You know You're a DC Freak When...

  1. You look at every computer that dosen't run a DC project and yell
  2. You print out your stats on your bedsheets
  3. You spend hours just watching how complete your WU is
  4. You buy a new computer every 6 months or sooner
  5. You get angry when someone shuts down their computer
  6. You spend more that 10 hours a week in the DCA
  7. You run you own stats engine
  8. You build a monster (or two)
  9. You rent a larger apartment so there is more room for your growing farm.
  10. You ask the landlord for a 100 amp CKT so you can run your computers.
  11. "Food or new cpu?" is a valid question
  12. You put all your pennies in a Jar labeled "New Computer #241"
  13. Your paycheck goes 25% for computer 25% for savings 50% for living
  14. You decide on the new cpu over food. (see #11)
  15. You check other teams' forums
  16. The local college sends you a request for computer time on your cluster
  17. IBM sees you as a threat to BIG BLUE
  18. Your house doesn't need a furnace, and you keep the windows open in the winter to cool your house down
  19. On Christmas Eve, you, your family and friends gather around the home farm because :
    1. it is the warmest place in the house
    2. you can keep an eye on the work unit being done
    3. you can explain to them the importance of the work the farm is doing
    4. at midnight, you can present to each of them their personal nodes on your farm
    5. you can turn to your farm for comfort after they tell you what they think of your presents
  20. The power company sends you a christmas card every year
  21. You make sure that you are at the computer for the next stats update
  22. you are able to contribute to a list like this
  23. You wake up early on a Saturday so that you can go to the hardware to get supplies for making a 'rack' and getting some old systems online and, before even eating, you get sucked into DCA for an hour or two
  24. If you're a sysadmin w/ borg permission, you evaluate new purchases as to how quickly they crunch a specific project
  25. You have a farm on more than one project
  26. The first thing you do upon waking up is check your boxen
  27. The second thing you do upon waking is read the DCA.
  28. You get assimilated into your project and hold five years of cache
  29. You run two other projects idle in case some of them go down
  30. You dream about new ways to present stats
  31. You start measuring time not in hours, but production
  32. You can't fall asleep without hearing the reassuring whine of cooling fans
  33. You borg all of your friends' computers after offering to help with upgrades
  34. You purchase UPSs to insure that your computers suffer less downtime
  35. You wake up 3 am, with this voice in your ears, saying: 'Don't worry, DC is nothing but a dream'. You jump out of your bed, switch on the monitor, call up the stats - and take a deep breath of relief ...
  36. Your wife/GF/significant other is feeling neglected because all your time and $$ goes to maintaining/building your DC farm "baby"
  37. You know how many hours your system has been up but can't remember how old your child is
  38. You haven't gone on a date in 5 years because all your money is spent on computer upgrades.
  39. You casually stop by work on the days off, to make sure the projects are running
  40. You save mini-dumps strategically, to scare your opponents
  41. You draw satisfaction from network activity LEDs blinking
  42. You verify that a pile of boards and cpus is still running by waiting for the tell tale flash of the disk LED's as the client writes to the checkpoint
  43. When you look at a bunch of old machines you make a mental note of what project might run where
  44. Your wife/GF/significant other has left you years ago because you have only computers in mind all the time
  45. You haven't noticed yet
  46. When your husband or boyfriend don't mind going shopping with you because they know where you are going
  47. You are woken at night by the client not writing its periodic checkpoint files
  48. You actually get up in the middle of the night to check that every part of your farm is still running, and at benchmark speed
  49. You know all the benchmark speeds by heart
  50. You have started a DC forum thread called "You Know you are a DC freak When...".
  51. You can add five or more reasons to a DC forum thread called "You Know you are a DC freak When..."
  52. You're woken up at 5AM with the smell of burning PSU and you change it without even opening your eyes.
  53. You've RMAed so much Ram that you've memorized Crucials telephone number and address
  54. You run a DC team
  55. You have your Seti individual stats page set as the default home page on all your web browsers
  56. If a friend/family member doesn't want to spend the money to upgrade, you'll do it for free so that your hidden dc client will run faster
