Vampire Squid from Hell

Vampyroteuthis infernalis

… is the literal translation of this lovely creature’s formal name, Vampyroteuthis infernalis. Isn’t is a cutie? I mean, look at that mouth.

Jennifer Rardin (1965-2010)

Jennifer Diana Rardin (28 April 1965 – 20 September 2010)

It was with no little dismay that I discovered this evening (via Smart Bitches, Trashy Books) that author Jennifer Rardin had died suddenly on 20th September.

Carrie Vaughn @ Galaxy Books, 19th Sept 2010

Carrie Vaughn

Urban fantasy author and creator of the Kitty Norville series Carrie Vaughn had a signing at Galaxy today, and I was there with a few books bought specially for the session (unfortunately you can’t get your e-book collection autographed) and prior permission to hang around and take an excessive number of photographs.

Boring statistics: WCG

I’ve finally hit the two-year mark (and incidentally earned the Sapphire badge) on the Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together (phase II) project. It’s been a difficult slog because of the dry spells that are part of the project’s design. Demand for these workunits is so high that the WCG techs have slowed down the rate at which they’re coming out of the hopper, and even if you have nothing but this project selected in your device profile there’s no guarantee that you’ll receive any tasks unless you keep refreshing each BOINC client manually every few minutes.

I’ve added Computing for Clean Water to my list of projects and will be concentrating on this for the next two CPU years.

The Clean Energy Project – Phase II has also been restored to my project list, but as it is still Linux-only and there’s a high demand for this project I’m not getting more than a couple of workunits a day.

The race to the 5-year target for Help Fight Childhood Cancer is still on hold until I bring my i5 system online. This will take another 7 to 14 days.

I’ve also requested and received permission to add my work computer to my little WCG fleet, so here’s another two cores to add to my 16. Or in terms of active devices, I added one and now have 6.