J7SC_Orion

...nostalgia ban !

???

...my dad had a (used) BMW Alpina in Europe; and I have had Alpinas (full editions, or just ECU + related), but yeah, the referenced XB7 is a different beast and has a price tag of C$ 182,000 - no thanks. You can't use all that power anyway in a big metro area...plus I'm genuinely happy with my current ride. ...a few years back before the previous lease expired, one of the sales folks tried s.th. similar with me - they had just gotten an X5 M Competition (~575 HP?) in and he insisted that we go for a quick jaunt, with him driving...so he puts it into launch mode while waiting at a red light, which revved the engine up while holding it with the brakes, and opened the valves in the exhaust. Just before he launched, I tipped him on the shoulder and pointed to the cop car in the next lane on my side...? launch aborted

^^...still an idyllic place to have a lunch, by the looks of it...may be you should just get one of those VW 'Westfalia' camping conversions done, the ones with a little kitchenette and the extendable camping 'roof' for a quick post-lunch nap. ...yeah, after driving to the Purolator depot by the airport this morning, I finally have all the parts in for the 'Raven's Nest 2.0' per below...no rush to finalize it though, working on the best combo of permutations and combinations for all work, play machines ('domino effect' triggered by the Raven's Nest) ...lunch was 'on the run'...stopped by a delicatessen for Tuna salad, Parmesan crisps and a chocolate milk ?

...my, my --- look what the cat the doggos dragged in banneritis

...hehe - that's because that pic was from when it was brand new on the showroom floor.(see also spoiler) ..but it will look just like it when they're finished with it as it is in superb shape. Apart from cleaning, they're doing a handover inspection plus new brake pads, so we're tooling around in an X1 courtesy car for the weekend...M package and all - peppy, but a bit small... fyi...at the exact spot where our X5 was in the showroom back then now sits a BMW Alpina XB7 (black on black on black)...menacing-looking 3-ton beast w/ 620hp...dealer kept on 'casually walking over to it' during our negotiations for the lease buy-out ...

...that does look tasty ? Breakfast time here before I drive to Purolator depot to pick up two packages (?) they were supposed to 'deliver'...Starbucks Sumatra + rye bread with Nutella, raspberry & wild honey

...

..exciting - other than 'Daily Mail' as the source ? I think I'll be burning reindeer poop for a little while longer

...bought out the lease of the company car today; had been driving it anyways since new...only real problem: Neither Starbucks venti nor I are a good match for ivory-coloured leather ?

...and then add a 500 W +- Ampere 3090 on top ?

...

...since I also like it super extra hot with Cayenne pepper, better add 2x Hertog Jan beer

...chciken + this and that...

..."for science Linux"

...yeah, looks sort of like a baby Threadripper, which always had LGA - and one of the best mounting mechanisms out there, IMO

...so much more we can learn from nature, including about 'eye sight'. ...Not directly related to algae proteins, but this ocean critter has the most sophisticated vision (we know of so far) on the planet - needed for his incredible 'punch'...would be interesting to see this 'technology' reproduced by man...

OK, so I'm fond of harmonics...

...it's been a while since I updated....have been extremely buys at work with a project that got initially delayed by Covid-19 but is almost caught up now. Project Raven will become Project Ravens' Nest ...decided on two workstations with two cases (one with three mobos, one with two). I've been ordering extra parts seemingly to frustrate myself with FedEx and UPS (still don't know which one of those is worse - they're both in the running ? ), and expect that 'actual build updates' to start late next week. ...in the meantime, to pass the time, I gave the 5950X / Asus Dark X570 a real workout today at 4.8 Giggles all-core...

...one can never have enough Arctic P12 pwm pst value packs; so two more for the 'Raven's Nest' build (5 mobo / 2 cases)

"It was just earlier this month that IBM announced an incredible manufacturing breakthrough with its 2-nm manufacturing process that crammed 50 billion transistors into the size of a fingernail. While that's still a future-looking technology that hasn't made it into mass production (and thereby not a solution for our current chip shortage just yet), it's already being surpassed. The combined research brainpower at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) have announced some big breakthroughs using non-silicon materials to make very tiny transistors (as small as 1nm)." source even more than...'50 billion transistors into the size of a fingernail' ...that should be 'fun' trying to cool for oc ?

...I've never been a big fan of companies buying their own stock back - at the very least, it is inefficient from an economist's point of view as the money spent on its own stock actually doesn't do anything productive. It can also get very 'addictive' to a company's management, whose leadership's pay is linked, among other things, to the stock price, not to mention their own stock options... ...AMD has done exceptionally well to come out of the hole it found itself in a few years back, with questions then whether it would even survive and not go bankrupt. Since then, it enjoyed a meteoric success via Ryzen et al, but the stock became a 'darling' of investors and was a bit overbought / overvalued (I bought and sold AMD stock on the way up). IMO, it would have been better to let the market sort it out instead of artificially pumping up its stock price via 'self purchase'; unless there was some sort of short-seller attack happening.

...I picked up one of these last week for one of the update-builds in my home-office...holds 300 pounds, just about what I need ?

...too late now, if I don't feed the ravens, they'll feed on me ? Then again, I'm actually updating my home-office by retiring some older (circa 2014) Intel HEDTs in dev servers - that's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it ! ...I want one, too (croc that is; you can keep the birds, coz...flock of ravens already here...)