  57. You mistake this thread for a DC "How-to" FAQ
  58. You mirror the stats on your computer so you can view them from work/school
  59. You write stats for those mirrors
  60. You go into withdrawls during stats/WU outages
  61. You read ALL items on this list to see if you are a DC freak...
  62. ...and then identify with more than two-thirds of them
  63. Whilst doing weekend work, you ensure that all your co-worker's machines are doing DC even whilst they're logged on and helping you - this in order to avoid a single moment's loss of weekend production
  64. You ensure that you're always the last one out of the office thus ensuring that as many of your colleagues' boxen as possible recommence crunching overnight/at the weekend
  65. When you have a power failure, you have to bring each system individually online, otherwise, if they all came up at once you would overload the main circuit breaker
  66. you buy the latest game but don't play it because it would reduce your box's crunching rate
  67. You only check the stats to ensure your systems are still up, 'cuz it's for the Science, not the stats
  68. You maintain a price/performance spreadsheet broken down by project performance, watching for the "sweet spots".
  69. You buy new hardware because its on sale, and you may need it in the future
  70. You invite complete strangers over to your house to party hearty, for the sole reason that they're fellow DC addicts
  71. You've completed & returned more DC results than +99% of of the entire worldwide DC population, and you're STILL considered a "small fry" within your own team's ranks
  72. So much light is generated from the LED's on your farm the neighbors have complained that they no longer know if its day or night
  73. You are watching the best musical currently running in the country and all you can think of is how to beat DPC in eccp-109
  74. The Power Company has installed a commercial electricity meter on the side of your home
  75. While house shopping you care more about the distance to the telephone central office and power generation station than the quality of schools and crime rate
  76. When you're playing a game, the following question becomes valid: "Why am I doing this, I could be using the cycles for -insert project of choice here-"
  77. You realize your children skipped their lessons, because the DC client running on their terminal didn't deliver in time
  78. You purchase a power adapter for your laptop to run in your car so it can keep crunching
  79. You look outside and see the powerline running to your house glowing red
  80. You are the cause for the rolling blackouts!
  81. You have to run your air conditioner in the dead of winter
  82. You get upset with the corporate policy of password protected screen savers
  83. You create a webpage with the "You know You're a DC Freak When..." list on it.
  84. San Jose International airport representatives ask you to turn your computers off at night because the airline pilots are confused about which lights are the landing lights and which ones are your computer's LEDs.
  85. You make sure to be the last to leave work, making sure all of your co-workers machines are left on for the night to crunch your project.
  86. You plan a 500 square foot addition to your home and 250 sq ft of the addition is devoted to your "server room "
  87. You can come up with reasons to post here
  88. You ask permission in the job interview to borg the corporate machines
  89. You have become mesmerized by watching WUs accumulate in a queue
  90. You time your departure from home or work to coincide with a stats update
  91. You can spend 3 hours tweaking a system to squeeze an extra 2% out of the CPU..but you balk at spending 3 hours bringing your car for servicing
  92. You wonder if you can run Seti on your Playstation 2
  93. You have a picture of your pharm on your desk at work but none of your wife/family!
  94. Your wife is as good at making sure SETI is still running on her own system as you are on yours
  95. You ask if there is a client you can run on your TI-92plus
  96. DC has actually caused you to bark like a dog, chase cats, and howl at the moon ... in REAL LIFE
  97. Your DC team has a pinup babe - Miss TDOW 2001
  98. The team you belong to has more computing power then most nations
  99. You are doing the news for several dc teams
  100. You've spent more than $100 giving away gifts, bribes, prizes, souveniers, and other contributions to people who've run DC for/with you
  101. Your DC team's home thread has outgrown the server's capacity, and you've had to repeatedly split & continue it
  102. You are fully aware of #1 - #100. You'd subscribe to most of it. You are still convinced, there's nothing wrong with you
  103. you get annoyed that only TLC has an ad banner on the forum and not -insert other team here-'s
  104. You quit your boy scout troop because you can't borg the scoutmaster's machines
  105. You count up the amount you save with coupons and add it to the amount you can sped on computers a month!
  106. You consider getting a third 1.5Kva rackmount UPS to give yourself evenmore uptime during power troubles even though you already have more UPS capacity than your work!
