1. Exercise.  It’s not so much that I like the exercise itself (at all), but I do like the general sense of well-being and smug self-satisfaction that one gets after one has returned from exercise.

At least, I get the aforementioned smugness and satisfaction.

Elizabeth and I were quite active this weekend, relatively speaking, though the relativity there should not be underestimated.  We even went to the gym, which is somewhat remarkable given my previous forays into dedicated fitness facilities.

2.  The Hip.  I know, I know, I need to shut up about the Hip already.  Bear with me.  I’m still buzzing (and my ears are still ringing) from the concert, and I just recently picked up two of their albums which I didn’t have before.  They are playing through my PC’s fair-to-middling speakers as I type, and are making me feel very soulful.

3.  Good sp0rtsmanship.  It allows me to remain friends with Diggory, even as he hands me the ass-whupping of a lifetime in our folding stats.

photo credit: kevindooley

Yes, text chat.  A feature that stopped being cutting edge fifteen years ago — and at least fifteen years ago we were using full keyboards, rather than the screen-based abortive hack of an interface that passes for an input means on the PS3.  In spite of this, we PlayStation faithful downloaded this used band-aid of a software update like so many piglets at the proverbial teat, and nobly installed it.  We knew that we could never return to the glory days of yore when we didn’t have the ability to awkwardly shuffle text messages to each other, but then why would one ever want to look back?

I have now an answer to that question.

I was willing to overlook the half-baked lameness of this update.  I was puzzled, but not bothered, by the rabid nature of the comments on Sony’s blog that heralded this as the greatest technological progression since we first trod on the moon.  I accepted this update as progress, even if it was progress that afforded me absolutely no benefit.  I was okay with all of this — until I learned that this update actually completely broke the media streaming functionality of our PS3.

You see, shortly after installing said patch, Elizabeth, Diggory and I decided to watch a movie.  We fired up the PS3, connected to Diggory’s PC-cum-server over our home network, and called forth a movie from the depths of the archives there.

The movie did not come forth willingly.  It was jittery, it was pixelated, it was slow, and it was a big, blocky mess.  Trying to fast-forward or rewind brought the system buckling to its knees.  “This is not ideal,” I commented mildly, shortly before giving up entirely on the film and moving on to the next.  When other movies yielded the same result, though, I began to suspect that something was up.

It says something that the PS3 was the one device in all of this that I did not suspect.  Perhaps it was the ethernet cable we ran to Diggory’s room, I ventured.  Perhaps one of our routers was glitched.  Perhaps Diggory’s PC has become so intensely focused on folding that it can no longer be bothered to share with us the movies it holds in the shadowy recesses of its memory.  Perhaps everyone just needs a quick reboot and some time to think, and all will be well.  I laid out a five-stage plan to tear down the home network, piece by piece, and test it at each and every point to find out what was standing between me and my consumption of video entertainment.

Diggory suggested, almost in passing, that maybe he could bring his PS3 upstairs and we could see if it experienced the same issues.  A quick test, we figured, which involved minimal unplugging of cables and locomotion of hardware, so we might as well try it out.  Up came Diggory’s system, still sweating from its day of folding proteins.  Thirty seconds later, it was connected to the network and streaming video like a champ.

I’ll skip over much of our troubleshooting and discussion, with its corresponding commentary on the state of technology and cultural development, and get to the point where we realized that the only difference between my PS3 and Diggory’s was that he had not yet installed the aforementioned update.  A quick search on Google confirmed our fears: update 2.70 trashed the media streaming capabilities.

At this point, the facts of the situation presented themselves to me like a hammer formed of concentrated light lodging itself in my cranium.  I had accepted an update that provided to me a meaningless feature I will never, ever use, and in return I had traded away the primary function for which our PS3 resides in our house.  What type of Mephistophelian exchange was this, I cried to the shiny black brick inhabiting the space beside our TV.  The echoing silence told me all I needed to know.

