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03-06-2003
7:50 PM
Argh, vi makes me mad sometimes. I had written a whole bunch of stuff, and I hit some key and it's all gone. So here I start again. (/me makes mental note to remember to :w more often) So I'm on the bus on the way from work after my pal and co-worker Larry dropped me off at the stop. I got on the bus at the Northwest Park & Ride, and am en route to the Robot group at Congress/Ben White. It tales an hour and a half just to get there. It's insane the amount of time you have to spend on the bus to get anywhere of considerable distance in this town. Linux Top Gun is tomorrow, and my team is just now preparing, heh. That seems consistent. We hadn't really prepared the other times, so why should we start now? Hopefully, everything will go much smoother this time. The last contest was plagued with network/systems problems because of the lack of available setup time at the Alamo Drafthouse downtown. They have a night club booked this time with lots of food and things, and plenty of setup time, so things will go much smoother. We all met and agreed upon new rules so it's not stinkin' boring this time around. They've changed to more of a CTF style like at DEFCON. Instead of an unrealistic and unmanagable 20 minutes of uptime on a server we've never touched, it is now up to us to provide the server/OS/services, with like 4 hours of attack/defend time. This should prove to be much more entertaining and involved. Oh, if you want to look, i took some pictures while waiting at the bus stop and other times today. So it's been a while since I blogged, i think mostly due to the fact that that weekend of being stuck in Brownwood because of the ice totally wore me out. That, and probably the fact that I seem to have misplaced my slackware hard drive somewhere (yes, I have several hard drives that I change out in my laptop), so I had to reinstall on my new 30 GB hdd. I also ordered a new high-capacity battery for my system, but it does not appear to have shipped yet. It's been a week now, and i'm getting impatient. I was hoping to have it already, so I can finish building my other laptop for Fethr. BTW, Fethr is the sister of a friend, who is wanting to get into Linux, but doesn't really have a computer of her own to do it on. i'm going to loan her my other laptop so she could use that. Dell is being very slow about getting my order to me. I should have checked for a backorder today, but didn't think of it when I had the time.

11:30 PM
I made it to the Robot Group meeting tonight, and late in the meeting, Tami showed up with Richard Stallman. It was pretty cool, and Tami demanded that we all see him speak at a thing tomorrow night. I think the LTG guys are going to work around it, since a lot of people were wanting to go, and the competition happens at the same time. So, I got to hear RMS sing the Free Software Song. It was pretty neat. I got a couple pics of him while he was there, and they're in the pictures for today.

03-12-2003
If you didn't hear, the Linux Top Gun went poorly. There was one other "team" besides us, and then David, who decided to be his own team. As is historically true, the rules weren't defined fully or truthfully beforehand, and it was just a big mess of trying to get things to work when the event actually happened. there was a big conflict with the RMS keynote speech, and there was hardly anyone at the event until well after 8:00 PM. On top of all that, I missed RMS speaking, who happened to be about 3 blocks away, and Tami was upset with us. Oh well. A bunch of us from the austin2600 group went to Bruce Sterling's SXSW afterparty - it was pretty fun. For those of you who don't know, Bruce Sterling is an author/writer who lives in Austin. He's written several books, does work for Wired Magazine, and does a lot of public speaking on technology subjects. I first read his work on the O'Reilly site. He had given a speech at an open-source conference. He made me this cool drink with Tia Rosa liquer and cream. He delighted in showing everyone the convection action of the alcohol and cream happening in the drink. Also in attendance was Cory Doctrow, a spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and another great speaker as well. I saw Cory give a speech at the University of Texas about 6 months ago - I was impressed. And he's canadian, eh? I took some pictures tonight, and should have them posted soon. In the meantime (before the prior word "pictures" turns into a link), you can check out some pictures from the LTG, and at kerby lane afterwards for dinner.

03-13-2003
I got yesterday's pics up, and realized I left out a few details. the first 5 pics or so are of various dinner occasions from the past few days. there's Rab, Monica (the hot chick jacob doesn't want), jacob, and a pic of the statue of liberty riding a motorcycle at freeb!rds. The rest is from the night of the 11th, at either nuclear taco night, or bruce sterling's house. Oh, and I forgot to mention the new group of people who have started hanging with the Austin 2600 crew - we affectionately call them the Round Rock Kids. (see the picture to your left) I slept all day today - until 3, anyway. Then again, I was up until about 9 this morning.

03-17-2003
It's 4:20 in the morning at mojo's, and I'm geginning to get tired. I hate working weekends. I wtill have to figure out how i'm going to get off for my sister's wedding next week. I got scheduled to work the weekends this month - major suckage. I haven't slept much in the past several days - weekend activites when you have to work during the week equates to not much sleep. I got ethereal to install on my slackware box today. problem is, the hostap drivers don't put the cards into promiscuous mode like they should, and you only see your local traffic. It seems to work ok with the cisco card i have, except that the cisco drivers stop sending/recieving packets after a few minutes. bleh. So It's OpenBSD for all my ethereal needs. I like snarfing packets, it's really fun. It's amazing what people transmit over a wireless connection in plain text for all the world to see. almost no one uses secure authentication for POP and SMTP. AIM conversations are usually pretty fun to watch happen over a wireless network. people are weird when they talk online.

03-22-2003
It's been about a week since i've written anything. I've been mostly getting no sleep and getting rides to work. Apparently, I lost half my rear derailluer on my bike somewhere while not riding. Combine the lack of connectivity at work, and I get behind. You can check out some of the pictures I took the other day. It's mostly pictures from meetings and stuff. Check out the next batch of pictures here - pictures I took on the way to work and of friends hanging out. It's good to know that I still have a steady hand for photography - the 2 pics of my computer compiling were taken handheld at 1/8 second. There's also a picture of A&W/KFC. I ate lunch there the other day, and wanted to take a pic to show Kristin that there's an A&W here now. I'm at Mojo's now, and they're playing music by a band from Denton called Mandarin. It reminds me a lot of Phil Keaggy. In news, I'm moving on the 1st of April to a house with Thomas. We should have the keys to the place today sometime so we can start moving stuff. It's on 51st Street about 3 blocks away from Flightpath coffee house where we usually meet. It will be great to get something so close. We got a T1 line from Core NAP, which should be going in sometime this coming week. We're going to wire the house for gigabit ethernet and get the hardware to support gigabit transfer somewhere down the road. We may be doing some small colocation/hosting sometime soon, which will help subsidise the cost of the connection. I am excited about the move - the house is in a great location, and close to a lot of things.

03-30-2003
Being without an internet connection is no fun. I am currently in the middle of moving, and our new place doesnt' have connectivity yet. The T1 got installed yesterday, and we were able to get the router talking on the network, but it appears the reverse routing on our IP addresses is not yet set up - so we can't really do anything with the connection yet. So onto the latest news - my sister got married today. Click here for pictures of the wedding. You can also check out pictures from the anti-war protest downtown at the federal building. There are also a few pictures here and there that i've taken over the past week or so.

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