The Druid's Keep

WEll here we are.

The other day I went over to one of my professors houses in order to help out with a board that he's building for the course. What I didn't expect to do was spend 2.5 hours touring his house and only about 30 mins on the board. Not that i mind, he does have a very cool (to me) house but oh well. I shall tell you of him.

Basically, he is this interesting guy, but he's the biggest nerd-geek I have ever seen. His hobbies include building his own computers from scratch - which he did in the 70's and 80's, building his own audio equipement from scratch, taking digital photo arrays and merging them in photoshop, playing the piano, archiving massive ammounts of music, and generally just never throwing anything out. He's single and his house is packed with his hobbies - one section for photos, one for audio, one for electronics.

He actually survived for years by mining for gold in computers - basically going out and buying obsolete computer equipement and melting it down to get out all the gold - (a lot of the older 70's chips had a lot of gold in them). he would also of course desolder any boards and save all the components, so he has two rooms packed with floor to cieling drawer cabinets on all walls that he's got all of this stuff stored in.

He built a second level to his house ($44,000) to store his audio equipement and Steinway concert grand piano($35,000) using money from an unexpected batcch of gold encrusted computer chips.

He has a $15,000 printer which he uses to print 44" wide photos. He actually goes out and takes these fabulous panoramas by taking up to 300 shots in rows and columns and stitching them in photoshop to create one massively high res photo - very impressive shots but he goes too far - he has a stack of over 600 sheets, each with 5-10 stiched photos that he's printed out jsut to have hard copies.

He has a 4.5TB classical music database.

He has built his own audio system with 8 amps and a hacked cd player - to bypass the analog and pull the digital signal straight off the board to his amps, an isolated power supply in the basement, and very nice speakers. It sounds very very good.

anyways, I have to get to class

-Pat