Well, been feeling a little down lately, was only a matter of time until the writer inside me began ticking. Enjoy.

Best Is Yet To Come

Its a strange to feel alone,
When a year ago i was surrounded,
Its hard to be so quiet,
When recently i was so hounded,
Its weird to be so alien,
And not to have anything to do,
Needing someone to talk to,
And being forced to think who?,
Recently i had the answers,
To the riddles i had my key,
But it seems ive somehow lost it,
Ive lost my identity.

To the past i say “a salut”,
To my friends i say farewell,
The next time we may meet up,
We’ll have better stories to tell,
To the people i left behind,
And the friends i never knew,
May all your wishes be granted,
And all your prayers come true.

To all the family i shunned,
During my apparent time away,
Fear not for my future or wellbeing,
I’ll prove you right someday,

To my girlfriend i say one thing,
I wish you could read my mind,
To see how much you mean to me,
And how rare you are to find.

To all the doubters and critics,
Throughout this course ive run,
Your going to want tape this show,
Because the best is yet to come.

Copyright Sam Marsh 2008 (c)

Well, since last time we spoke nothing much has been happening in my techie world! I got the Xigmatek heatsink last week and with the help of a few online forums for some reference voltages, i managed to push it to a whopping 3.25Ghz per core (Q6600 quad core), idling at 33oC. The heatsink is awesome and i would urge everyone to go out and buy several.

Aside from tech, ive still been laid up with the man flu that seems to be going round – i even had to take the unprecendented step of ringing in sick for work on monday and tuesday – well i say ringing, i actually emailed because i lost my voice! (Not very good working on IT support when you cant speak ).

Ive also been ploughing through my graduate applications, got quite a few pending now which im happy with, and ive bought a few psychometric testing books to read through to hopefully give me an advantage – after i managed to somehow fail the aptitude test for Orange IT & Networks graduate scheme which i was bloody perfect for, but dont get me started on this stupid flugging tests.

Finally, I spent the weekend at Frans in Birmingham which was fun – chilling out with her and her brother on Saturday night at their pub “Gosta” or whatever! Managed to see quite a few people from Intel while walking around town which was surprising lol

Anyway, off for another shift at the dream factory – adios.

The last 2 weeks have been fairly hectic – fairly being an understatement. On the social side, we went to 5th Ave with Joe Joe and Matt again, with Fran tagging along ( ). She also gave me the bloody man flu, which is horrible – and i still have it, so cheers Fran!

On the career side, i applied to about 20 graduate scheme to hedge my proverbial bets, and ive been turned down by 4 so far! Not impressed – psychometric tests are the biggest FAIL since man and they will be so so so sorry in the future when it emerges they rejected the worlds richest man as a graduate!

Techie wise, where to begin. First of all, i saw that my gaff’ at work had a new toy – an Acer aspire one “netbook” – a 8.9inch laptop with a SSD Hard drive running Linpus Linux, a custom derivite of Fedora core. I decided to buy one (at 200 quid you cannot argue – it even has an ATHEROS wireless card in it!). I was overjoyed to find that it had Fedora core repositories in it, running a custom version desktop combined with XFCE and gnome. Main gist of this, is that you can bring up gnome-terminal by pressing “Alt and F2″ and typing “gnome-terminal”, and going to SU you can then go “yum install WHATEVER” and it will install if it is in your repo’s (wireshark worked a treat – VLC was a pain in the arse to install).

Other than my netbook, i have been clocking my Q6600 with Matts help – its up to 2.7Ghz per core from 2.4Ghz using an Arctic Cooler Freezer 7 Pro – idling at 46oC (Antec 900 case). Im upgrading my heatsink to a Xigmatek HDT-S1283 (http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=81&Itemid=1) which comes very highly rated at a lovely low price of 22 quid! Hopefully this will allow me to ramp up to 3.0ghz per core, a 2.4ghz in total overclock! (600Mhz per core).

Aside from personal tech, ive been working on VoIP a lot at work – implementing soft and hard phones over a LAN using Trixbox – this is my first venture into VoIP and i have to say im very impressed. It does exactly what it says on the tin, and the soft phone solution especially works a treat.

For the future tech, i should be recieving delivery of my Cisco 3524XL switch this week, so i can config that and get that onto our network to extend our NOC I will also be continuing with my Virtualization white paper (evaluation into the performance implications of Virtualization), testing CPU, HDD, Network, File server etc aspects of virtualization vs non-virtualization. Should yield some very interesting results so keep your eyes peeled here for updates.

Finally, a little note – its mine and Frans 1 year anniversary on the 10th December, so yours truly managed to swing some sweet tickets for Jimmy Carr at the apollo on the 5th December, row GG in the front, absolutely great tickets for a momentous occasion

Later all, Sam

13 days on i think its about time for another blog!

The last 13 days have been fairly random as always, involving trips to the Pav, 5th Ave, a weekend with Fran, a weekend with Joe, rebuilding my PC twice and generally having fun!

Couple of weeks ago we decided to hit up the pav for the first time in 2 years – this involved copious amounts of pre-drinks with Martin, Fi, becky and Dave. Ended up getting a Ratvan hotdog before we headed in (which i still regret!) and had a good time in the Pav for 5-6 hours! Went for an emotional walk around Irwell also, quite sickening to see the darkside so decimated from its former glory!

The weekend after was the most fun one so far in Manchester; Fran came up on the Thursday for a long weekend and we spent a couple of days chilling before heading out massively with Joe Joe and Matt on Friday night to 5th Ave. Ended up having a cracking night, although we had to leave at 1am to try and find matt – who wasnt in the club, or outside. On returning home, he wasnt there either. Confused we left it for a few hours until at around 3.30am he strolls through the door pissed as a fart covered in mud having no recollection of where he went! Great times lol

Other than alcoholism, our technolog-ising has continued. I purchased 2, yes 2, Samsung 22″ widescreen TFT’s (same backpanels as Dell Ultrasharps reputedly!), along with a new Freezer 7 Pro heatsink for my PC, which i have rebuilt and cleaned so it can go on my desk in all of its Antec 900 glory.

Due to the that that one of our housemates may or may not contribute to the internet bill, we are setting up a VPN point to point network in our house; whereby each of us will have a vpn client to the point of presence linux box on the edge of our network, e.g. the only way to the internet. If you dont have a valid certificate, you dont have the internet, its simple. So if he doesnt pay – he doesnt play