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JeffMagnus node count: 4000 (107 new since July 28, 2000) JeffMagnus experience: 8932 (196 more since July 28, 2000) JeffMagnus experience to node ratio: 2.233 XP per node JeffMagnus nodeshare: 0.637% JeffMagnus node of the day: E2 server facts
What hath kept me out so late? A defining characteristic of life right now is unemployment. Time has little meaning. My friends are getting a bit weary of me asking what day it is - and meaning it. Annoying lack of time-orientation aside, I can stay out late pretty much whenever I want. Tonight I watched Chicken Run and enjoyed it immensely.
I've been on foot since Tuesday. My car is kaput. That's okay - walking is therepeutic. Except when it's midnight and I have to get from downtown (Seattle) to my place, which is in the midst of a bad neighborhood. So tonight I dared the bus.
A man in a sort of mobile cart boarded just after me. He had to go through the whole beeping lift experience and then somehow navigate the crowd of stander-upers to get to the disabled persons parking area. People couldn't get out of his way too well as the bus was packed and most of them were drunk and not paying attention. About half way to the space he lost his temper and just started running over feet and ramming shins. The bus driver was amazingly diplomatic about getting the situation under control and calming the injured drunks and the frustrated guy in the mobile cart - all of whom were swearing quite creatively at eachother.
I said a silent prayer of thanks for several things -including my mobility and sobriety - and kept my eyes glued to 'Tales of the City'.
It was our neighbours. They'd found one of the pillars of our wall lying across the pavement and were letting us know about it before putting it in our front garden out of the way.
So, today, we'll be taking the rest of the wall down. It was obviously unstable when we moved in. But given we had expected to have the builders in almost straight away, we didn't do anything about it. Now, a year later, it's started taking itself down! Oh well - it's something to do :-)
Two hours later and we've tidied the rubble up. One half of the wall seemed quite stable, so we've left that, along with the lowest course of blocks on the other half, standing.
The plan is to start with the front bedroom, then move the boxes from the back bedroom to the front. Then rewire the back bedroom and move the beds into there from the middle bedroom. Then do the middle bedroom and anywhere else upstairs that needs doing.
Just a few questions for the postal node nuker:
Yesterday | Dizzy->Day_Logs() | Tomorrow
9:25 BST
Tried explaining Unified Change Management to some IRC dudes last night and failed... I really should update that node. (update: I did update that node, and put a fair amount of work into it...)
The sun is shining but the garden needs work, the house needs tidying, the laundry needs doing, houseplants need cleaning and Alpha Centauri is looking very attractive.
I kept having vivid dreams about being on Big Brother - I only watched it for the first time last night, and didn't find it that compelling. Why has my subconcious mind placed that much importance on this programme?
Sigh. I probably gained all the weight I lost last week when I ate loads of chocolate last night. :(
10:45 BST
Sensei, Yossarian: I hope to one day meet you. Your nodes have an uncanny knack of reaching me when I need it: The Brightness of Your Eyes and This music crept by me on the waters
14:00 BST
Decided to reinstall Mandrake 7.1, but now my X server takes a heck of a long time to start up. ReiserFS is cool tho'
What am I doing here when I could be swimming with the Dolphins? - if anyone wants to node that, feel free
18:00 BST
"I send you nothing but love, just wait for me, wait and see - you know all the right words to say" Sometimes a fragment of a song will hit me with the perfection of it's words - these words were Beth Orton's
Noding all of The Sermon on the Mount has left me quiet and tranquil inside. I feel happiness from anything right now :)
I'm wearing my new tee shirt, that J made me, and looking pretty damn spiffy.
I've just noticed that Silent Running is on the tv tonight. That's a really great (albeit sad) film. Proof if proof were needed that the bbc are scanning getting to know you nodes to determine their listings.
There was a torrential downpour. After it had finished I went for a walk. Nice to be out in the fresh air. On the way back I saw a butterfly whose wings had been damaged by the force of the rain. It was fluttering its wings but it couldn't fly any more.
Yesterday, Tomorrow
All this for Neon Genesis Evangelion, episode 4. It better be good.
Drank a cup of cold coffee from yesterdays forgotten espresso. Hurtled out into the day and everything was much better. Beautiful Seattle Summer! The scooter ride along the waterfront is always my favorite, as you can see the Olympics over the sound. Unfortunately there are always gawking peds everywhere, so one can't really hurtle as fast as one truely wants to.
Got to the ferry, and there is one of those BSA motorcycles I like so much. I was admiring it (has anybody noticed how many motorcycle riders are short and bald?), when an even cooler British bike rolled up behind me, hipster male, cute hipster female. There is something about young folk on motorcycles that turns me on. A little picnic I think, she in black pants and sandles, with blonde hair, he in a green bowling shirt, tricky sunglasses. They joked with each other, I admired the bike.
