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eblanton@cs.ohiou.edu

So I'm in the Land of the Rising Sun. I am presently studying at Chubu University just outside of Nagoya, Japan in a shi (town) called Kasugai. For those who are not so Japan-conscious (as I was not until recently), Nagoya is the 3rd largest city in Japan, and it is located toward the southern end of the large island, between Tokyo and Kyoto.

Life here is surprisingly similar to life in the States in many respects, but in others it is very different. I'm still not sure exactly where those places are and aren't, because often the lines seem to be blurred. The Western culture I'm used to butted right up against traditional Japanese culture...

I've been sending out roughly weekly mailing detailing my status here in Japan, hopefully soon I'll get them put up around this site someplace for my fan base's perusal. If you read this (people read this?) and are interested, drop me a line and I'll add you to the distribution list.

Once again I'm a little slow in updating, but this time I have a (sort of) legitimate excuse. ;-) I've been quite busy since my last update, so here goes a summary.

I went to Athens two weeks ago yesterday, and spent a week and a half (until last Weds.) there. I had a wonderful time, and I'm definitely going to miss it while I'm gone. I will especially be missing a certain beautiful Russian girl (that's Marina for the slower readers), Josh, and Benny. ;-) Actually, I will miss a lot of you guys in Athens. But I'll be back in the Spring!

As everyone in the world knows, last Tuesday some terrorists brought down the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon in the most horrible terrorist attacks in known history. I don't know who you are, guys, but I hope your God did not, in fact, admit you to Heaven for your jihad.

Those same said attacks made my last day and a half in Athens a little surreal, but some good things still happened in my life. We had a wonderful picnic out at Stroud's Run with a bunch of the gang from Hoover's 3rd floor my Sophomore and Junior years, and I spent a nice evening with Marina. (Did I mention I'm going to miss her?)

My flight for Japan leaves Wednesday at 13:25 from the Port Columbus International Airport (CMH). I'm supposed to be at the airport and ready to go at 11AM. It's coming up fast, and it's getting a little scary. I'm starting to miss home, friends and family already. But on the other hand, I'm sure it will be a wonderful experience.

The next time I update will be from the East, I'm sure...

I've been planning on writing an update since Sunday, but I'm just now getting to it. I'm well out of the ghetto and settled in at home now. Of course, as I've mentioned before I'm not here for very long.

We went riding today out toward some fabled place called "Yellow Springs", but we didn't make it there due to a very real threat of Death Needles. We headed back home direction where the threat of Death Needles seemed smaller and ate at Der Dutchman in Waynesville. After eating we were going to take 725 back home, but the Death Needles thwarted us again. We came back 73 and managed to avoid them until Springboro, but I was still pretty wet and cold by the time we got back.

I finally got my Kensington Mouse-in-a-Box Optical, and I have to say that it basically rocks. More than basically, really, it does rock. These optical mice are definitely the Way it Should Be. I considered their "Pocket Mouse Optical", which is smaller, but decided on the cheaper one in the end. ;-)

I'm officially done here, I'm just waiting for the bus to come so I can go home. My computer was taken down an hour or two ago, and Wes and I (and Mark) moved all the crap back into our cubicle that was there when we inherited it. I'm wireless in the basement killing another 40 minutes until I go home.

Work-wise it was a good summer. I didn't get nearly enough done, but that seems to be par for the course for me. The DSACK stuff is virtually finished if not finished and the SACK draft is nearing another last call. The two smaller drafts are going to take some more time, but hopefully not a lot.

Packing, packing packing is in order for tonight. I started yesterday, but I didn't get a whole lot done. I mostly straightened and got all my paperwork together. Today is box day, I guess. I should be able to just dump all my clothes in a duffel and start boxing stuff up, so hopefully it won't take too long.

The aalug-l had quite the thread yesterday, all started by an innocently broken PGP mail. Well, as innocent as any breakage fostered by Microsoft Exchange can possibly be.

