[rescue] Bigger Iron at Home (was: SNMP, Baby!)

[Dave McGuire]

On Tuesday, November 11, 2003, at 11:38 AM, Sheldon T. Hall wrote:
> SWMBO spotted the Challenge L in the garage.  It's hard to camouflage, 
> that
> one (the Challenge, not SWMBO) since it sounds like I've got an 
> airliner
> idling out there behind the toolboxes.
>
> As you married men might imagine, a discussion ensued:
>
> "What's this, then?  I thought you were getting rid of some of these 
> old
> computers!"
...

   You're not going to like this, Shel, but I won't sugar-coat it.

   She can't have the zebra without its stripes.  Speaking entirely 
idealistically, it is evil, bad, cruel, and just plain wrong to say "I 
like this person, but I don't like this and this and this about him, so 
I'm going to marry him and make him stop doing those things."

   It is wrong to try to mold another human being into what you think 
they should be.  Some 80% of the cars in this country are parked 
outside...your wife will, without a doubt, survive the hardship.

   I'm sorry if that sounds harsh...but you are who you are, and what 
you do with your life makes your life what it is.

> So ... what _am_ I going to do with it?  I'm not much on graphics, and 
> it
> doesn't have a framebuffer, anyway.  It's only 10baseT, so massive
> fileserving would seem unlikely.

   100Mbps ethernet cards (and FDDI if you want fast stuff) are readily 
available for that machine.

>   I know some of you guys have _big_ stuff
> at home, and I'm not just talking McGuire and his Cray.  I need a story
> here, so give me some ideas, and, while you're at it, some real-life
> examples of what you do with your BigStuffAtHome.

   Well, I make my living on mine.  I design embedded systems, write 
software, maintain a marketable skill set, and generally try to do my 
best to make my life useful to the world by advancing the state of the 
computational arts wherever I can.

   And I park my car (a fancy, expensive one at that) outside.

       -Dave

--
Dave McGuire                      "My tummy hurts now, but my soul
St. Petersburg, FL                 feels a little better."     -Ed