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Back to work…

So I’m back at work, having just actually managed to attend Nats. Holy crap. Four years of trying, and I finally make it there.

Good fun, too. Arguably we weren’t hugely successful (seeded 15th, ended up 27th after a nasty draw in the round robin and getting spanked around a little in the second cascade and finals games), but I don’t think anyone in the team actually cared, because we were all enjoying ourselves. Plus we had the best shirts.

Had a great run in triples, made it to 12th place after a couple of unlucky games meant we missed making the finals by about 4000 points.

Melbourne was.. well, grey. Everything from the sky, to the fog, to the sea seemed to emanate greyness. We went to the Melbourne Aquarium, which was a little underwhelming, and of course the Crown Casino, which I found excruciatingly boring. Other than that, I spent an hour or two wandering aimlessly through the CBD trying to find as many interesting little side streets and alleys as I could, which works remarkably better in Melbourne than it does in Perth – seems like every single side street in Melbourne is packed to the brim with small shops and coffee outlets and people. Everywhere.

Really regretted not having bought a small wide-angle lens for my camera to do some unobtrusive street photography with; maybe next time I’m there, whenever that might be.

… now, to start planning for Hobart in 2012. Could be chilly.

Third time lucky. Maybe.

So I’m signed up for Nats, again (again). My somewhat-recent change of employment means I might even actually get to go this time around. We’ll see. Stacked together a fairly chill team, should be a good bit of fun.

Actually got a tax return this year, which means my HECS debt must have been paid off in full. Yay, go me. More moneys into the shiny camera bits fund.

Slowly clawing back at my pre-moving-to-Osborne-Park workout strengths; benched 32.5kg today and an incline bench of 22.5kg means I’m not far off where I was before. Actually going to a proper gym means I can use real equipment instead of just a bench and a handful of small weight plates, so I should be able to make some decent progress now that I’ve eased myself back into a 3x/week schedule.

Horsing around

Went out to Waroona the other week with Brad, Lauren, Sera and Erika to go for a trail ride, out at Langford Hill Riding Farm. Slightly chilly at times with the breeze, but good fun nonetheless – definitely worth the hour and a bit drive to get down there and the fairly modest $55 fee. Hoping to maybe go do it again before the heat of summer kills off all the greenery.

I wonder..

.. if anyone even reads this. Probably not, which is probably for the best.

Mini-review: Skoda Octavia Wagon 1.9TDI

So, since my car is busy being serviced (again), I’ve been given a diesel Skoda to potter around in for the week, and since I lack anything better to do at this instant, I’ll write up my thoughts.

Basically, the Octavia is a Golf in drag. Cheaper, slightly tackier drag, but drag nonetheless. The interior is fairly roomy, and there’s a ton of luggage capacity (it is, after all, a wagon), but has a fairly cheap feel to it compared to the Golf family. Not really anything too bad, and featurewise it’s nearly identical to the Golf, but to put it simply, the Golf feels nicer.

The engine is a slightly aging 1.9 litre 77kW turbo diesel, hooked up to the 6-speed DSG transmission. Unfortunately, being an older engine, it does rattle a bit, and until you get into 3rd gear you’re never under any illusions about not driving a diesel. Straight off the line it’s clunky, torquey and prone to jumping a little unless you’re extremely gentle with the accelerator, and the change from 1st to 2nd is more of a lurch than anything else. 3rd gear through to 6th, however, is typically smooth and nearly instantaneous, and is a rather pleasant driving experience. The engine doesn’t change revs particularly quickly, and there’s a bit of turbo lag, so planting it to overtake requires more forethought than the excellent (and twice as powerful) 2.0TFSI in the GTI, but it’s not anything that would trouble you beyond getting used to it.

To be honest, the biggest problem is the price – the Octavia is surprisingly expensive. With the 77kW 1.9TDI DSG at $34,290 before accessories and delivery and so on, you’d have to want the extra luggage space afforded by the wagon. A 90kW petrol Golf with DSG is $28,490, 118kW with DSG is $32,990, and to be honest I’d personally rather own either of those.

Maths is fun

Seriously.

Nearly forgot just how much fun it was.

Cheers for the reminder.

iBlog from my iPhone

Trying out the WordPress app on my new iPhone while I wait for the unlock request to go through so I can use it as a phone. That is all.

Speakers!

