Assorted stuff

My friends are wicked talented! Saw a bunch of boston circus guild folks and emperor norton's stationary marching band at club oberon. Much awesomeness. It's particularly great to see the huge improvements folks I've worked with have made since "mischief in the machine". Frackin amazing.

I earned some kind of nerd merit badge in stupid bullheadedness this morning. I woke up to do some scheduled off-hours work. Checked my personal email from my desktop machine at home as I went out to snag my work laptop. In the time it took me to take the laptop back into the bedroom and boot it up, my internet connectivity went away. I spent a few minute power cycling and dis/re-connecting the cable connection on the modem. No luck. So I proceeded to use an ssh app on my iphone (touch term) to ssh to the bastion host at work, connect to the correct internal machine, use lynx to navigate thru my ticketing system to get to the details on the commands I needed to run, and then connected to a firewall and made the appropriate changes, with about 5 minutes to spare until the end of my maintenance window.

I am reminded of the time back in the early 1990's when I was sitting around in my bedroom with a soldering iron fixing a vt100 so I could dial back up and connect to NEU's network and finish whatever project I was working on for school.

also, WOOOOHOOO! THE TRAILER FOR PORTAL 2 is out.

a guilty confession, thanks to another paper due.

I'm writing another paper for my NEU class.

I am now two for two -- when writing a paper for a college-related class, I think of nihilistic_kid's article on writing for a term paper mill. It certainly helps provide the distance necessary to keep me from freaking out like I did when I first tried writing the paper from a few weeks ago. Focus on the structure, not the OMGWHATDOISAY.