The Evil Monkey has a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from a southeastern U.S. university. After a postdoctoral nightmare of Inquisitorial proportions, he is currently working in a laboratory and an adjunct assistant professor at a nearby state university.
Scicurious is a graduate student wrestling with a PhD in Physiology and Pharmacology at a southern institution. She is a nerd, a geek, and also a dork. And yes, that really is her brain.
NotoriousLTP is an MD-PhD student in New York City. After finishing (hopefully soon) his PhD in behavioral neuroscience, he will re-enter the fun vortex that is medical education.
Testing...testing...
Unlike other bloggers who apparently sat in corners with their laptops, rocking back and forth and hitting refresh over and over again, Sci only did that a FEW times (and it's really only because she's sadly addicted to things like her email). More importantly, Sci spent her weekend with Mr. SiT, building her very first computer! Yes, even my weekends AWAY from the blog are geeky.
Because it's my very first computer I've built, it's a baby, not suitable for gaming, but plenty good for Word Processing, surfing the internets, and other functions of people who only have minor computer-related obsessions. The specs:
Putting the specs in the "extended" thing to see if that in fact makes thing post under the cut..
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000 Dual-Core Processor
- Western Digital Caviar SE 320GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA Hard Drive
- Cooler Master Elite RC-330-KKR1 Black ATX Mid Tower Case with 350W Power Supply
- Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2 Micro ATX Motherboard
- 2x Kingston 1GB DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) RAM
- ASUS Black DVD Burner with LightScribe
Right now it's running Unbuntu 8.10 (my next lesson will probably include finding out what Ubuntu IS...). I'm rather proud of myself, Mr. SiT had to tell me what to do, but I did all the putting in and stuff myself (I do wish there had been more tool use, one of the best things about bench science is doing things like surgery and playing around with tools and your instruments). Until we get around to selling it (anyone interested in a nice simply machine should email me and I can pass it on), we'll probably run it on Protein Folding, a program that runs simulations of protein folding to benefit teh scienz.
Comments
Oh, Noes! What was he ever thinking?
Getting under the hood of the hardware is OK, since there really aren't any user-disserviceable parts in there.
Ubuntu? For someone who takes complex stuff [1] apart for fun? Either he didn't know what he was doing, which is scary, or (worse) he did -- and that's much scarier.
[1] I think neurobiology qualifies. In spades.
Posted by: D. C. Sessions | January 12, 2009 3:39 PM
Relax, D.C., the Ubuntu, as I understand it, is temporary. It was just to see if all was working.
Posted by: Scicurious | January 12, 2009 3:59 PM
I could point you to quite a few games that your machine would run rather well. It's a step up from mine, and I can play most of the games that don't involve crazy video of people with guns. (IE, I like puzzle games, RPGs, and games like Portal)
Did you get to use some of the paste to connect the heatsink to your CPU? That's probably the trickiest part, imo. You can use the wax junk that comes in the box, but I prefer to wash it off, lap the heat sink surface a bit (any excuse to use a dremel), then apply some Arctic Silver goop. every time I do it I get anxious, but I haven't gotten it wrong yet (6ish or 7ish computers built).
Posted by: Chris | January 12, 2009 4:25 PM
Oh, I've heard that before!
First it's Ubuntu (maybe with a solemn pledge to not inhale or to pull out before it goes too far.) Then someone thinks, "It can't hurt to try just a little Fedora." By then, though, it's too late. Before you know it, there are scripts and coding paraphernalia hidden in locked directories. Eventually there's Gentoo out in plain view and the poor soul is starting to look into LFS or even BSD.
--
I wish I could say that no metaphors were harmed in the production of this comment.
Posted by: D. C. Sessions | January 12, 2009 5:27 PM
Sci's future?
Posted by: Mr. SiT | January 12, 2009 5:37 PM
SciC, you are a totes 1337 hax0r!!11!!!
Posted by: Comrade PhysioProf | January 12, 2009 10:20 PM
...and yet you still can't figure out how to put a Recent Comments list in the sidebar...
Posted by: BikeMonkey | January 13, 2009 11:47 PM
To be honest, Bikemonkey, I've never really wanted a recent comments list. I feel like the sidebar is full enough of everything under the sun without adding recent comments as well. But I mean, if ya'll want it really bad, I can probably put it up there...
Posted by: Scicurious | January 14, 2009 9:05 AM
FYI: Recent Comments in the side bar has a *huge* positive effect on intiating and maintaining discussion in your comments sections. This is because it dramatically reduces the activation energy to check and see which posts have ongoing discussions. Obviiously, the nearer the top of your main page it resides, the larger the effect that it has.
Posted by: Comrade PhysioProf | January 14, 2009 3:57 PM
In response to Chris:
We did not use a third-party thermal compound. The CPU came in a retail box with thermal compound pre-applied to the heatsink, so we just rolled with that. I've heard good things about Arctic Silver, but I thought it would be overkill for a basic machine that won't be overclocked.
Posted by: Mr. SiT | January 14, 2009 8:38 PM
Observe, Bikemonkey and PhysioProf, the new and improved sidebar!! I did it just for you. :)
Posted by: Scicurious | January 14, 2009 11:06 PM
HAHAHAHA! Awesome!
Posted by: BikeMonkey | January 15, 2009 2:36 AM