Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

Well, 'tis Spring Break time 'round here. Most people think three things: alcohol, sun, and girls. I ignored two of the three, and went up north to visit my Grandma. My thinking was: food, sleep, and more food. I only got two of the three... but I digress.

It started, like most of my days, with a tech call. A family in Northern Indiana knew of my computer prowess, and had their son, my friend, ask me to come up and fix their computer. I agreed, once I figured out my plans, and spent the first night (Friday) checking that out. 'Twas a busted monitor. Once I got the mother to buy a new one, it amazed her that her "dead" computer worked again! Thankfully, since she didn't ever know about firewalls or virus protection, she counted everything on the hard drive as lost, and I was able to reformat the whole thing, and load it up with my usual suspects, zone alarm, et al.

Well, once I finished that chore, I pished on to Chicago, to visit malap. Now, I think it should be mentioned here how weird it is when you know someone from online, in this case, Walraven, as opposed to meeting them in person. It feels more natural to call them by their handle, as opposed to their real name. Interesting problem. Anyways, I spent the night with him*, had some excellant food (apparently real geeks cook... they also "instantiate the fish"), and went to an awesome show.

If you're ever in new York of Chicago, go see Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind. It is *well* worth the $8-$13 you pay to get in. Why the variable cost? In true geek fasion you roll a d6 (that's a six sided die) and add the result to $7 to get the cost to get in. Since I always roll low on Leadership tests, though the Emperor's Finest never needs to, I paid $8. They (try to) do 30 plays in 60 minutes. If they don't finish, they don't finish. Every week they change 2d6 (think about how I described it before, and figure out what that means) plays, writing them from scratch. These plays are anything they want. many were funny, some were sad, others just... serious. All very high quality, though if you're conservative... you might not enjoy the serious ones. However, to watch a bunch of people doing flips in their underwear and making pudding... well worth it.

I awoke the next morning to my Grandma calling and telling me a snowstorm was expected, I better get on the road. So I did. I got in to her place about three hours before the snow started, and we got 6 inches that night. I got some good pictures, as we haven't really gotten snow here at school, at least, not decent accumulation, in a long time. I'll upload them sometime later. Spent three days with Grandma, got me some nice food and sleep. Then, Tuesday, they predicted more snow on Thursdy. I figured, no biggie, I'll go home Friday. Wednesday they upgraded accumulation from "slush" to "heavy 4-7 inches". I decided to get out of town before that happened, and left that morning for home. I stopped again in Chicago, and let me tell you, I hate driving in that city. It sucks. DC may be rated higher for bad traffic, but Chicago is way more annoying. So, I made it home in about 12 hours, of which I was driving about 10. So, not too bad. Trip was 650 miles.

Now, I am being confronted by the bulk of Ubuntu's stupid decisions. Such as not giving me the same header files as the kernal was compiled with. And making a "nice" seperate network interfaces GUI, when other distros actually have one that works, that for some odd reason requires a timeout for every change, as well as takes 45 seconds (no lie) to rewrite the routing tables. To put that in perspective, I can do all of the above with command line instructions in about 45 seconds. There's absolutely no wait time between hitting enter, and having the command execute. How it takes so long is beyond me. Also, this "handy" GUI doesn't recognize wifi so well, and often times will just clear the routing table. What... a... pain...

But, I've got a router to play with. Brand new Asus WL-500G Deluxe. The thing is sweet. It comes with two USB ports, and using the firmware included, its real easy to setup a wireless webcam, or wireless print server. However, putting a version of Linux on there, OpenWRT, you can do whatever you want with said USB ports. However, its got some.. sercurity problems. Such as OpenWRT not being able to switch the password for the web login. Other then that, once you get past the learning curve, 'tis quite sweet.

That's my break in a nutshell, oh, and a ton of WoW, just 'cause I have the urge. I'll post some screenshots I took a little later as well.

*Edit: Not "with" him, but I used his couch to catch a few hours of sleep.