There were one or two personal digs at me in the deal, and after a lot of introspection and digging through the archive I don't think I'm really to blame. Maybe I get a little too fired up about standards breakage, but if there's something in the network business worth getting fired up about, I think that's it. The rest of the drivel in the thread was people feeling sorry for themselves for having to use sub-standard software and the follow-ups that engendered. Most of the blasting there wasn't mine, even. The funniest part is that it turned out that the sub-standard software wasn't really the only choice. It's one thing to take the easy way out and not deal with a problem (I do it all the time ... sometimes it takes me months to get around to fixing sub-optimal software setups), but it's another to whine about it when it's fixable with three minutes of work.

The real moral of this story for me is that people a) take criticism of the software they are using as peronsal criticism, and b) don't feel as strongly as I do about practically anything. b) is possibly my problem to deal with, but a) is something I can't help them solve. Software is a tool. If it's broken, either accept the brokenness and work around it or find a new tool. Don't flame the guy who told you it's broken.

And a short quote from mallman about clue:

Some time not so long ago I had a number of opportunities over the
course of IETF week to chat with a young man attending his first
IETF meeting.  He kept telling me how rude everyone was.  Our hero
was completely astonished at the lack of civility exhibited in some
of the discourse he observed.  I have chatted with this gentleman at
a couple of other IETF meetings since then.  While he occasionally
makes a comment about the level of discourse he has mostly aclimated
to the culture now.  My interpretation is that he is starting to
"get it".

I'm not sure how I feel about that. I think I might agree with Mark that the hero has changed and understands now where the combativeness came from, but I'm not sure "getting it" should entail this change. Maybe a step back and a re-evaluation of where this impatience comes from is in order. If "getting it" means the inability to tolerate broken users and broken software, it's going to be a long career...

OK, I think this is the first ever blatant plug that I've put up (I'm sure I've plugged-in-passing before), but it has to be said.

GnuCash rocks. That's all there is to it. I mean, I don't know squat about money or finances (witness my mighty stock holdings for proof), but GnuCash lets me keep track of everything I have quickly and easily. I've never used Quicken or MS Money, so I can't compare them feature for feature, but I have to think that GnuCash includes at the least all the essentials present in commercial packages. For sure it includes more than I will ever need!

Getting 1.6.x working was a little bit of a challenge, but it seems that it is well worth the effort. It is hugely expanded and polished from the 1.4.11 I was using before.

Now everybody go get GnuCash and manage your finances wisely.

As the title of this entry insinuates, I have one week left here in Cleveland. I can't say I'll be sorry to be leaving this summer. :-P It looks like my summer schedule is pretty busy from here on out, too. I'll be here for the next week and home the week after, and then I'm going to Athens the following week to spend some time with Marina. I'm going back home from there (around the 9th), and then on the 19th I go to Columbus to meet up with the Chubu program people to fly to Japan. Whew.

I still have a lot of cleaning up to do for the work I'm doing at NASA, and I'm not sure if I'll get it all done before I leave. I hope to, but with only one week left (and part of that week burned up on checkout-type stuff) I'm afraid it won't happen. Ahh, well. If not it's not like I'll be completely severed from the world when I'm abroad. At least, I hope I won't. ;-)

I'm stateside again as of about 15:00 today. Coming home was a little bit exciting, actually. Mark and I got to the airport at about 10:00 for an 11:00 flight, and this threw Continental into a tizzy. They put us through First-class registration, and then told us to run to catch the plane. Unfortunately, security decided that my little Buck knife was really far too large to be on an airplane, so they would have to detain me. Then what seemed to be a verteran security person informed me that two months earlier carrying that knife on a plane would have been illegal, but now I was OK. I, in the meantime, was far more concerned about them getting out of my way and letting me board than whether or not my knife was legal two months ago. They finally did so, and the rest of the trip was completely unremarkable.

The IETF meeting was both productive and entertaining. I think all of the important things that needed discussed in my part of the world were discussed, and now all I have to do is type them in. That includes re-inserting threshold retransmission in the SACK draft per a modification of the algorithm suggested by Kevin Fall.

In addition, I attended the keysigning party on Wednesday night and hopefully connected our little OU web of trust to the larger web of trust. If Marina and Jason can get signed by some well-connected individuals as USENIX in a few weeks, we should be well on our way to being a well-connected web. Not that that will matter until someone around the LUG is better-known at large, but it's cool anyway.

Obviously I didn't feel interesting on Monday as I mentioned before, but I've decided I have something to say on Tuesday. I'm not sure what just yet, but we'll see what comes out.

