July through September 2025
Well the grind came to a sort of conclusion, in that my portion of the project was fully fired up and put into production mode. Dozens of moving parts, cumbersome manual mapping, a mountain of documentation – and it’s all just doing its thing now. It’ll come back up many times, and hopefully it will get to be improved and built upon over time. No more unbilled hours on it though, period.
So the big news for July – I bought a Dell C4140 and got it up and running! It has dual 2400 watt power supplies and can get pretty damn thirsty. The power where I live is a little jittery, with couple-second outages at least once or twice a week and slightly longer outages at least monthly. I couldn’t have my new beast getting hit with fluctuating and disappearing power so like the rest of the hardware in the house I had to have it on a suitable UPS. Getting the UPS up and running was a bit of an adventure, but it’s been smooth for weeks now and it’s done its job each time the power blips out for a moment.
Update: I agreed to take a month long trip with an old friend. The journey to and from Burning Man 2025 was something else – definitely one of the harder things I’ve done and another lesson in overextending and then stubbornly sticking to unrealistic commitments.
Right now I’m focused on:
- Putting this machine to use, testing large models and multi-gpu inference
- Burning Man! First time in 3 years, but it’ll be the 14th time back out there.