Hiatus

Sorry it's taken me so long to update this, a combination of distractions left me too busy to get any updates posted, but I have no plans to discontinue this site as of yet.  Things like a trip to Vegas, a hacked computer, the start of my summer class, and looking for a new place to live all consume time...

Yesterday, I did find time to go to Camp Courageous with a friend for their annual classic car show.  My friend worked at the camp for two summers, and he wanted to show me around the place.  Below are some of the cars we saw:

1967 Corvette

1967 Chevelle

Customized PT Cruiser

We went for a hike in the surrounding woods after looking over all of the cars.  We came across a tiny snake, but I didn't recognize the species.  Any amateur herpetologists in the crowd?

Here's a picture of my friend JD with some T.P. in a TeePee:

The area around Monticello is quite hilly for the state of Iowa, and there are several rocky cliffs that would make for excellent climbing.  We struggled up a short area, to save ourselves from having to walk around.  Here's Jen bringing up the rear:

School's Out

It's the last day of the semester, and things are pretty slow.  Summer classes start on Monday, and I'm taking one called "Southern Politics & Society".  It should be a pretty interesting class, geared towards learning the history of the South to understand why it is the way it is.

Powerless

It's been busy around here in the last 24 hours.  Last night, at 4:55, as everyone was about to leave, campus lost power.  It came back on around 6:00 p.m. and we started bringing systems back online, and checking everything out. It was an educational power outage, we realized we'd missed putting a UPS system on one of our network switches, and that one of the UPS systems had a bad battery, but nothing too major.

Then, we tried to log in to our Netware servers.  We discovered we could not, even though they were online.  To make a long story short, there were 20,000 errors that had to be corrected in the NDS tree, but we're back up now!

Seven Point One

I installed Red Hat 7.1 yesterday, to do some hardware compatibility testing for an upcoming computer lab that will be dual-booting Linux & Windows.  After some help from another sysadmin on campus, I'm now able to log in to our Netware server and access all of my files, right from my Linux box.  Ximian 1.4 is very user friendly, and almost Mac-Like (pre OS X).  Each new version of Linux I use impresses me more and more...

Insomnia

It's nearly 1:00 in the morning, but I can't sleep.  I don't normally have this problem, but I do tonight.  I watched all of the good TV that was on my TiVo, then listened to the rest of the audiobook The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, which was stored on my MP3 player.

Having now done so, I think I could still work for Mr. Jobs if I was asked to do so.  I've got a thick enough skin, that I could probably withstand a few of his tirades, assuming I still had my job left afterwards...

The book did make me wonder about NeXT computers, which I've never seen or used.  I wonder if they were cool.  Maybe I can find one on eBay...

Later: Yup, they're out there!  This one looks cool, but I'm not paying that much for a machine with a 25mhz CPU in it...