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I have 3 computers in my apartment, labeled Bart1-3. Each has a purpose… there’s the laptop, the old computer that has massive amounts of storage, and the new fast computer for everything else.

Now, some would say that there is no way I could be using all that much power, and you’d be mostly true, however, I have been religiously using some software for the greater good. And by that, I mean Folding@Home. The folding project uses distributed computing power running on tens of thousands of computers to fold proteins in the research needed to solve many possible diseases and quite a few breakthroughs have been discovered by the Folding project so far. Read more at their website.

I am a member of Team Engadget, which is one of my favorite tech blogs. This team is currently ranked 32nd overall. I keep it running almost all the time, cranking away displaying beautiful colored orbs as the machine tries to interpret the data it’s given. My new computer can finish a project in about 3 days. It takes about 4 days on my old computer. And I don’t dare try on the laptop.

But a PS3 can finish it in about 7 hours. They released software 3 days ago or so that allows Folding@Home to run from a PS3, making them a little better than what I might have thought of them before.

The amazing part: The PS3s are DOMINATING the Folding charts!! If I told you that 19 thousand PS3s would have TRIPLE the output of 160 thousand computers, you’d think I was crazy, right? Man, that Cell processor must be amazing!!

Look for yourself, taken from the folding site:

As I mentioned in a previous post, here is the latest installment of Friendly Admin.

(click to enlarge)

*MySpace and Wikipedia are copyrighted by their individual owners.

At 2:35am this morning, I wrote the following to everyone via email… I think it’ll sum up the frustration if you read between the lines…

Good morning,
As some of you know, the internet/email/G-drive/phones/everything-electronic were off for about an hour and a half late yesterday afternoon, and, in fact, most of the evening as well. I had a colossal power failure due to having only one small electrical breaker to handle an increasing number of servers, plus an air conditioner that was used for the first time in awhile, causing an overload. It is something I will need to work out with maintenance so that my server room can get the power that it needs before summer approaches.After several repeated attempts at getting power to return, which caused all of my servers to crash multiple times, I experienced a casualty. The INETSERVER lost a RAID drive, and is no longer usable to me.The INETSERVER handled the following responsibilities:
1. Storage of Ministerial files
2. Antivirus updates
3. DNS and DHCP routing for all staff computers, along with a variety of scripts and DNS entries that were very important
4. Printer server

What this means to you:
1. If you’re worried about ministerial files being lost, I should be able to recover them from the alternate mirrored drive using disk recovery. After which, they will be moved to G:
2. Either Malcolm or I will have to eventually reinstall every antivirus client in order for you to receive automated updates. Should be ok for the present, but will need to be updated at some point
3. Some computers that have manually-assigned IP addresses will not be able to access the internet at all because of changed settings. If you know someone like this, please have them call me, or, if you know how, have them change their IP address to automatic settings instead
4. You will not be able to print to either the Canon Copier or the Color Phaser until you do the following:
a. Go to Start-Control Panel-Printers
b. Delete all the printers that have the word “Inetserver” in the title
c. Go to \\cams and double click on the two printers that show there (Phaser+Copier) to automatically add them to your printer list

Brent and I tag-teamed the variety of peculiar issues that ensued until after 2am, and I believe email is finally back up and working as it should be, after we off-loaded all the responsibilities this server performed to other servers. There might be a couple back-lashes from suddenly losing a server and all it’s important settings, but I hope to have them resolved as quickly as I can.

Thank you for your patience as we deal with this very stressful situation, and I do apologize for the inconvenience.

Are you tired of visiting blogs/myspace sites/personal sites and getting absolutely bombarded with auto-playing songs? See, if you use Firefox especially, and by the way, all of you should be, you realize that the “stop autostart” codes don’t work with firefox and you hear EVERYTHING!! AT ONCE!!

I was reminded of that while viewing someone’s blog this morning. My volume was up, my headphones were on, and they have 97-gajillion songs that, when played together, sound like…

What a train wreck would sound like if the first train were carrying every country singer known to redneck man, all singing at once, with their own choice of accompanists, and the second train was carrying 19 big-band directors, each car having it’s own orchestra, playing it’s own tune…. And if each car had it’s own powerful amplification/distortion system… And if that train were to wreck for, say… 5 minutes. And the last thing that anyone on the trains wanted to do was sing their own favorite song one last time. Badly. While in pain.

Yeah. I think that makes the point.

I did fix it, though. I give you…. The Stop Autoplay Plugin! (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1765/)