Today, not long after I got to work, I figured out how to use the Apple Mighty Mouse I bought the other day. It turns out that the main case, unexpectedly, has a sidedness to it that determines what button click is generated. Just like the iPod I tried at the Apple store that day, there was a trick to it that wasn't intuitive, but once I got it, everything is simple and good.

I recently met with the sysadmin of Dr Just's group (another research group in Psychology) to discuss issues with machine space, storage, backups, etc. In the course of things, I saw his machine room, and then showed him mine. I'm rather jealous. His machine room is well-cooled, directly accessable, has good power, and has 24 machines in a compute cluster and some other hardware all in racks. It also looks professional. Mine is a small, poorly-cooled closet with some of the hardware on the floor, the rest on a desk. Sigh. I also spoke with the head of another group to talk about pooling resources.

All the conversations were pretty useful either way.

For a demonstration that really intelligent people can say some loopy things when they get old, and as a reminder to ask whether people still had their head screwed on tight when they said something, check out the article on David Bohm, in particular the interview in the "Thought as a System" section. Ouch. Mixing philosophy and quantum physics leads one down a swift road to utter stupidity.

You may want to take a look at something like Liebert's MCR if you think you could fit most everything into a rack.