Dave's Workshop - Workbench August 12th

Workbench

Week of August 12^th - August 18^th 2001

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Busy few days, as always. Kara had a couple of friends over for an extended weekend. We saw Rush Hour 2 Friday night. A bit slow in the beginning, but it got better as it went on. The whole thing felt a little forced though, like they were just going through the motions. Not bad for a sequel, but not nearly as good as the first one. All was not lost as we watched Toy Story 2 on DVD later that night. It was great. Every bit as good as the first. I actually had a few hours free Saturday afternoon. Naturally, I accomplished nothing. Oh well. We all went over to Jacksonville for the day on Sunday. It was fun, but tiring. Monday it was back to work. After being out last week in training I had a mountain of email to wade through. Probably ninety percent of it is was stuff I could just delete. That's the problem with the information age, information overload. It's simply too easy to communicate now. We don't think if it's important enough to send to someone anymore, that we just send everything to everybody because it's so easy. So, after a morning of email I spent the afternoon working on another "rush" web page. Or pages, to be more precise, three PowerPoint presentations that needed to be up by Thursday. At least they told me before Wednesday this time.

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Right, it's time to talk sports. August is well under way, that means FSU is getting ready for the fall college football season. The biggest news so far is the naming of Chris Rix to be the starting quarterback. Rix and Anquan Boldin had been battling for the position, but with our receivers dropping like flies it was decided to move Boldin back to receiver. This isn't the first time Boldin has changed positions. He came to FSU as a quarterback, but after a few practices and the prospect of sitting on the bench behind Chris Weinke and Jared Jones, he decided he'd rather play and moved to receiver. Boldin contributed nicely as a wideout, but after the season when it looked like Weinke would leave to go pro, talk started that Boldin might be moving back to QB. Michael Vick had electrified college football that year, leading his Virginia Tech team to the championship game before falling to FSU. Many fans in Tallahassee thought Boldin could do something similar here. It was not to be, Weinke surprised everyone by staying for his senior year and Boldin continued to catch passes. Now Weinke is gone and Jones and FSU have parted company. Another quarterback prospect, Fabian Walker, has had academic eligibility problems and is just now goining the team, but must wait till next season to play. That left redshirt freshman Rix as the only scholarship QB last spring. So back went Boldin into the mix. They shared time and everyone expected a battle this summer to see who would lead the Seminoles. In the end it was injuries, to our receivers, that forced the issue. With Robert Morgan out for the year, it was decided Boldin was needed too badly back at WR. But don't be surprised to see him behind center throughout the year, a la Peter Warrick a few years ago, just to mix things up a little bit. So now we have a redshirt freshman as our starting QB. To be honest, I'm exited about having Rix as our QB. Sure he hasn't been in the system a long time, but maybe well see a more balanced offensive attack this year.

We have a new leader in the race for the worlds fastest computer. Here's some stats...

"Located in a classified area at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, ASCI White covers a space the size of two basketball courts and weighs 106 tons. It contains six trillion bytes (TB) of memory, almost 50,000 times greater than the average personal computer, and has more than 160 TB of IBM TotalStorage 7133 Serial Disk System capacity, or enough to hold six times the entire book collection of the Library of Congress."

What is it all used for? Simulating nuclear explosions of course. Even more impressive is the fact that ASCI, Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative, has four of the top six super computers in the world according to TOP500 Supercomputer Sites.

It looks like Be has finally been sold. The Register is reporting that Palm will acquire Be for 11 million in stock. What will Palm do with Be? Who knows, but it doesn't look good for the once promising BeOS, their desktop computer OS. At least it's offshoot, BeIA, may live to see another day. Who knows, maybe Palm will GNU the desktop stuff it doesn't want.

Saturday

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Week of August 12^th - August 18^th 2001

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Week of August 12th - August 18th 2001

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Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Week of August 12^th - August 18^th 2001