Maybe 6 months back, one of my coworkers, Roger, asked me if I wanted two NeXT Cubes he had been given several years back that were just taking up space. I of course said yes and became the owner of 2 Cube chassises, 4 system boards, two monitors, and a NeXT laser printer. I played with them a little when I first got them, but didn’t do much.

This morning I finally got to work on them.   I started with one working bootable system. Openstep has an interesting property that you can install the OS onto another hard drive as long as you have a working system, you do not need install media (although I do have the install CD). I pulled out an external 4GB SCSI drive I had and after much noodling was able to get it attached and recognized by the Cube.

Why use a new drive? Good question; I wish I had a tape recorder. The drive that is in the Cube is the newest of the three drives I got with the machines. It is a 3.5 inch half height 1GB drive (as opposed to the other 2 non-functional 300MB full height 5.25 inch drives). But even though it is “newer” it is still old and the bearings sound like they have sand in them and can be heard half the house away. I doubt that drive has much life left in it.

Once I had the system installed on the new drive, I detached the old drive and began to play. So far I am attached to my network, and am able to browse the web.

Pretty cool for a computer nearly 14 years old.

During my nighttime contemplation time (2-4am), a realization occurred to me. My neighbors must be afraid of the dark. Or maybe bizarre initiates in the church of illuminating the night. A strange sect that embraces the modern technology of 200 watt halogen lamps to drive away the heathen demons of the night.

I on the other hand am being persecuted for my belief that it should be dark at night. Lighting the dark when performing task is perfectly acceptable, but I seriously doubt the 5 houses around ours all had people performing yard-work at 3am. So I sat in bed and looked angrily at the shadows that are being cast all through the room from my dark-fearing neighbors contemplating how likely I would be to hit the bulbs if I owned a bb gun.

Bah.

I read Slashdot, as do most of you, but the comments on the system rarely rise above the general 13 year old geek “my blip is bigger than your blip.”

But Occasionally you come accross a great comment. This is from an article on Apple selling a million songs from the iTunes Music Store in 3.5 days.

The good publicity Apple’s sure to get from this would almost make it worth their while to buy those songs themselves…

…hmm… wait a minute…

No, sorry, my bad. It wasn’t Apple. It was me. I admit it. I was the one who bought those songs. I just wanted to see if their servers could withstand a vicious one-man slashdotting…

It can - apparently the iTunes server’s not running Windows. But I’ll try again tonight, this time with my friend Chris buying the same songs simultaneously. Then I’ll get Greg and Dave to help me buy whole albums at a time, and pretty soon, Steve Jobs will crumble in terror and BEG us to stop our vicious assault on their site!

Steve Jobs, I warned you - I’ve got my VISA, and I’m ready to take. you. down.

You didn’t care when I started buying iPod after iPod in an attempt to exhaust your assembly line workers in a one-man iPod Slashdotting. Well this is different. This time, I’m serious and I’ve upped my VISA limits. Your site is toast. Get ready to rumble!

I am now on the train somewhere above Ashland. I am connected to the internet at a blazing 14.4K. I am posting to my blog. I love technology. I have not been ablr to connect to any wireless networks yet, but I am trying. Why? because I can.

September 19th is International Talk Like A Pirate Day! Arrr!

So I mentioned yesterday that we had a drawing for 2 iPods for the OAs as part of the Fall Startup process. I forgot to mention that we also had 2 iPods that were being drawn for staff who volunteered to work the weekend as well. Basically, the earlier you volunteered, the more tickets you got.

We held the drawing earlier this week. The 2 iPods went to students. In addition, 3 of the 5 gift certificates went to student workers as well.

This morning, I got an IM letting me know that one of the students who won one of the iPods felt he didn’t deserve to get it as he only worked 3 hours on one of the two days. Don’t ever say that William and Mary doesn’t have honorable students. So an impromptu redrawing was held with the staff names.

I won. :)

P.S. No, I was not present at the drawing, and no, I didn’t pay off the student or anyone who participated in the drawing.

Really, I’m not. The last month has just been very busy. I will try to give a brief roundup. My birthday and associated presents was great. I got lots of cool music and books (and some yummy candy). In addition to the ones I mentioned in a previous post, I got a new copy of 1984, Invisible Frontiers, Altered Carbon, Ambient, What Einstein told his Cook, and Stop Making Sense. I am probably half way through reading things at this point. I also bought myself Thievery Corporation’s The Richest Man in Babylon. which is the group that played on the final night at the ACLU membership conference. Good stuff.