Travelling went as well as can be expected. I walked right onto both planes with no issues, sat around for a while, and walked off at London Gatwick. I rode the Gatwick Express in to Victoria, then took the tube to Marble Arch, got a positive visual on my hotel almost immediately, went to a different tube exit, walked to my hotel and went to sleep. So much for fourteen hours of travel.

Yesterday was what I've come to expect from the first day at IETF (which my limited experience)... Drop in to a meeting or two that seems interesting, find all the people you need to talk to for the week, and spend a lot of time writing email. ;-)

Jeff left to take Marina back to Athens a little more than two hours ago, and I'm already lonely. This summer has been traumatic enough that the only thing that kept it from going down in history as the Worst Summer of My Life was Marina's company. I'm going to miss her for the next few weeks until I'm back in Athens... Then the six months I'm in Japan are bound to be traumatic.

I leave for the IETF meeting in London at about 5:30 tomorrow morning. It's going to take me a shade more than 15 hours to get from my apartment to my hotel, assuming all goes well and my calculations are correct. I expect to be in London by about 10PM UTC, and to my hotel by midnight UTC. Then it's shower and crash for eight hours (hopefully, that will be a little early for bedtime here ... but between getting up at 5AM and travelling all day I don't anticipate much trouble) and head off to the first morning of IETF.

Hmm, I've run out of things to type. Marina left, I'm going to London tomorrow, end of story. Maybe I'll feel more interesting Monday when I'm on the network again. ;-)

Update at 21:19: I remembered one other thing. That defunct bank card I mentioned last time? It was defunct because the woman never activated it. That means that not only did it not work, I didn't have a new debit card on its way to me until today. I am not amused.

The best news is that it's cooled off here. The past three days have been absolutely beautiful. Marina and I have gone riding for at least a little while each day. We found a road not a quarter mile from our apartment that has these absolutely incredible houses on it. One of them has a turret. That's how cool these houses are. Today we stopped at a little park/lake thing and walked around for just a minute. It was nice.

So, I have zero motivation these days. I mean, basically I'm doing all right and getting all the important things done, but when it comes down to my free time I'm just completely unproductive. I had a whole list of projects I wanted to work on this summer, and I don't think I've so much as started one of them. Hopefully that will clear up soon... I'm not holding my breath, though, this has been going on for about a year and a half now.

I found out yesterday that my ATM card is defunct. I'm assuming that's because Bank One has mailed my new card, but I really don't know. Have I mentioned that I'm ditching Bank One at the end of the summer? They're really horrible... Mediocre customer service, expensive account options, etc etc. The only thing they have going for them is their spiffy web account interface. I have to admit I'll miss that.

You'll notice at this point that I have no real news this update. Most days are more of the same, especially since I can't really go anywhere. Look for some more interesting updates starting toward the end of next week, if I actually post. Marina will be leaving, Jeff (and maybe Jeff) are coming up, and I'm taking off for IETF in London.

The biggest news in my life that I can think of is that it's hot. Incredibly hot. And sticky. It's OK at work, but the apartment was miserable last night... I don't know how Marina stands it. It's supposed to be cooler today, but it could be a lot cooler and still be hot with the humidity we're having. A storm threatened last night and teased us with cool breezes for a few minutes, but then it decided it was just kidding and went back to slowly roasting us.

Dr. Berman and the HTC came up with some funding for my IETF trip as well... As I mentioned before, they paid for my last trip. I'm doubly grateful to them now.

I've gotten Japanese input working at least passably well on my iBook. jed has no support for multibyte characters (although I hear that slang 2.0 will fix that), so sometimes changing what I've already typed is exciting... I'm hoping to come up with a little better solution soon, though, when I get some time to put into it.

I think for once I have several pieces of big news. We'll start with the good stuff.

I bought a new laptop last week, an iBook. Not the old toilet seat kind, one of the slick new white ones. I'm very pleased so far. Aside from a few minor glitches (the clock drifts under 2.4.x, no sound) it's up and running 100%. I've got wireless working at NASA and everything. It's fast, the battery lasts for 4+ hours under my typical work load, and it has a little heartbeat light when it sleeps. What more could you ask for?

