So what’s new in the life of me. Not too much. Hmmm, let me think – I guess I’ll just go through them all. [B]Text:[/B] I have been doing a ton of reading as of late, and very little of it is uplifting. I finished Snowcrash (Gibson), the 7-novel series Death Gate Cycle (Weis & Hickman), Digital Fortress (Dan Brown) and Pattern Recognition (Gibson). Digital Fortress and Pattern recognition, although fairly long books, were both very engrossing and very quick reads. PR, though, is in Gibson’s typically-cryptic style and takes a lot of think-time outside of reading the book. Like, read 10 pages, stop, think for a few minutes, make sure I have it, then continue. Maybe I am getting dumber. Wouldn’t surprise me. I’m supposed to read The Da Vinci Code next, but I have to wait until Keen is done with it. [b]Web:[/b] [L=http://jared.seehafer.net]Jared’s website[/L] is back up, which is super. He even has all of his archives. Yay. [L=http://pinklaura.blogspot.com]Laura’s site[/L] has some new content, which is nice. Other than that, the [L=http://www.copyright.gov]www.copyright.gov[/L] website has a ton of good reading on it. For example, you don’t need to put a copyright notice on any work created after 1989 — it’s insta-copyrighted upon dissemination. Odd. Also of interest is the latest [L=http://www.uniras.gov.uk/vuls/2004/236929/]TCP Protocol Vulnerability[/L], which is a semi-big deal. Not for me but other people. I also highly suggest reading [L=http://www.kottke.org]Kottke.org[/L] – always good text and links, and it was one of the original reasons why I started rand0m.org [b]Store:[/b] The store is doing OK. We had an issue with our CS Team, but that has been cleared up. I setup the FreeBSD machine to be a [L=http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/filtering-bridges/article.html]packet filtering bridge[/L]. Yay for bandwidth shaping & firewalling. I think implementing that broke our mailserver, though, as it went totally apeshit the other day and stopped accepting mail. Burned an hour of my day to figure out why, too. I had no idea configs could just change. On another note, we are starting up a Counter-Strike League. Here’s to it working. [b]HPI:[/b] Nada, really. Had a bizarre set of circumstances that led to the whole HPI network going down. I’ll put up an article about that shortly, and link it here. Additionally, had some _whack_ weather kill a bunch of our radios in one day. It was not fun. Also, 5.7/5.2GHz ISM/UNII totally owns the shit out of 2.4GHz gear. Period. [b]Personal:[/b] I am not sexually interesting, per Samantha Garrett, my almost-life-long dream girl. How’s that for a start to your Wednesday? Maybe I need to find a floozy and use her to make myself feel good. Meh, that never works. Well fuck that. Maybe I am just uninteresting in general. I could see that, as I’m pretty bland, or have been for the past 6 months or so. Maybe I just give off the “uninteresing sexually” aura and drive women away. Ahh yes, that must be it. Nothing wrong with _me_, just the damned Aura. And some girl’s obviously misguided opinion of things. Yes, that too. One of my roommates Got Laid. He looked happier than a fox in a hen house. I was jealous there for about 3 seconds, then realized that, oh yea, I’m a eunuch, and then went on my way. There’s a girl I’m thinking about pursuing, but it’s going to take some time to sort itself out. God I hate that. And the whole relationship thing in general. It’s so fucking difficult to find good people – especially women. And then they crush your spirit mercilessly, and you’re just like “this is bullshit”. Eat shit and like it. Took Duck in the face at 250 knots. I walked to work today, and despite the inclimate weather, it felt good to be outside.