Well well, once again we are here, with me wondering what I should be writing for yet another entry in my blog. The answer is pretty obvious really, and it is more of an exercise of pseudo-intellectual rhetoric than anything actually remotely useful.
I've been back in Singapore for at least a fortnight by now, and like all things that occur in my life, things got a little interesting along the way. I think that to give enough perspective, it is important to start writing things in a chronological order.
So I took a rather long flight from Champaign-Urbana back to Singapore. In the bid to avoid having to take any of the long haul buses up to Chicago, the originating flight for it all was from CMI (Champaign-Urbana). The trip from CMI to ORD was relatively uneventful. However, it was at ORD where things started to get... interesting.
First off, my two pieces of checked in luggage required re-tagging to be kept checked in all the way from ORD through AUH to SIN. That took a while, but it was eventually done. Second, I had to have my boarding pass reprinted at ORD because there was no direct transfer from the domestic terminal to the international one---I had to leave the secure area and re-enter, which explained the need for the reprinting of the boarding pass.
The flight from ORD to AUH was relatively uneventful too. AUH (Abu Dhabi) was an interesting airport to spend the night at; it was located in the UAE, and thus the dominant landscape was that of sand. The food places at the airport were as expected; mostly ``international'' fare in the sense of the fast food. I had a lot of coffee there, but still managed to sleep on the eventual plane ride back. The transit to the aircraft was something of an eye-opener as well, since we had to take a bus out from the departing gate towards the plane that was parked a little ways off from where the gate was. It felt like the old days of air-travel for some reason, where one would get to climb up the stairs to board the plane, kind of like the depictions in the many Tintin comics.
The nightmare began the moment I arrived back in Singapore. The airline lost my luggage, both of them. To make matters worse, the re-tagging step at ORD was done incorrectly---only one of the two pieces was re-tagged, and even then, it didn't seem that it made its way back to Singapore either. It would take the airline and the Lost & Found department of Changi Airport roughly a week to find everything back, and even then, the hard shell luggage was damaged beyond economic repair and I had to claim damage fees. During that time, I just made do with whatever clothes that I had left lying around at home, as well as the stuff that I had shipped back via FedEx. Since I was missing my key going-out clothes, I was also mostly confined indoors, which was a blessing in disguise because I could acclimatise with relative ease.
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In general, I think that the way in which I had been relying to beat jet lag was to use my ginormous brain to solve some problems that crop up, and this time was probably no different. I took apart Elysie and cleaned her out as best as I can, going as far as to take apart the heat sink and fan of the CPU to clean out the dust and to re-apply thermal grease, seeing an immediate improvement in the overall core temperatures. While Elysie was still incapable of handling a four-core full load while maintaining a relatively low temperature in this non-air-conditioned environment, it took much longer for the warning sensors to report reaching 90 degrees Celsius than before the thermal grease update. That's of course a good thing.
I also switched out the PSU to something of a higher wattage (from 480W to 600W), and switched out her Nvidia 9600 GT for an Nvidia GTX 680 made by ASUS. Man, that new graphics card is a real beast. It was just long enough that I had to shift the hard drive to a higher position in the mounting rack, nearly missing the ventilation that the fan could provide. It was also thick enough that I had to remove the external eSata card connected to one of the PCI slots just to give it enough room for the heat sinks and fans. It consumed enough power that it required effectively three PCI-e power sockets; two multiplexed with a given cable plus another one. Thankfully, the new PSU was a modular one, and it was possible to stitch together something that worked. The other problems that the new card posed were the position of the cables---Windows XP, being the weird system it was, didn't like it when the hard drive was not in the SATA #0 or #1 slot, and it promptly kept crashing ever so often. But I was afraid of connecting the hard drive to the SATA #1 slot because it was directly under the massive card; I was afraid there wasn't enough clearance, something that I soon discovered to be false.
So after rejigging things for quite a bit and suffering one too many BSODs from Windows XP (no kernel panics from Xubuntu, even after the rather harrowing re-partitioning process and re-install), the card was successfully installed and tested. Benchmarks from DMC4 and Torchlight II showed a ridiculous improvement to the point that I am extremely satisfied at the small fortune I spent in the upgrade.
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I think I will stop here for now and write more some other time.
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