It looks like I'll make it to the London IETF after all. That's good, because Mark and I plan to chat around about the concepts behind two new drafts we're releasing tomorrow. Dr. Ostermann said he'd make it happen for me. Kudos to him.

And now for the bad news... My car was stolen yesterday morning, so I'm now transportation-less. That's especially inconvenient right now because I live about 30 minutes from GRC . Public transportation takes a little more than an hour. Bummer, eh? If you see somebody driving a red Bonneville with a bent antenna, beat them up and give me a call. :-P

The last time I wrote here, the quarter was just beginning... Looks like now it's ending. With only two weeks of classes left total this quarter (well, only one week plus finals), the end-of-the-quarter / end-of-the-schoolyear craziness is in full force. While this has been an incredibly busy quarter for me, I can once again say that I have no idea what I did the entire time 'cause I have nothing to show for it.

I'm home for one week after this quarter is over, and then I'm off to Cleveland to work at NASA GRC again this summer. This time I'm staying in an apartment in Shaker Heights with Scott (who has no homepage I can currently get to) and Marina. I'm hoping to have some time this summer to finish up some projects that I've been wanting to tackle, such as a good diff mode for jed and a more complete eshell, among other things that are currently escaping me. ;-)

I've spent the last couple of days working with varying amounts of dedication on parsing ISO9660 images in Java . I have to confess that this is not the most pleasant thing I've ever done ... It has been a learning experience, though, so I guess it's good that I'm working on it. The past two days were spent implementing a deceptively trivial hex dumper class in Java. I've released it to the rest of the Operating Systems II class, not that any of them will use it or care. ;-)

Wow, I really shouldn't be allowed to go so long between updates. Somebody needs to kick me every now and then, I guess. :-)

I guess I'll start by summing up the end of last quarter, which was not documented here due to my laziness. Life got pretty busy at the end of last quarter, between straightening up tcpurify for INBOUNDS (hyperlink ommitted due to me being too lazy to look it up) and class work, etc. It was fun, but busy...

Toward the end of the quarter, Mark and I released the third revision of our SACK draft. It is more or less a final product, I think, and modulo some typos I expect it to wind up as an RFC in more or less its current form unless something unexpected comes up.

For spring break I went to London with Jeff, Cara, Myra, and Dorothy to visit Aengus and see the sights of the city. We had a FABULOUS time. Aengus was an excellent host, and London is a fascinating city. We saw at least two major attractions a day for a week and some odd days, and I think we could have done it for another straight week.

I think this quarter is going to be more work than I had hoped for. I should have expected it, as I have twenty credit hours of classes, but it's still disappointing. ;-) I mean, who really wants to work, eh?

I guess it's been a while since my last update, but I'm sorry to say there's not much to tell. Life has mostly been more of the usual around here, with the occasional interruption for the ordinary. There are a few notable events, though, so I suppose I'll pass them along.

I went to Winter Fantasy this past weekend with Matt and Doug. We had a great time (well, at least I did) and got in some good gaming.

My official FAA license actually came in the mail the other day, too. :-) Not only am I licensed airman now, I have documentation to prove it.

On the computer front, two things are happening... For one, I've written a ROCKING packet capture framework called pktplug. It's built on top of libpcap, and it allows you to write four functions defining packet handling and initialization routines to create a fully functional packet capture program. The other is that I'm switching some of my filesystems to ReiserFS just to try it out. We'll see how it goes.

I got back to Athens early this evening, but I was a long time in settling in and unpacking. Actually... To be honest, I really haven't unpacked yet. ;-) Between other mod folks returning and general procrastination, I barely even got sheets put on my bed. I'll do more tomorrow, I promise!

I'm not sure I'm ready to be here yet, but looks like I don't have much choice. Things start off quickly with an INBOUNDS meeting tomorrow afternoon... I haven't done virtually any INBOUNDS work over break, either, so that isn't going to be pretty. Ahh, well, I'll have to raise that on my priority list. Problem is that so many things have a high priority these days... Perhaps a new sorting mechanism is in order.

Well, 2001 is here and there's no monolith on the moon, the world is still intact, and most of the US thinks we're one year into the new millenium. Most of the US thinks AOL is "American Online" and that they're a respectable ISP, too. Just to put things into perspective.

