victory

April 9, 2004 at 1:42 am · Filed under General

apologies for the lack of real news in this post. every so often it’s important to talk about what really makes one’s day.

i ought to say how pleased i have been recently with vim. sure, it may screw up unicode every so often when i try to edit some of andrew’s pages for professor yeti, but get this: you can close your entire terminal without saving bupkis and the only thing preventing you from getting back to your document is a ‘vim -r’. as ross perot would say, easy, simple, cut and dried. it’s almost worth forgetting that a .swp file exists so that you can get temporarily upset and start to tear your hair out only to be giddily pleased with yourself. no, you don’t have to retype (botch) that paragraph. how could you reproduce what you wrote the first time anyway?

i’ve also been pleased with linux. suppose you browse the web when you get home from work on occasion. you run into the following exasperating dialogue more frequently than actual websites: “The connection was refused when attempting to contact the-interweb.com.” “Bullshit!” you say. all you have to do is reload the page a bunch of times and it works fine… you wonder, is it really possible that the server is sending a reset back to me?

the answer: sure, the server could be sending resets, but it’s not. instead, it’s that (damn) beloved (much hated) windows (don’t ask me how i know) box that our dsl provider has functioning as our gateway:

00:16:19.662045 192.168.1.1 > 10.10.1.13: icmp: net 148.87.9.44 unreachable
00:16:20.235352 192.168.1.1 > 10.10.1.13: icmp: net 137.22.100.1 unreachable
00:16:27.195276 192.168.1.1 > 10.10.1.13: icmp: net 216.52.17.116 unreachable
00:16:30.183318 192.168.1.1 > 10.10.1.13: icmp: net 216.52.17.116 unreachable
00:22:55.509263 192.168.1.1 > 10.10.1.13: icmp: net 64.37.246.8 unreachable

as i often get to remind network admins, ‘tcpdumps don’t lie’. thanks to having compiled too much stuff into my kernel several months ago, all that’s needed is an overly restrictive restriction (heh):
sudo iptables -A INPUT -p icmp -j DROP

sweett.

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ohfour.ofor.04

April 5, 2004 at 12:38 am · Filed under General

everybody watch out for my masterful dart throwing technique!

there’s no substitute for free drinks from the company for a job well done. there’s also no substitute for an unexpected rendevous with carleton alumns in the same spot i am. (year 1 A.C.) the next morning i woke up to a persistent headache. i proceeded to drink water and conquer it with 20+ miles of biking. the last stretch had me thirsty, exhausted and euphoric all at once. (perhaps the lack of dinner the night before and the lack of breakfast the morning of had something to do with it.) the bike ride required lunch. lunch required 3 hours of sleep.

sunday was more predictable. one book finished, two loaves of bread baked, three laps of calhoun cycled, four ceramic rice bowls acquired. and tomorrow? the first of (hopefully) five days of training.

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