So, my speakers are finally finished, after around a month and a half of effort. Mind you, this was a bit over a month ago – I just haven’t gotten around to posting about it until now. I’ve had to make quite a few changes to my original plans along the way.. the Fostex 208e∑ cabinet was replaced by a simpler (to construct, anyway) design, one of the G Chang variants designed by a group of diyAudio members. Instead of being a long back-loaded horn like the 208e∑ design, the G Chang is a ‘big vent reflex’, or BVR cabinet combining some aspects of both horn loaded and bass reflex cabinets.The overall aim is combine the ‘open’ sound of a horn design with the simplicity of construction of a bass reflex box.Since the G Chang was originally designed for the Fostex 207e (a magnetically shielded variant of the 206e that I purchased), a little bit of series R is required to tame the treble response of the 206e. Instead of a simple resistor, I constructed a small BSC (baffle-step correction) circuit from the guidelines found on Martin J King’s excellent Quarter Wave Loudspeaker Design site using a piece of veroboard and a handful of parts.There were also changes required in the materials themselves – I was originally intending to use Jarrah veneered MDF (unfortunately, plywood is frighteningly expensive here in Perth), but low stock levels meant that I had to look around for something different. I eventually settled on a Tasmanian Oak veneer that, while rather lighter than the Jarrah veneer, had a nice warm tone to it. I additionally chose to use veneered wood for the outward-facing sides, with a strip of veneer running along the front edge of the side panels, and black semi-gloss paint for the rest.  Where to next?Well, on a whim I bought a pair of old Altec 414-16C 12″ midbass drivers that I saw a good bargain on on eBay. They need new gasket foam, but that’s no biggie; they appear to be in rather good condition, and with the AlNiCo magnets they should sound quite spectacular. Now I just need to figure out an enclosure to put them in..

Oh Happy Day

So at long last management has agreed to purchase some proper servers, finally laying the groundwork to rid us of the nasty whitebox plague.

At this stage for storage the likely candidate is the Dell PowerVault NX1950 Integrated NAS Solution which is pretty much just a big wanky name that signifies it’s a standard Dell 1RU dual Xeon running Windows Storage Server, hooked up to an MD1000 (actually, up to four of them) packed full of SAS or SATA disks. Total capacity is anywhere from a couple hundred gigabytes right through to around 44 terabytes (11.25 terabytes per MD1000, based on filling them with 750GB drives). We don’t need even remotely near that amount of storage, but the expandability is certainly nice to have.

Also on the agenda is at least one server for running VMWare – a 2RU dual quad-core Xeon with 8GB of RAM and a few hundred gigabytes of fast 10,000rpm storage seems to be the go here.

List price on both these items is quite reasonable – the VMWare server comes in at similar prices to similarly configured IBM or HP machines, and the NX1950 is actually considerably cheaper than many other options – each MD1000 is only around $3000 base price, which means scalability is quite cheap.

We’re also shopping around for package prices for new PCs; building them individually is getting tiring.

If all goes to plan, within a month or two we should have replaced about six or seven increasingly crusty old servers with a trio of nice matching rackmount boxes.. I can’t wait. Yes, I realise how nerdy that makes me seem.

Also in the semi-nerdy stakes, got my three days of annual leave approved for a couple weeks from now to build (or at least begin the building process of) my speakers. I’ve more or less settled on building a two-tone cabinet from the Fostex FE208e∑ plans (the speaker itself is only the FE206e – however, the 208e∑ cabinet is a superior design for this driver than the stock FE206e cabinet), with the side panels (and a strip around the front/top to match) in a dark stain Jarrah veneer, with the remainder being painted a matte black. Doing it all in Jarrah veneer would be extremely time-consuming due to the fiddly nature of the cabinet (to be detailed in a later post), doing it all in black would look okay but to be honest I rather like the look of the wood veneer. The two-tone finish should be a suitable mix of looking nice and being straightforward to finish, I think.

Still need to get myself some damping material for the inside of the cabinet, as well as turning a pair of Jarrah wood phase plugs and performing some surgery on the drivers. Also need to decide upon what sort of binding posts I want as speaker terminals (I’m thinking the copper finish Cardas CCGR), and what to use for interior cabling (leaning towards a single twisted pair extracted from Cat5e UTP to add a small amount of series resistance to raise Qts and thus improve bass response slightly).

And then I need to build my pair of power amps to drive them… and then a preamp to drive those.. should be fun.

Smashing trees to pieces for my own amusement.

Well, not directly. Finished Spook Country yesterday. Overall I like it, but not as much as the Bridge trilogy or perhaps Pattern Recognition. I’m not sure why, exactly; I guess it was, if anything, the sense of realism, as dumb as that sounds. Still a good book, mind you.

Next up in my list of things to read is Philip K Dick‘s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

Leopard comes out tonight, and being a nerd, I’m naturally looking forward to it. Shame my Powerbook’s DVD drive is still busted – I’ve still got a whopping 2.5 weeks of Applecare left though, so I’ll get around to it on the first day I don’t need it for work, whenever the hell that’s going to be.

Found out that Gran Turismo 5 (and the GT5:Prologue uber-demo-that-you-buy-or-something) will include a ‘GTTV’ system where you can buy and download episodes of motoring TV shows in-game and save them to your PS3. Naturally, this includes 70 episodes of possibly the greatest non-fiction TV show ever, Top Gear. Not only that, but the game itself will feature (either built-in or as a purchasable download) the Top Gear test track and possibly even allow you to compete against the Top Gear top lap times (from The Stig)! Is that pure awesomeness or what? (protip: the answer is ‘pure awesomeness’)

Of course, Polyphony being Polyphony and all it probably won’t come out until 2015, but I don’t care.