Steaming

I've had a fairly frustrating few days...

On Friday my home PC started to bork. It looked as if it could all be down to my own stupidity of keeping it next to my Xbox 360 (which up until recently has been unloved). That thing (being an early elite) kicks out some heat; in the direction of the PC cooling fan. I rescued the poor Acer from its Microsoft cell mate and lo' and behold, the problems vanished and I managed to do a successful backup. Rosy.

Last night, I took the decision to have a late one busting out some work to start on the grid computing facilities. Roughly 30 simulations each requiring about 8 hours of run time + another hour to do some post processing. I finished at 4am and tried to upload them to my ftp account. But stupid me, I'd forgotten just how long it takes to transfer files of that size and number from home. I fell into bed, exhausted. This morning, I awoke to find a PC recovery console as my desktop with a big fat 'Failed' error message. It quickly dawned on me (over my morning green tea with lemon) that yesterdays hard work was all for nothing. I wasn't happy. Then again, I hadn't lost all 'that' much and set the PC recovering from a handy system image. Its completed but no longer seems to believe it has a network adapter. It wouldn't play nicely with Ubuntu either, or MemTest for that matter. Basically, its f*cked.

A little miffed I headed into uni/work and begun re-making my files. It always feels tedious doing large batches but even more so the second time. I finished at about 7 this evening and put them onto the grid computing system to find out... that there are currently no licenses for the given software.

So since taking over Fluent, Ansys have removed my standalone license, invoked a university wide license (which isn't currently active) and transferred the grid licenses to Fluent 12, which has failed. I'm effectively a hydraulics experiemnt which is short of a fluid. Having access to three grid accounts I'm now effectively 18 times slower without it. Thats a lot and makes any effort at the minute seem absolutely futile (but necessary?).

There is an upside to this all however (in fact a few):
1. I'll finally sort out my woefully inadequate 500Gb filled to the brim passport backup.
2. I went to the Foundry tonight and tore the place apart

I know its the done thing to claim general weakness when asked but without blowing my proverbial trumpet, I feel quite strong. Not my strongest ever mind you but certainly something approaching decent. It may seem from my recent postings that I've lost sight of my previous epiphany, that is not the case. Time is conspiring against me at the moment and there's nothing I can seemingly do. Indoors will have to suffice for the most part and the nature of training goes a long way to destroying the memories of a frustrating day.