Star Trek movie last night, and it was superb. The astrophysics was lousy, but that's just Hollywood, and Scotty seemed rather lame, but the rest was damn good.
I think I'd like to go see it again.

A new Windoze

Well, I'm giving the Windows 7 RC1 a try, using VirtualBox, since I don't have a spare PC of high enough spec...

My Saviour.....

I'd gotten myself into a pickle with an spreadsheet. I was revising the Karma Pool rules for my upcoming Shadowrun 3E game to make them follow a simple non-linear progression. I had decided that the first point would cost the normal 20k, then each additional point would cost 5k more than the last one. This gives a nice simple formula of y=2.4x^2+17.5x, where x is the number of Karma Pool points and y is the total coast.

Then I realised that for existing CHRs I needed to reverse the equation - if a CHR has already earned y karma, how many Karma Pool points would it be worth?

It turns out that solving that equation for x instead of for y is not as simple as I had hoped. I asked Chrissy to have a look at it for me, and she recommended asking Kathy in America, as Kathy is a Math(s) teacher.

After much hard work, Kathy tells me that the correct answer is x = SQRT((8x+245)/20)-3.5
I'd never have worked that out by myself.

Many thanks, Kathy!

Pieces of PCs

On Thursday this week, I did some cleaning out in the spare room, as the plumber who never showed up on Friday needed access to the radiators to change the valves. I don't have a picture of what it looked like before I started, but that's because there wasn't room to get into the room while holding a camera.....

Anyway, after throwing out several bin-bags' worth of rubbish, moving several items to other rooms, and stacking things more neatly (Thanks for all the help, Bowch!), I finally got to see for the first time in a year or two, how big my computer stash is.....I don't have an exact count, but I can say that this is all in addition to the six desktops and two laptops currently in use elsewhere in the house.

p.s. As far as I know, only 2 or 3 of these are complete PCs - the boxes of motherboards, expasinion cards, memory chips and disc drives will be needed for that.

Better cooling

Lost_Boy, the downstairs PC, has been getting a bit unreliable lately, so today I took the cover off for a look. It was rather dusty, so I gave it a good clean-out, then had a closer look at the cooling fans. The air-in fan on the front of the case was particularly clogged up, since the holes in the case are small, so I decided to improve the air-flow a bit. A quick bit of work with the tin-snips later, and the obstruction was removed. There shouldn't be be any more problems at this end now. {grin}