Pico-cluster

Today I had aimed to be in the office before lunchtime, but I was caught up by an unexpected email from the UoE Pensions Office, saying that I could no longer make the large voluntary contributions that had been approved three months ago! The reason was that I couldn't be paid less than the "living wage"! Hence my plans for avoiding tax this year were rather messed up. I hadn't expected it to be worth challenging them, but they seemed to get the picture - maybe they hadn't realised that I'm part-time - and doubled the contribution to a value rather closer to what I've been paying before. I'll pay a bit more tax, but have a bit more income.

I managed to collect my new glasses and buy lunch from Greggs in time to get the X62 into Edinburgh. In the office, I had a chat with PhD student B before going to the common room for cake to recognise the retirement of our chief computing officer (S) after 36 years in the School. That's just one year more than me, and he's been a great ally throughout my time - and we've also chewed the fat many time about our outdoor activities! When no-one else stepped forward to take photos - at the invitation of the Head of School - I took some for my mate S. I'll miss our random chats in the corridors of JCMB.

In the afternoon, B and I chatted some more, and I did some programming, until the other computing officers had stopped chatting to S in the Common Room, and I could collect our "pico-cluster" from them. It's got six four-core processors, each with its own memory and hard drive, all mounted inside a minimalist Perspex box. Relatively cheap, it's essentially a Raspberry Pi on steroids, and almost as cute. B will use it for performance testing, and he had a lot of fun starting to work out how to. He confessed to having wanted build a cluster (from old PCs) when he was a teenager, so this comes close to fulfilling that desire!

Eventually I went home, and walked Django whilst A was cooking.