The RAM! The RAM Is Here!
And so another month has gone by. The test was not as bad as I had imagined it. More importantly, the RAM finally came in. Of course, this happened the night before the test. That resulted in not much studying.

This RAM is crazy in every way. Very shiny. I have never spent over $500 on RAM. I don't know that I ever want to. Is it worth it? This stuff is heavy, weighing almost as much as my hard drive for the two sticks. It must be mostly because of the thick copper plates covering the chips. Even the name of the memory is big: "1GB Dual-Channel PC3200 DDR400 ECC Registered RAM". Let's not expand the acronyms.

Installing WindowsXP on this thing was painful. It actually required a floppy drive with SATA drivers. When F6 is hit as instructed for additional drivers, it gives no feedback for about 30 seconds. I must have tried 5 times before letting it sit for that long. And that was just me giving up. I installed Windows by giving up. Windows didn't support any of the hardware out-of-the-box, even though the motherboard design is about two years old. Games run amazingly: smooth, high-resolution... perfect.

Currently, Linux is installing. I decided to go with Gentoo for several reasons. Firstly, I need X.org, as well as software that will work with as many multimedia streams as possible. Secondly, the processor was given to me by a Gentoo guy, so it feels right to have Gentoo on it. Debian's pure64 is very tempting, I intend to give it a try in due time. All hardware works out-of-the-ISO with Linux.

I'm very excited by the wireless project at school. It seems as much a social thing as it is technical. Basically, as we put more and more access points up, more and more people come to our door to ask about the network or offer to help out somehow. It's an interesting phenomenon. We seem to be piloting this sort of effort on campus.