On the work front, the students are back. A coworker and I were in charge of running this years Fall Startup project. This involves organizing the process by which we get all of the freshman connected to the network. William and Mary has never done this twice the same, but I think we ran a system this year that will be the model for future years. We had wonderful cooperation from all of the OAs and things went quite smoothly. IT set up appointments with each team of OAs over the weekend following the friday of freshman move-in. At the appointed time, the OA would make sure all of their students were in their hall, and a team of IT folks would show up (in their stylish black t-shirts designed by moi) and make sure everyone was set up. The best part was we gave the OAs information on how to get their students connected prior to when we showed up and many of the halls had greater than 90% of their students hooked up before we even showed up. And to give them a small incentive, the more students they had hooked up, the greater their chances were to win 1 of 2 Apple iPods. Everyone was happy (and tired).

And with the arrival of the students is the start of classes. I am taking another graduate CS class, Network Systems and Design. It has been interesting, if not exactly educational yet. The professor is 3 years older than I am, which adds an odd dynamic to his perspective. I was looking forward to having the class be a combined undergraduate/graduate course, but with the exception of one undergrad I know, I no longer have that opinion. The undergraduates are generally annoying and I would much have preferred just having myself and the other 8 grad students than have 8 graduate students plus 40 undergrads.

The shelves! They are getting closer to completion. We are putting the finish coats of paint on now. It is a nice gloss white. All of the woodworking has been completed. But the painting is a slow process.

That is all I can think of for now.

For all those people who I pester to use XHTML. Now an easier way; HTML Tidy! For the Mac users out there, MacTidy which can either be used as a standalone application or (even better) as a BBEdit plugin! And for those using other operating systems you can look at the main page - HTML Tidy

Last year, Elizabeth gave me 11 days of birthday fun from August 1st through my birthday, the 11th. This year she is continuing the plan! Yipee! Isn’t she wonderful! So far I have gotten two presents, one in green wrapping and one in purple.

Yesterday, I picked a book shaped object and was rewarded with Body of Secrets. It is a book about the NSA. I’m sure it will make me more paranoid.

Today I picked a CD shaped object as I wanted to have something new to listen to as I worked in the office. I got promise of love by the American Analog Set.

After I opened it, Elizabeth asked me what kind of music it was and I had to answer that I had no idea. I have taken to listening to KCRW at work. KCRW is a public radio station out of Santa Monica that I listen to because they have Morning Edition on an internet stream within iTunes. I soon found their companion internet only music station which rebroadcasts their music shows all day. I particularly like Morning Becomes Eclectic; it is music I have never heard before nor would I hear it anywhere around Williamsburg. When I hear something I like I add the CD to my wishlist on the spot. This CD was one of them, so I had no memory of what it was as I had probably added it months ago after hearing one song. It makes the suprise even better; I don’t have any memory of the music, but I know it was something I liked.

But listening to it now, I am glad I added it. I like it lots. Thanks sweety!

Yesterday I received an email forwarded to me from a student who seemed to take issue with the system I ran. They responded to an email that was sent to all of the student body indicating the system would be down for some maintenance on monday. Read on for the letter.

Date sent:      	Thu, 31 Jul 2003 15:03:10 -0400
From:           	[name removed]@wm.edu
Subject:        	Re: myWM Unavailable Early on Monday
To:             	itadmin@wm.edu

Wait, my.wm is going to be unavailable on Monday? Really?
Like it was unavailable for a good portion of today, and the
day before, and several days before that?

my.wm is the most faulty system everyone I know has every
encountered. my.wm is the devil. my.wm NEVER works. I have
no idea why you bother sending out these emails explaining
that my.wm is going to be out of commission on a particular
day. We all expect, at this point, that my.wm is going to
work very sporadically, and we know, without question, that
when it DOES work, the layout will still suck, it will be
difficult to navigate, the little System Alert button will
pop up when we're in the bathroom and the middle of an
email, and even its name is still going to be obnoxiously
cutesy.

Every professor I've visited in their office has complained
about the perpetual annoyance that is my.wm. webmail worked
splendidly. It was efficient and easy-to-use. I never had
any problems getting into it. Its name was kind of slick and
futuresque and I would marry it if I could.

Please bring it back and/or make my.wm stop being quite so
hideous and painful.

Thank you,
-[name removed]