Niall’s virtual diary archives – Friday 17th November 2006

Friday 17th November 2006: 4pm. Things are slowly turning upward. Last two weeks or so have also not been good, but they do feel stabilised at least. And with stability, things can move forward.

Johanna and I have stabilised into some sort of quasi-relationship - we are broken up, and we're partially behaving as though we're single. But we're also partially behaving as though we're still going out which is to be expected as we're both still very much in love with one another - that has never come into question - and of course we still live together. So we still have cuddles, which we probably shouldn't, but then if I'm honest I'd happily have cuddles with anyone (female) I'm close to except they don't tend to allow it unless they're drunk. There is still quite a bit of conflict in my head regarding her - on the one hand I'm happy with her to be off with other men, but on the other hand I worry that I'm not deep down and so I spend a fair bit of time questioning my feelings on the matter. I will get surely hurt, but then I was hurting her while we were going out which is why she ended it (partially) because I was imposing my world view on her.

I have been however continuing to impose my worldview on others with much pain being caused to them as a result. The close friends I ended regular contact with are not happy bunnies and are hurting themselves and me in protest. But again some stability has arisen there - I was being too forgiving, I wasn't liking myself for it and I was deluding myself into thinking they would be there for me when as recent events have shown they would not. Now my mental construction of my relationships with them have been reset, I do feel much happier even if they don't.

I don't feel much like socialising at present - I don't mean with one or two people, but rather in the sense of going to parties or being around larger groups. I don't see that changing any time soon - I never particularly liked it anyway, but I do have a major itch to do something really productive and now seems like the right time. From my recovery after Ruth, I have defined myself through my computer programming works which is a rather lonely affair. Half way through first year, my loneliness caused me to direct more effort into people and I have been burned by that, though less so than on previous occasions. Having been burned, loneliness is looking more palatable again for the time being and I might as well make use of it.

Hence I have decided to upgrade my computer for Christmas as my current one is neither powerful enough nor equipped enough for writing the economic model I plan. I want to make use of graphic processor (GPU) programming in order to massively increase the horsepower available for my economic model and for that I need a newer graphics card, one which nowadays requires PCI Express. My current computer is a dual Athlon 1700 built in 2001 and for less than five hundred quid I can upgrade to an overclocked dual core Intel Core 2 system with an ATI X1950 GPU with commensurate upgrades in hard drive, RAM etc. A nice feature of this upgrade is that I will be able to run Apple Mac OS X on the desktop as well as finally having native Linux and FreeBSD installations as currently I must run these in VMWare on the desktop. The Apple Mac OS X is particularly handy for building and testing PowerPC editions of my software so I can ensure I've got the endian support implemented correctly.This new Intel chip has virtualisation support, so I should be able to run a copy of Linux in parallel with Windows thus making good use of the 2Gb of RAM this new machine will have. Another major advantage is that sometime in the future, I can stuff a quad core processor into the same system and finally get the quad processor system I've always wanted to test Tn upon.

So things are looking up. If nothing else, I very much enjoy building a new computer and seeing just how far I can overclock it and that in itself will do a lot for my happiness. Even better when I get to tune Tn and see what speed increase I get <rubs hands in glee>. Be happy everyone!