Sorry for the lag time between posts … I’ve been really, really, really busy. This is just a summary of some of the things that have been happening as of late, and hence, will be pretty long. Settle down for the long haul, cuz it’s right here. I’m just going to go chronologically because that is easiest. This past week, I have spent tons and tons and tons of time getting nice and friendly with FreeBSD so that HPI could setup all the routing and networking for [L=http://www.everlan.net]EverLAN[/L]. That is all fine and dandy, but Wednesday was a bitch. For two reasons. The first off is that there was a shooting in my building. On the third floor of our building, there is a company called Land & Title Company. They had a lady who worked there, who was 20, and who recently broke off an engagement with some guy who was 24. Apparently she had to file a restraining order against her ex-fiance, which he violated three times. The first time, he went and visited her house. The second time, he called her on Wednesday morning, and the third time, he went to her office on the third floor. This third time was not good. He showed up, asked if she was there, and then walked to her office. The floor receptionist phoned that the guy had shown up, and the afforementioned lady started running to not be in her office when the guy showed up. Well, she was stepping out of her office when the guy pulled a .45 and blew her away. In short order he shot himself. I found out about all this because Jack and I were going to lunch and hit the lobby right as the police were entering the building. We got hauled to a back room, quickly questioned, and then escorted out of the building. As we left, we saw a SWAT van with lots of officers donning bulletproof vests and loading M16s. It was very scary, really, but I think the biggest impact on me is that there are people out there who are not safe; that somebody who you know can be driven to a point where no decision making is preceded by thought, that a person can lose every inhibition and do the unthinkable. To all of you anti-gun people: the problem is not the guns. They are just a means to an end. The problem is the derangement of a person. Very, very sad. Following that tragedy, Thursday was very, very busy. I spent most of the day tweakin firewall and routing scripts in an attempt to be ready for the conference. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way our new found BSD box started broadcasting its routes and poisoned the route tables in one of our alpha servers, consequently taking down one of our on-floor T1 customers. This proved to be a real bitch to fix, and I was at work very late fixing that. And it sucked. Friday was a busy day — went over to EverLAN and setup all the networking, which was pretty crazy. We were working with four total networks; not very complex, just very big (compared to what I work with normally). However, we got it all up and working friday night around 7pm, before the majority of people started showing up Saturday morning. Saturday proved to be rather eventful as 300 gamers started plugging in their PCs & monitors … it was pretty warm in the conference room, and power breakers started blowing like mad — once every 4-5 minutes, 60 people would blink off. Unfortunately, our servers went up and down several times, necessitating a reconfig on every occurence. That sucked. It finally settled down around 1pm or so, and things were peachy keen, and rather uneventful. Went home at 2am, then came back on saturday morning @ 8am and spent the day there again. The day was similarly unspectacular on Saturday … so Jack and I decide to call it quits at 11:30pm since everything is stable and go home. Well, about 3 minutes after I leave, I get a phone call saying the network is down. Turns out that the only computer on the network with unrestricted firewall settings decided to turn on KaZaa and utilize the entire connection by itself, leaving nothing for anybody else. I almost bitch slapped that guy, but instead resorted to yelling at him for having it on when it was expressly against the rules, and then yelling at him more for purposely defeating the firewall rules in place (against the acceptable use policy he signed). That was sucky. And then I came home. Which brings me to my next topic. I came home on Sunday morning to find a very, very, very drunk Matt Byrne at my house, a not-sober tony, shawn and melissa curled up asleep on the couch, and a very downtrodden, almost “I’ve been whipped into submission” Emily. It took very little time for me to realize that I very much dislike Matt when he is trashed. The easiest way to describe him is menacing. Tony does the same thing when he gets really trashed. Matt is much more menacing when he goes that route, though, simply because he is very big and could probably kick my ass. Thankfully, Emily decided to go home pretty quickly after I showed up, because I was in no mood for Matt’s shit and would have probably blown a fuse (remember, < 6 hours of sleep and > 16 hours of work) if he had gotten all up in my grill. I was very irritated with him the other weekend, and as much as it pains me to do it here instead of face to face, I wanted to beat his ass when I found he was completely bad mouthing me while he was over at my house drinking my alcohol. Goddamn cocknocker. So, around Matt, I will not speak of anything which may make him decide that I ramble on too much about a particular thing, like say work, or school, or other people simply because it gives him ammo. And honestly, I would rather have nothing than a negative. Went back to EverLAN at 8am this morning, and everything was up and stable. That’s basically how it was all day. We had a couple bandwidth shortages here and there, but some reweighting of dynamic bandwidth allocation queues solved those very quickly. As far as I know, most of the people were pleased that the net access was there and that it worked, although most complained that it was fast not enough, which I can fully understand. Cramming 350 people on to a wireless T1 is not good times. But it went well. The bad part is that no other HPI people ever showed up. No marketroids, no sellers, no other techs, nobody else showed up, and that really, really pissed me off. Their going to get hell tomorrow morning. The best part is that it is over, and I think that people have a generally good impression of HPI. And that is my post. Somewhere in there I spent an evening at the Perk and got all depressed about things and blah blah blah, but that is all because I suck and have a very low opinion of myself, blah blah blah. But that was my week, and it was good. I have another long, long week ahead of me, filled with meetings with the mayor and a post-op about EverLAN. And that is that. zoobay. [b]Update[/b] – due to technical difficulties, this is post 343. Tough. [b]Update – 10:55p 11/4/02[/b] – Thought I’d post some hilarious links: [L=http://pichosting.pcthike.com/brutuskend/menwomen]http://pichosting.pcthike.com/brutuskend/menwomen[/L] [L=http://www.ebaumsworld.com/media/pooch.mov]http://www.ebaumsworld.com/media/pooch.mov[/L] Oh, I turned on the webcam too. Click the above right for a pic of my shitty beard!