Seems I've been working the past few days, actually. Aeronca installed a new Novell server and had some fire fighting to do, so they called in the big guns. ;-) After adopting my Novell-server-defeating stance, I rolled up my sleeves (except I always wear a T-shirt) and got ready to work. All this without even knowing when or if I'll be paid. Ain't I a nice guy? Anyway, there are still some "opportunities" left (as John would say), but it seems I've done about all I can do. Tomorrow (that's right, Jan. 1) we'll iron out the last of my jobs and I'll call Winter Intercession 2000-2001 (barely 2001) over.

I guess it really has been an action-packed break (despite starting off pretty slow), but I'm not quite ready to end it. Ah, well. The Wheel waits for no man. (I just finished Winter's Heart a few days ago, btw ;-)

Happy new year, everybody.

Boy, is it a small world. When I was in Chicago O'Hare coming back from San Diego, I just happened to meet Arvind... He was taking the same flight I was back to Columbus. What are the chances, eh? Then this past Tuesday I met Geoff in a Radio Shack in Middletown... Granted, his family lives in Middletown so it's not as weird as meeting Arvind in Chicago, but the chances of him being here from Sunnyvale and in Radio Shack at the same time as me are still low, I think. :-)

I went to dinner with Ash today, it's only the second time I've seen her this break. Dinner was fun. I should make more effort to keep up with her, since she's going to be off to school soon and it will get harder to keep in touch. I feel like an old man saying this, but she sure is becoming a beautiful woman. :-)

I also worked at Aeronca for a bit today. Wow, it was a busy day. ;-) I helped get a Linux server in and established as their mail server. Hopefully it's mostly correct so Josh and I can easily administer it remotely. I think it is, and I also think it is set up in such a way that it will help them transition to a saner network setup.

Sounds like Mandy got her hair cut today and it's not much longer than mine now. ;-) The X-Factors say it won't be long now until I can pull mine back, by the way...

Only a handful of days until winter quarter. I hope I'm ready.

Actually, it's 2:10 here. :-) I'm sitting in an IPv6 working group meeting right now... It's actually rather disappointing that most of the talk has been about business stuff and not technical stuff so far... There was a good talk about extending socket options/etc., though. Right now they're talking about Anycast.

Getting out here was a bigger deal than it needed to be... All flights in and out of O'Hare were shut down on Monday, which b0rked my United flight from Columbus -> Chicago -> San Diego. I was rerouted to an American West flight through Phoenix, which was subsequently cancelled because the plane that was coming to Columbus for that flight was holed up in Newark. I was finally put on a flight through Cincinnati - I wound up arriving at the Cinti airport seven hours after I left home... I can drive there in about an hour. :-P Anyway, that flight left Cinti for San Diego at 4:30PM, meaning I got to the meeting about 40 minutes before the meeting where I was supposed to talk. It all worked out in the end, though... :-) Mark had changed the slides slightly while I was en-route, but it was nothing major and the talk was not affected... Reports say it was OK, with just a little bit of "rambling"... Those who have heard my AALUG talks probably understand.

It's about 65 degrees and sunny here... There was a spot of rain yesterday morning, but it has been otherwise pretty. I've spent several hours out in a little outdoor café with the wireless card chuggin' away.

The social event last night (hosted by Cisco and Qualcomm, I believe) was a real bomb. After the incredible social event put on by Marconi last August, it was a real disappointment. We stayed for about an hour and then came back to the Sheraton to hang out.

I haven't had much of a chance to poke around San Diego, which is a little disappointing... So far I've been here the whole day up until bedtime every night, so I've basically only seen the Sheraton and my Residence Inn. They're very nice. ;-)

Break has slowed down for me and I'm cruisin' at quite the relaxed pace... It's nice in a lot of ways, but it's also kind of depressing. Funny how when I'm going hard, all I want to do is slow down... But give me a week or two off and I'm wishing for things to pick back up.

I should have gotten a job this break, but it's past time for that now. Ahh, well, we live and learn. At least I'll have no excuse not to be relaxed and ready to get back to work when school comes back in session.

Now that I've complained about how slow things are, I guess I should point out that this coming week is going to be very exciting. :-) I fly out to San Diego for the IETF meeting this coming Monday (as I said below), and then come back on Thursday. Friday I'm leaving for Athens to attend Marina's birthday party... I'm lookin forward to that, as well. All in all it should be an exciting week.

