BLEH. I had originally intended today to spend my lunch time on a mental-health constitutional. However events conspired to keep that from happening. I spent it instead removing Silver Thermal Paste from a CPU, hoping that it would work correctly once the offending material had been removed.

Not so much with that. The CPU still doesn’t work, and I am no nearer the needed goal of having an acceptable, inexpensive method of shipping a mobile data center with Solaris 10 x86 (a Windows competitor) installed. For those in the know, Solaris is a unix-based operating system, unlike Windows which is (was) a DOS based operating system. Solaris likes a SPARC CPU, and Windows a CISC processor. Really I am just spouting though, as the solution we are architecting is acceptable to all, it’s just now a matter of building and testing. And making sure that my eager-to-help boss doesn’t play with the thermal paste again. The problem has been that equipment meant for a Data Center is not made for ease of shipping. So, not only must the machines in question be robust, but they must also be compact. So that they fit in my shipping containers. We have done laptops before. And SP@RCbooks as well. But, the price on new SP@RCbooks just became prohibitive. Its 30 grand a pop for one of those now, compared to the relatively low-price of only 10grand each. SP@RCbooks are also notorious pieces bad manufacturing, in that they tend to fall apart if you sneeze *near* them. It’s like buying a Dodge Viper. Nice to look at, fun in theory, but hell for maintenance. And my Unix knowledge is not so in-depth that I want to be using it to repair shit all the time.

Handy tip folks – Don’t leave the thermal paste where the boss can use it. Or, if you do, stock up on q-tips and rubbing alcohol. Ahh well.. back to the binary grind. BTW: Did you know there are only 10 types of people in the world? Those who got that joke, those who didn’t :D