Back to the Office

Today marks the beginning of working from the office primarily again for me, instead of at home. I’ll still be working from home some, especially if/when I need to concentrate hard. But I expect that over the coming weeks the amount of time I spend at home will continue to decrease.

Somethings felt relatively natural in the office. Others, however, will take some getting used to. I was very much used to my normal routine at home, and lack of talking throughout the day… transitioning back to frequent conversations will be, shall we say, interesting.

Update on the New PC

Yesterday I wrote a brief blog post announcing that I had completed my new gaming PC build. Today… an update.

This morning I decided to run a few benchmarks against the machine (I literally only did initial OS installs yesterday). I very quickly noted during the tests that the CPU was getting much warmer than it should, and so I decided to take the machine apart and replace the CPU fan. I was using the stock cooler that came with the AMD Ryzen 5, but I had a spare CoolerMaster CPU fan that I didn’t end up using in a previous build, so I installed that. In all, it took me about an hour to remove the old fan and install the new one.

It's Been a Day

I was originally hoping to post a more thought-out blog post today. However, after my normal morning routine, around 10 hrs at work, and just finishing dinner, I’m rather tired, and don’t have anything particularly insightful to talk about.

So instead, here’s a podcast recommendation: if you’ve never listened to Daily Tech News Show from Tom Merritt (and friends), I’d strongly recommend checking it now. It’s a nice daily tech news summary that I utilize to keep up to date with what’s going on without having to read a lot of news stories myself, unless I choose to.

Early Mornings

Every once in a while, I wake up super early, and can’t fall back to sleep. Today was one of those days. I awoke around 3a, and have been up ever since.

Oddly enough, I don’t mind it that much, other than it messes my schedule up some. I’m normally up at 4a anyhow. I have a rather lengthy morning routine, due in part to the fact that I attempt to fit so much into my mornings before work:

Still Failing

Yesterday I blogged briefly about reinstalling Windows on my gaming PC. Unfortunately, even after doing so, I’m still having random BSODs and other crashes on the system. Therefore, last night I made the executive decision to replace the system (almost) entirely.

This morning I did a little planning (using the excellent pcpartpicker tool), spec’d out a new machine, and placed an order for the components. I believe that my graphics card (a GTX 1070) is still good, so I only needed the rest of the system. It wasn’t super cheap, unfortunately. But I want to be able to play the occasional game that isn’t supported on Linux with good performance, and maintaining a functional Windows machine appears to be my best solution for that.

Windows 10 Updates

Every once in a while I fire up an older Windows 10 PC, mostly to play games. Unfortunately, because it doesn’t get used much, it normally needs to run updates. And I officially hate running updates on Windows machines.

At this point in my life, most of my work is done on Linux. I understand the operating system relatively well, and I generally understand what an update will do to my computer.

Timing Matters

Short post today. Been a busy day, with more to come…

Professionally, I do a lot of work with microcontrollers and real-time systems. I don’t normally need to focus much on the timing aspect, as the frameworks in place generally have been ironed out, and timing just works.

However, there are times, like today, when I find out that a system is failing to perform correctly because we are missing timing deadlines. When something like that occurs, it’s time to start digging through the code, looking for the point of failure. Sometimes it’s an easy fix; sometimes it’s a design flaw that requires a substantial amount of work to fix.