The ferry ride was slightly unusual, as a massive fog bank shaped like a lense was across the sound. We were chugging along as usual, when all of a sudden we found ourselve at a near standstill, the ferry like some huge beast hooting it's confusion. Added a few minutes to the ride, but it make me think of that one sci-fi movie where the aircraft carrier goes back in time. I think that involves fog, but not sure. just the boat, the people and the fog.
Then Bainbridge Island, and now work. Interviewing another near diety of OOP, this time we are going to grill him alive :-)
With a freshly compiled kernel ready to go (With any luck at all), I'll reboot the Linux box. After I've got 200 days of uptime. Then it's networking time. Pure, unbridled, out-of-control networking bliss, baby! Yeah!
My latest ThinkGeek order oughta come around Monday. Hmph.
ADDED TO MP3 PLAYLIST TODAY: Goody Two-Shoes, Adam Ant; She Blinded Me With Science, Thomas Dolby
I've found that I really like reading other people's day logs. I had been ignoring them for a while since (really) I don't know very many people at all here. I almost never go to #everything and the chatterbox is usually off of my screen. But even without knowing the people involved, I find the day logs really compelling. I like reading about the small joys and triumphs and disappintments of my fellow noders. It's sort of addictive and voyeuristic.
Anyhow ...
Still sick. I would've spent all day in bed if not for the fact that I had to pick my parents up from the airport. I distracted myself from my feeling ill while I drove by listening to "This American Life". The first to acts were pretty good, the first being a half-an-hour with David Sedaris, who is always funny. Afterwards we went out for lunch and had good chinese food that was only slightly spoiled by a whiney twelve-year-old girl sitting at the table next to us. She was complaining incessantly about how she wanted to go to Burger King and how poorly her father always treated her because they weren't at Burger King and how miserable she would be until they got to Burger King. I wanted to slap her silly. I mean, really! Burger King? I don't think she could possibly think of a less trivial to complain about? What was even worse was the mother kept on taking the whiny daughter's side. I'm sure that can't be a good parenting strategy to let your kid divide and conquer.
No big plans for tonight. I'll either try to rest some more, if I can (but it's hard because my room is so damned hot. I think it must be close to 100o today and my room is facing south so I get a lot of sunlight and my computer is on 24/7 so that acts as a little space heater so it's really, really uncomfortable.) or maybe do some work. Oh, I got news that the company I'm contracting at thinks it can stay afloat for at least another 4-6 weeks, now that it's decided to sell off some of its assets (another company that it had acquired about six months ago.) That's nice. If I stick around it'll be interesting to see what happens.
Woke at 05:30 and had breakfast at 07:30. Strange that we kept that schedule for a week. We had breakfast at the same restaurant every day, and usually had the same breakfast, but anyway...
We got to the Alexis by 09:45 to see the USAFA cadet hacking case talk given by Gregory White. He was a good speaker, and went over the background of the case, what people on both sides can learn from what happened, and how the prosecuting side took the presence of traceroute (they thought it was a nefarious tool), BitchX, and one or two other tools on the cadet's box, and two failed log in attempts, as the basis for a possible 15 years in Leavenworth (which he didn't get...).
At 11:00 we saw Robert Graham's talk on evading IDS, then an overview of LDAP. A bunch of people left during that one. We stayed in the room for lock-picking (missed it last year) but it was postponed and we got a Pentagon briefing (I'm being facetious) from a Fed who is a part of the management layer above the CIA, et al. He did an intro then took questions. There was one guy - who pines for the Fjords - who bombarded the fed with questions. He just wouldn't stop. There was another guy with green hair who was picking at his zits then biting the fingernails on the same hand. And one guy in the front asked what was the smallest thing they could see with their imaging satellites. The Fed said that he couldn't answer that, so the guy asked "Okay, what's the next smallest thing." Everyone in the room cracked up, and the Fed admitted "sub-meter."
We took a break for lunch and had pizza in the snacks area while standing, then I snagged a table just before this script kiddie with a huge chip on his shoulder. We ended up sharing, which wouldn't have been a problem except for the fact that the dude couldn't be considerate about it.
At 15:00 I went to Greg Hogland's advanced buffer overflow techniques talk, which he had given at Black Hat. He got into detail, but later said "If anyone wants to talk about some really insane stuff you can do, see me later." Then at 16:00 I stuck around for ghandi's talk on buffer overflows on the SPARC. It was good, though I'm not so hip to assembly. He covered writing optimum assembly, system calls from assembly, using GDB and ADB, assembling instructions to hex, stack altering, et cetera.
We left at 17:00. I didn't see Hacker Jeopardy this year, or a few other events that I was at before. They didn't have the TCP/IP drinking game at all.
Back at the hotel we shared a margarita at MargaritaGrille, then had chinese at the Golden Dragon. And passed out early, of course.
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