And now, to update the long-overdue X-Factors.

I just got finished reading the Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson yesterday. (See also In the Beginning Was the Command Line) It's a fabulous book, with almost more story lines than you can keep up with all woven together into a spectacular finale at the end. I highly recommend it.

Well, all the paranoia in Cryptonomicon led me to decide to start using GnuPG again, and I decided my old key was getting a little cumbersome with all those uid's, so I created a new one. It's signed with the old one, so if you've verified the old one you only have one level of indirection to this one. Anyway, I'm going to start signing all my emails again. And I don't care about the poor schmucks who say it's ugly because they don't have a capable mailreader. :-)

My trip to the IETF has been confirmed, I leave on the 11th. :-) It turns out I didn't preregister in time, though, so I hafta pay an extra $150. That's stinky. I think the OU funds will still cover it, though, so I'm not personally out the cash.

So it seems the Clinton administration isn't quite done disgracing the noble institution of American Democracy. As I'm sure everyone and their long lost cousin knows, the 2000 Presidential elections will be decided by a recount of the ballots in the State of Florida. George W. Bush beat Al Gore by such a small percentage of the vote that Florida law required a recount.

Obviously we can't hold this against Al, since it's not his fault; however, we can, in my opinion, expect him to treat this with the dignity it deserves. He doesn't seem to share my opinion on this subject; either we don't agree on the definition of dignity or we don't agree on how much dignity the election has. He started off with a minor faux pas when he prematurely congratulated Governor Bush and called to take back his congratulations in the same night when the recount was announced.

I guess we can't fault him here, either, since I might have made the same mistake. He was trying to politely concede, but if he truly does believe he has a better plan for America than GWB, he should not in all rights give up before the game is over.

The latest behavior of Gore's camp is despicable, though. The continuous mud-slinging William Daley is casting toward Bush is crude and unnecessary. It's not like further campaigning can win votes, is it? Yesterday (maybe the day before) he said he thought GWB's preliminary selection of a Cabinet was "arrogant" and intended to "take the focus away from the Florida recount."

OK, does this seem stupid to anyone but me? For one thing, I think the man who has every probability of assuming at least four years of office as the most powerful man in the world in approximately one month has the right to start preparing. Don't you? Second, what does it matter if the Cabinet selection distracts from the Florida recount? It's not like the ballots will fall on Bush's side just because CNN wasn't talking about them...

We won't even talk about how they just happened to find some more Gore votes when they recounted, or how the "confusing" ballot caused Gore to lose votes...

OK, that's all for my Election 2000 political rant. Back to winding up the quarter...

Hmm, it seems I hafta get back on posting these guys... I'm getting way behind.

I got up early this morning to go to the language lab and catch up on some of my Japanese homework, but I haven't managed to leave yet. Hopefully I'll get around to that Real Soon Now and dig myself out of the little hole I've created.

I managed to miss most of the "festivities" this weekend without trying too terribly hard, which was refreshing. Saturday I hung around here, and yesterday a handful of us went to Marisa's place and ate a fabulous home-cooked Thanksgiving-style dinner. Josh & I rode down, and let me tell you about cold. I guess it really wasn't that bad, but it was undeniably cold.

sloth is now masaka, which is irg.cs.ohiou.edu. Everything lives here now, with a little symlink to jarok for transition convenience. (As if there were so many people that required a convenient transition ;-)

I just got finished installing OpenSSL and a secure imapd and pop3d on sloth. Hopefully we'll complete the migration to sloth Real Soon Now and I can start using it for everything. :-) I have to admit it's quite a nice machine, for being Solaris.

For the record, these pages (and other IRG pages as well) are now available on the new server as well as on jarok. The jarok pages will be disappearing soon. For some definition of soon, anyway.

It seems like I'm getting unreliable about updating this again. I'll have to try harder for a while... When I'm in the habit it's not hard to keep up with it, but if I get out it's all over.

My bike rolled over 2K miles yesterday coming back from the airport. I had just finished my last solo flight before my checkride, too. All in all it was a momentous afternoon. ;-)

I guess it's kinda slow on the news around here. I've been under the weather a little for four or five days now, but I'm getting better. My parents were here for the weekend, and that was fun... That's about it for my life right now, I think.

