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The transfer from the Q6600 running at 2.66 GHz to the Core i7 at 2.66 GHz went smooth. Overclocking the core to 4.2 GHz was effortless but I’ve settled for 3.6 GHz to increase hardware lifetime and allow me to run quieter by not needing to crank up the fans and 8 hours of searching for Mersenne primes over 8 threads has verified system stability. I think the austerity of Windows 7 may help.

Such is my loss. My war against slowness and crapware and unnecessary registry keys defined my relationship with my computer. Much like a couple that breaks up and misses the arguing the lack of conflict in my computing life is disconcerting.

Or at least that’s how I felt until I was in my kitchen, booted up my laptop and tried to make a quick photo edit in Photoshop. After waiting for Photoshop’s startup which I assume involves calculating Graham’s number from first principles followed by the flipbook effect of applying a mask my computation ennui passed.  Just in case I ever again miss technological knuckle dragging I’ve made a user on my new computer that’s identical to my main one except it runs SETI@Home, Folding@Home CPU and GPU apps, Einstein@Home and GIMPS at once.

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My boss asked me about modern graphics cards for a bit and we talked about how GPUs and CPUs had diverged and what way each is optimized for.  He asked me to look into nVidia’s entry-level supercomputers and I reported to him.  He said there’s a possibility we’d get one to speed up rendering drawings and asked if I could help set it up and test it.

Dear God, please make this happen before I leave.  If we get this, and I can test our supercomputer with a Folding@Home install, I will get soooo many F@H points I could finally cash them all in and get that Red Rider BB gun, and with 4 cards with 240 streaming cores each, I might finally get more than 24 FPS in Crysis.

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I’ve been folding a lot of drawings.  I’ve nearly doubled my throughput in about three weeks of training and I’ve gotten really good at size E drawings which are 16 times a normal sheet of paper.  The folding table isn’t big enough to hold the drawing so my first and second folds are negotiated in mid-air and the folds are done with the back of an Expo dry erase eraser.

Today while folding, a group was waiting for someone in a nearby cube to finish a phone call and they started watching.  Apparently folding vellum is a lot more hypnotic than I’ve ever found it to be.  Later, a coworker returned and started watching, I asked if I could help him, to which he replied “I heard you’re good”.

I’m waiting for some upstart young turk to challenge me for my seat.