My point (if I have one) is to Sony, and it is threefold.  First, if you are going to foist software on a trusting and cash-bearing public, kindly test it before you do so.  Second, if you are going to compell us to install updates, might I ask you to make them worth our while?  And third (assuming you ignore one and two, which I’m fairly certain you will), if you do continue ramming pointless updates down our throats, at least for the love of all that’s holy do not break the very functionality that keeps our wives from just selling the damn thing on eBay.

photo credit: shagy6six6

Just to give it a sense of perspective: Diggory and I both run Folding@Home on our respective PS3s, as well as our PCs.  The Ps3s, as expected, run pretty well neck-and-neck, which means the difference really comes down to the protein-crunching power of the PC.

Diggory’s PC can churn out a goodly-sized protein in the space of about a day.  My PC, for a similarly-sized protein, will sputter and fuss for about a week before lobbing its efforts over to Standford’s server and impatiently awaiting its reward.

Because of this, I have stopped talking about our individual results around the house, and am focusing my conversation on the productivity of our team.  It’s less mortifying that way.

photo credit: Guillerm?

(Nerd alert:) Work units, according to Wikipedia, are the packets of data that F@H downloads to work on (and yes, I know that sentence isn’t grammatically correct).  They come in different sizes; the PS3 processes work units that are 150,000 or 300,000, while Diggory has downloaded work units that are as large as 10,000,000 on his PC. (/Nerd alert)

I have no idea what the numbers actually refer to, so don’t ask.

The point is, you would think that if I completed a work unit that was 150,000… whatevers… in size, and Diggory completed one that was 1,500,000 in size, Diggory would get ten times the points.

To my simultaneous glee and consternation, that doesn’t seem to be the case.  Diggory’s PC is grinding its way through absolutely enormous… things.  I think it’s actually simulating the birth of the universe at this point.  It will churn on these calculations for days, grunting masculinely with the exertion.  But when it loads them back to the server, they still count as one work unit and only a slight advantage in points.

At this rate, my lowly PS3-and-wheezing-laptop combination just might be able to keep pace with Diggory’s shining arsenal of protein-folding doom.

photo credit: Vik Nanda

Diggory has also set up Folding on his PS3, and created a team (startlingly named “Siege & Diggory”) so that we can combine our points for greater glory and bragging rights.  We just set up the team a couple of days ago, and so far I am in the lead.

That is, until Diggory’s PC kicks in.  You see, he also downloaded the app onto his computer, which is currently gnawing on proteins the likes of which would frighten a bull moose.  So Diggory has both a high-powered PC and a PS3 churning out proteins to add to his point totals, while I have just a PS3 and a laptop that spends more time scratching itself and watching flower petals drift by than actually calculating protein folds.

For that reason, I am being boisterous and obnoxious about the house with reference to my current lead in points, because as soon as Diggory’s computational behemoth lumbers from its fiery cave, breathing smoke and spewing lava, I am going to get crushed.

photo credit: William Hook

1. Saturday mornings.  Even though I am actually working this morning, because I have finished Hellacious Project #1 and am now trying to wrap up Hellacious Project #2, I like that I can drift down to the office at a time that I choose.  I have some of the coffee my wife got me brewing up in the kitchen, and am looking forward to sipping a cup as I try to power through a few of the 5,000 items on my to-do list.

2. Folding@Home.  This is a project hosted by Stanford University, where they use computers to simulate protein folding in an effort to identify ways to attack diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.  The neat thing is that anyone with a PC or PS3 can sign up to have their computer contribute during its idle time.  I have our PS3 set up now so that whenever we’re not using it, it connects to Folding@Home and starts grinding away on folding proteins.

I don’t claim to understand even 1% of what this protein folding entails, but it feels good to contribute to something that could help humanity, and all it takes it setting up a computer to run some calculations while I’m not using it.

3. The fact that I don’t have a disease named after me.

photo credit: net_efekt