Author: Martin

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Sleepy time

Earlier this week, pretty much from one day to the next, Alex finally grasped the idea of this whole “sleep” thing. We have a rocking chair in his bedroom, and until now we have rocked him to sleep every night. It usually took about 20 minutes, but sometimes as long as 45 before he would doze off and be sufficiently solid to move him to his cot.

As of this week, he no longer wants to be rocked to sleep. He’s happy enough to sit or lie in Abi’s or my lap for a few minutes, so we can tell him a story or play the eyes and nose game with him. But then he arches his back and starts loocking over at the cot.

“Beh,” he says.

“You want to go to bed? You want to go to your cot?”

He nods his little head.

So we lift him up and lower him gently into the cot. He lies down immediately, and curls himself round onto his stomach, clutching his cuddly toy to his chest. We rub his back, tell him we love him, and say “night-night.”

And then we leave the room, close the door, and walk away…in perfect silence! No screaming, no anguished cries of “dada!” or “mama!” Just the peaceful knowledge that he has learned to go to sleep on his own. I’m so proud of him!

Of course, at Nursery he’s been falling asleep for his mid-day nap on his own for some time now. But that’s not the same as falling asleep alone at home, where he knows he can command mama and dada’s attention, and make us do (almost) anything he wants. It means that what he really wants is to not to play, or have a story, but to fall asleep. It’s a big step.

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What makes the web?

A few things recently have made me wonder what exactly makes this thing we call “the web” what it is? What makes it useful? What makes it materially different from anything that has come before? The only observations I have come up with seem obvious–even banal–on their own. But put them together, and they produce this incredibly powerful…thing.

Content: A Book

Never before has such a wealth of information been available through a single access point. There is vastly more knowledge available elsewhere than there is on the internet (in libraries, newspaper archives, and on millions of people’s bookshelves), but you can’t get at it through a single wire, person, or contact point like you can with the internet.

Indexing: A Catalogue

Altavista, Google, Teoma…. There are others, and there will be more and better search engines in the future. But even now, the indexes of the web dwarf by manyorders of magnitude any previous attempt to condense and collate keywords and metadata.

Community: A Café

Content and indexes make for a great library, but people don’t hang out in libraries just for fun. Yet people have made the internet their homes–sometimes in a nearly literal sense. People have always come together in groups, and every form of technology that has allowed communication (letters, telegraph, telephone, ham radio) has fostered new communities. The community aspect was one of the earliest properties to emerge from electronic networks (email), and it has been in continuous evolution since then, through dial-up BBSs, on-line forums, chat boards and blogs.

Just as with Content and Indexing, there is very little that qualitatively distinguishes on-line communities from their real-life counterparts. It’s the quantity, ubiquity, and fluidity of their creation and make-up that makes the big difference.

Connectedness: An Address Book

Every web page can be connected to any other by a single step. This means that every piece of knowledge can be instantly referenced by every other, and every community is within shouting (whispering?) distance of every other. Connections and comparisons that were previously difficult or elaborate, now are suddenly simple. The power of a network increases with its size (Metcalfe’s Law), and also with the number of connections between its nodes.

Again, this networking effect has always been present in human communities: someone knows someone else, who knows someone or something else, and so the chain goes. But the speed and volume of connections on the internet is vastly greater.

Conclusion?

Going by these observations, there is very little the web does that has not been done elsewhere. Yet I feel that the web is qualitatively different from all that has gone before. Paradoxically, though, it seems to be the quantitative differences that combine to make a qualitative difference.

Am I wrong here? Am I missing something? Is the “Internet” really something different at all? Please enlighten me with your comments!

(See also Part 2 of this article.

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Aftermath

Normally, a severe barfing session on the day after one’s birthday would suggest a night of heavy partying. The alternative explanation is that one has come down with a case of the seemingly endemic winter vomiting. Sigh. I’m recovering now, but I’m exhausted, and my chest and stomach muscles all ache whenever I sneeze or draw a deep breath.

Possibly the worst part of being sick was not being able to enjoy my birthday lunch at the Hong Kong Martell. Mum & dad and Scott & Ange had all come round for the occasion, but by the time we got to the restaurant, all I had appetite for was their jasmine tea. And I’d so been looking forward to having their scallop parcels again, too!

Never mind. We’ll just have to do it all again in the New Year. Everyone else had a good time, though, and Alex kept us entertained with his latest party trick: balancing his juice cup on an upturned tea cup, then flinging his arms out and exclaiming “ta-daa!” Abi often entertains him by jumping out from behind objects and going “ta-daa!”, but this was the first time he’d performed the action himself. He had us all in fits of giggles. The boy is a born comedian.