  107. You hate taking vacations because you have to take down the home part of your pharm while you are away!
  108. You withdraw all of your savings twice a year for a new box. (See #13 above).
  109. You have a gasoline generator out back to take over during power failures.
  110. You stare at the stats screen waiting for the update even though you know it isn't going to happen for another three hours
  111. You read this thread instead of the web-page, because you want "the up-to-date stats".
  112. You let out a heavy sigh every time you glance at the server racks at your job.
  113. You spend more time laying out an action plan to convince your employer to borg the computer labs than you spend working on your resume
  114. You get caught borging the computers at the local Gateway store.
  115. You dream of being in charge of installing software for a major OEM
  116. You continue to buy parts from the agora to assemble the next DC machine even though you are unemployed!!!
  117. You enjoy reading this thread because all the points mentioned are sounding so familiar to you
  118. You write a song to help urge your team on
  119. You have teammates who are crazy enough to sing it along with you, in public
  120. You're a Paramedic, you're on a 911 emergency call. The call happens to be in the testing and assembly area for HP/Compaq Computers. You're in a hurry, trying to help a very sick person and it's ALL you can do to keep your mind off the borging disk in you front left pocket (next to your heart :D)
  121. You have a complete directory-hierarchy "/dc/" directly in root that you keep updated with all the newest clients, documentation and news items
  122. You keep that just for your own perusal, not as a service to anybody
  123. You carry a business card CD-R that has a super simple one-click borg routine on it. In your back pocket, and you HAVE tested it in Comp-USA, PC-CLub, Fry's, Gateway County, Best Buy, Circuit City.....
  124. THIS :D
  125. You just had HP onsite tech support service your laptop since you ran DC on it full time and the HS/FAN finally failed
  126. you build a stand w/ 120mm 110v fan in it for your laptop to stay cool while running DC! (and I have to admit, it is one of my most effective cooling mods)
  127. you still crunch on the laptop, even when on a site visit you have to wrap it with saran wrap for splash protection and the mill's ambient temp is about 110
  128. you do the above deliberately in hopes of frying the 750 so they have to replace it with a P4
  129. You rummage through your old computer parts, find a 486, put it back in working order and start to look for a DC project where it could be used. Never mind the electricity bill
  130. You cry when your wife phones to say the power went off at home 5 minutes after you left for work. And when the power is finally restored, she doesn't know the trick about turning PCs on one by one to save the circuit breaker tripping.
  131. The first thing you do with a new OS is service a DC client so that it runs even while you install apps & reboot! Can't lose production time
  132. You start running farms for other "users" just to add to the fun
  133. You can hold an entire conversation with someone and just use terms like DC, WU production, queueing, borging and wasted cycles
  134. You know _exactly_ how much CPU goes to waste in your office each day and what the total production of those wasted cycles would be if applied to DC Project X.
  135. When the project ends you feel betrayed, alone and have no idea what you should be doing now
  136. You run stats sites for teams that you produce in
  137. You run stats sites for teams you no longer produce in
  138. You've sold items that at one time you cherished to feed your addic^H^H^H^H^Hhabit. (I haven't done this yet, but I'm in the works for it).
  139. Your reasoning for not adding a "real" firewall is that the 486 is too slow to crunch and route packets. Your ideal firewall is at least a Dual MP2200+.
  140. You have to start working lots of overtime to pay for the electricity bill that just tripled in the past 2 weeks
  141. You can contribute 5+ items to this very thread in one post
  142. You start wishing someone would code DC clients for your cellphone, calculator, and PDA's, 'cause they'd still produce a few points, eventually
  143. You make a lecture series for DC fit into every undergrad course you teach, then assign each undergrade to choose a DC project of their choice and borg campus machines to compare how well various hardware/software combinations run their chosen project (leaving the borged machines running after completion of the assignmet, of course).
  144. You recruit the most promising undergrads to work on a research project to develop the 'best" hardware farm solution for your favorite DC team
  145. You can continue to think up reasons to add to this list
  146. You get your old 68040 mac connected to the internet to post in the DC forums, so you don't waste you other boxes computer time!
  147. You also connect it to crunch the 2 or 3 OGR units a day it will do!



List adapted from this forum thread.