Wow, I'm slow on the update. I'm almost starting to feel like Brett in my timeliness.

It's been raining and yucky for the past several days, and I'm not very happy about that. It makes it hard to ride when it's this yucky. Not that I've got any time to ride, anyway, but it's really the principle of the matter. I'm going to have to walk over to Stocker, to boot. Who wants to walk that in the rain? Not me, I tell you.

I was hoping this quarter wouldn't be as busy as I was last year, but that hope appears to have been futile. I'm not even getting some of the stuff I'm supposed to be doing done, much less the stuff I just want to do. At least I'm having a good time, I guess. :-)

It's after 6AM and I can't seem to fall asleep. :-( This was not what I had in mind for tonight.

On a happier note, I think I'll be able to move these pages to a more capable server Real Soon Now. Now if only I had time to update them to a better format once I did that... *sigh*

Apparently Hideake Anno (sp?) was wrong about the Second Impact, because the 15th seemed to pass without remark. I guess that's fortunate.

The weather this afternoon was AWESOME. It was sunny and beautiful, but there was a light spring-like rain going on at the same time. It was the coolest weather I've experienced in a long time. It didn't last very long (obviously, if you think about it) but it was cool while it was here.

Found out my TCP simulations were all wrong this afternoon (they'd been running since about 11PM on Monday) and had to start 'em over. Ahh, well. They're split between jaguar and buick now so they should finish faster.

Tonight is my first evening back in the Hoover Lab for the year... I pulled three late night shifts for this quarter, which is nice because I get a lot of work done that way. Maybe I can get my research stuff knocked out of the way while I'm in here. At least some of it, anyway. :-)

I've scheduled with Cory to fly twice this week and it hasn't worked out either time. :-( Once our plane was down for maintenance and once it rained. What kind of luck is that? I asked if she wanted to ride out to the airport on my bike, and she wasn't sure... Then I heard a voice in the background saying "You will NOT ride on a motorcycle!" and she said "No, I better not". It was funny. I don't know who it was, maybe a roommate.

I'm back in the swing of things in Athens by now, I guess. It's a good thing, because it's been nearly a week (as Matt so kindly pointed out) since I updated this page. I don't have a real excuse, I just sorta haven't gotten around to it. :-)

It looks like this quarter is going to be reasonably relaxed for me. I'm excited about that. I think both of my scheduled CS classes are going to be reasonably cool, and Japanese is fun so far. I'm having a little bit of trouble getting motivated to do any work, but it's early and hopefully that won't last.

On a technical note, it looks like jarok will be replaced as the IRG web server Real Soon Now. The new server is in and Mr. weddy is installing the appropriate software/etc.

Hair update: Kristen put my hair in a little ponytail last night and it was nearly respectable. Well, not really, but there was a significant amount of hair back there. It was a thrilling moment in hair history.

Well, I moved back into the ol' Hoover room today. It's good to see the people here again, but moving is a pain. I'm mostly settled, at least as far as important stuff goes. The computer is hooked up, I have a place to sleep, and I managed to find enough of my other stuff to get a shower and get ready for bed. What more does a guy need?

I'm currently fighting the SCE computer. I ran GNU parted on it and it wasn't working right, so I said "I wonder if I can just plain delete a partition?" I can. :-P So then I ran the restore disk, and it's really quite slick... But now I'm getting Blue Screens of Death. I hate Windows. And here all I wanted was to put Linux on the box.

I got up at 5AM this morning (well, yesterday morning now) and I'm thoroughly worn out. It's bedtime.

Another typical vacation day... I put 100-ish more miles on my bike and got nothing useful accomplished. The list of things that need done isn't getting any shorter, but the number of minutes to do them in sure is. I really have to do some bill-paying. :-P

I took my bike to Honda of Troy today to have the front tire looked at, and they said that if the wheel really is out of round I couldn't get it back before I go back to school... So I'm going to have to look up a Honda dealer in Athens. Fortunately the vibration it causes isn't dangerous or bad for the bike, just mildly irritating.