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The Quiet PC

Wow. After placing my order late on Wednesday afternoon, the components from QuietPC.com arrived yesterday (Friday). They came in a huge and heavy box, that had me slightly worried. I haven’t taken a note of the dimensions of the AcoustiCase (£99 ex. VAT) before I ordered it. What if it didn’t fit on my desk? Gulp.

Fortunately, the box contained a lot of packaging. The case itself turned out to be slightly narrower than my old one. It is a good bit taller and longer, but that’s okay–it means there’s more room to manoeuvre inside. (It also has a flat top, which means that stuff I leave lying on it won’t keep rolling off. Cool.)

Another thing I hadn’t checked before ordering the case was the page of installation instructions. If I had, I wouldn’t have been surprised when Abi heaved an enormous bag of acoustic padding out of the box. Some assembly is required, you see…

What you start with is a nice, solid case. A good old-fashioned steel PC case. It weighs a tonne, but that’s part of the deal: with a heavy case like this, there’s less possibility of bits rattling around and making noise. You also get three different kinds of acoustic padding, all carefully cut to size: plain acoustic foam, which slots into spare drive bays and other empty spaces; acoustic barrier mass, which is heavy rubber, backed with strong adhesive for adding dampening weight and thickness to the case; and acoustic composite, which is a combination of the two, for places in the case where there is room for both.

It looks like a daunting task at first, but the instructions are clear. (Once you find them, that is. They were hidden inside the case itself). Overall, it took us about an hour and a half to assemble the case and transplant my PC from its old case to its new one. Installing the Ultra-quiet PSU (£52 ex. VAT) was a simple matter of slotting it into the case and attaching it with a few screws. The Flower Cooler (£33 ex. VAT) looked at once beautiful and scary, but turned out to be easier to snap on to my CPU than my current heat sink and fan.

When it was finished, the whole package looked fantastic. The acoustic padding is cut to perfect size, and is cleverly thought out to fill all the spaces through which sound might escape. The case is large enough to accept an ATX motherboard with stacks of room to spare for running cables. The Flower Cooler comes with a fan that attaches to the case itself rather than the heat sink, and hovers a centimetre or so above the fins to ensure maximum airflow. It also has an attachment that allows you to adjust the speed of the fan, so you can balance trade off some cooling power for more silence.

But the main reason I bought the case was to silence my PC. So does it work? Oh boy, does it work. It is gorgeous. When the computer is idling away, there is a very light thrumming noise from the CPU fan. Sitting a few feet away on the sofa, watching TV at normal volume, the sound is barely noticeable. It makes me cringe at the noisy rattle the old case and cooling fans had been producing.

I had been a little bit worried about heat build-up inside the case, because the acoustic baffling looks like it restricts the airflow in places. But the worry turned out to be unfounded. My CPU (a Duron 800) is ticking over at a happy 45°C, which is lower than it had been in my old case. Excellent! Given that the rear of the AcoustiCase has much better ventilation than my old one, I could probably get away with not running the fan at all right now. But I know I’ll need it when I move up to a high-speed Athlon next year, so I don’t want to get used to complete silence, only to be disappointed when I have to turn the fan back on.

Looking at it sitting on my desk now, the AcoustiCase is a true beast of a case. But it purrs just like a baby kitten. It wasn’t cheap, but this is definitely one of the best computer purchases I’ve ever made.

Links

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Silence is golden…

…or at least a substantial pocketful of silver.

Our new washing machine arrived yesterday, and just in time too, because Alex went barfy with winter vomiting again during the night on Tuesday. Our old one still worked–sort of–but the filter for the waste pipe was giving us problems, and the wash cycle didn’t always advance properly. So last weekend we went out and bought a new one.

The best thing about it is that it’s so quiet. We knew the old one was loud. It had lost most of its internal stability some time ago. When it went into full spin mode the whole house would shake. But it had deteriorated slowly, over several years, and we had just come to accept it. But this new one…wow! With the kitchen door closed, you don’t even notice that it’s on. Even when it’s doing a full spin, we don’t need to raise our voices, or turn the volume up on the TV.

It’s immensely satisfying to have a purchase turn out so good.

And on the subject of quietness, I ordered some components from QuietPC.com yesterday: the AcoustiCase, ultra-quiet PSU, and Flower Cooler that I mentioned on my PC upgrade list the other day.

I was very tempted to buy the rest of the components as well, and spend some time upgrading my PC while I’m off work this week…but I decided to hold out until the new year. There’s nothing I’m doing with my PC right now that really requires extra oomph (i.e. games), so I’d be upgrading just for the fun of it. Best to let Moore’s Law run for another month or two, and save myself a few pounds. The case components, however, are not electronics, and are unlikely to come down in price much. And they will provide a tangible benefit for our everyday life and computer usage: they’ll make our living room substantially quieter.