Life in Germany
I haven’t posted anything in a while, and I have good reasons to do so. I’ve been busy looking for a good Silicon Graphics Octane to buy. I posted on the Nekochan forums (people with a common interest, it’s not called Nekochan for nothing), and somebody with an Origin 3K showed me this. At the time 70 Euro seemed to be a good deal for a first generation Octane with one MIPS R12000 300MHz CPU, 1GB RAM, SE graphics and IRIX preinstalled on a 9GB disk, with a black SGI keyboard, mouse, and associated cables. But then I found an eBay auction by olmos GmBH for an Octane with similar specs, but with 1.5GB RAM and SSE graphics. And I could probably get it for less than 70 Euro.
But when Charles posted a new image of his Octanes, I did a second take. Those had the new lowercase ’sgi’ logo, not the cube logo. Really, the black keyboards should have tipped me off already (the keyboard that came with the first Octane was granite) but it was actually an Octane 2! An line from everything2.com floated into my mind: the Octanes with the newer green skin were never sold with VPro graphics. That fit – it had SE graphics. And it suddenly came together – once they used same components from the Octane 2 for the lower end Octanes, they were essentially Octane 2s, except they were never sold with VPro graphics. A visual distinction had to be made.I contacted him – by this time he offered me 49 Euro including shipping – and told him those were probably Octane 2s, but I insisted on keeping it at 49 Euros.
And there you go, once I make the bank transfer tomorrow, the Octane 2 will be MINE. MINE, you hear. I need to change the skins because the previous owner took them away – no fucking clue why – and they’re about 30 UKP each from Ian Mapleson, the guy who packs better than anybody else. I’ll probably get another SCSI hard disk from him, V8 graphics so I can play Quake 3 on my Octane, and a dual R12000 300MHz processor module then. I was thinking of making every machine I own have Gigabit Ethernet, but the PCI cardcage for the Octane is dead expensive (~400 UKP), and the 3Com PCI-X card is 105 UKP. I could buy a SGI Fuel for that amount of money. Mmm, DVI… oh yeah, I need a 1920×1200 display too 
But for now I bought a Eizo Flexscan F520 for 24.90 Euro. It’s not the best monitor out there (in fact, in a move very much unlike Eizo, it was supposed to be a low end monitor) but it’s an Eizo. It also supports Sync on Green, so I don’t need to worry about buying that other 13W3 VGA connector.
And since the housing’s internet comes through PPPoE and IRIX is high end, it doesn’t have any facilities for communicating with commodity protocols. That’s where a gateway/firewall/server comes in. I need a boring old PC to be a server and gateway that will implement the PPPoE protocol. This means Linux. Once I’m done, I will have 3 machines that can play Quake 3 (hehehehehehehheheheheheh not really, I prefer Quake 1 actually).
On more down to earth things, I like Germany. It’s just the right temperature right now (and my laptop loves the ambient temperature too), but the people keep to themselves a bit too much. It’s a bit weird – it’s very quiet. The building is deathly quiet, even on a freaking Friday night. In Canada, people party and drink beer on Fridays. Here, I guess everybody does it in their own room.
Classes are okay, I think I can hold on. I’m not doing too bad at the moment, but I seriously need to tidy my room and take a long, hard look at my schedule, which is obviously wrong and so far I have been too lazy to correct it. I need more paper, organizers, binders and shit, and I just got my pin number, so I will go buy those tomorrow. Ah, money makes the world go round.
n.p. X JAPAN – Art of Life (the best part is Yoshiki going crazy on the piano, it sucks that I have to sit through 10 minutes of Toshi’s voice just to get there)