While I'm on the subject of my motorcycle (and I always am ;-), I went in and took the maneuverability test and got a real motorcycle endorsement today. That means I can carry passengers and ride at night now. :-) I look like a real wild man in the picture, too. My hair's just goin' to town.

I know, I know... This is two updates in one day. It's for a good cause though, I swear. That other one didn't count since I couldn't get to jarok for so long. The official word from Marina is that there was Big Trouble over in A-town regarding networking today. Today? Hmm...

I rode a grand total of 131 miles today. That's a lot of riding for one day. It didn't seem to bad while I was doing it, though, which is good. That little bike's quite comfortable when you get right down to it. I can't say I'd want to take it cross-country or anything, but there isn't any day trip that I'd call it inadequate for at this point.

Somehow I didn't manage to get any sorting of stuff done today, which means I've got one less day to go through all my worldly belongings in. Hmm, I need to get on that fast. We'll see what tomorrow brings. :-)

I'm starting to get used to jarok being unreachable. Actually, more accurately, sisko being unreachable. I don't know if it's going down, or if CNS just isn't routing to it appropriately. Either way it's irritating when I can't get to my mail and I can't update my web pages to keep my loyal fans happy.

It must officially be time to start heading back to school. Several of my friends are already there or are moving in in the next day or two... RAs are there, band moves in sometime mid-week (tomorrow?), and for some reason (I just realized I have no idea why) Kristen is there. At least it won't be lonely when I get back on Saturday with all the freshmen.

I bought spurs today. I chink when I walk. I'm almost a real cowboy now... ;-)

Well, we cruised into the driveway at about 5 this evening, I think. It took me a little while to get the ol' computer set up (which is terribly out of character) because of the not insignificant impediment of huge piles of my stuff. My mom helped me straighten it up, though, and now I'm cruisin' with a minimum of peripherals.

I've been playing with my new x10 Firecracker kit for a while now. It seems the grounding craziness in my house keeps the remote modules from working if they're not on the same circuit as the transceiver. Hmm. Hopefully it won't be this picky at school. So far I've turned my cell phone charger on and off about a hundred times. Man, is it thrilling. :-)

I'm planning on getting up reasonably early tomorrow to do some riding with the family. I'd better head toward the sack.

I'm taking a break from packing all my stuff up to help Jeff out with some programming and update this page. My family should be here any minute (I've been expecting them any time since about 9:45PM) to help me move out... Of course, I expect tonight we won't do a whole lot of moving. :-)

I've got maybe 1/2 to 2/3 of my stuff packed up, modulo my computer and its associated mess. If I include that stuff, I'm at like 10%. It's been a slow communication evening (little #aalug traffic, no email, etc.) so I'm getting a lot done. It didn't hurt that I've already unhooked my cable and put away my VCR. No Cartoon Network tonight. :-)

Back to the grind... After tomorrow I get a week's vacation. Excellent.

Jarok has been unreachable when I've wanted to update a couple of nights in a row now. To be fair, I don't think this particular brain damage is jarok's fault, as it seemed to be a routing problem. Rumor has it that there was touble at CNS with routing, and I'm blaming that. For once, I'm letting you off the hook, you evil Solaris beast.

Today was my next-to-last day of work for the summer. I'm not going to be done with this project when I leave, and I am OK with this now. I had hoped to leave with some closure, but I don't think it's even possible to run all the experiments that need run tomorrow, as some of these simulations seem to be taking 12+ hours to run.

I've been trying to tie up loose ends around here... For example, I called the electric company to have my service shut off next Monday and I returned my cable box to the cable company. Fortunately I can still get Cartoon Network without the cable box, because the PowerPuff Girls come on in two minutes.

I was just reminded that the Third Impact is coming up fast... Only 22 days to go. I recommend that you avoid Antarctica on Sept. 15.

On a side note, it was warm enough to ride without my coat today, and I did... It felt funny, like I was unprotected & unprepared. I can see why so many veteran riders wear leather all the time.

This update is dedicated to Kristen, who made sure I posted it in a timely fashion. ;-)

As you can see, I'm putting a new look in... Until I have some sort of reasonable scheme for this particular page, however, it won't be retroactive. This ditches the rounded corners, though, which were proving to be trouble on Mozilla. They didn't used to be trouble, but they are now. That's why HTML made it to the hatred list, after all...