Category: Geekery

Phone call yesterday afternoon:

Him: “Paul, you know that computer you were sitting at down in the lab earlier?”
Me: “Yeah, what about it?”
Him: “I got a call from Corporate Security. Evidently it was pinging the corporate network.”
Me: “Yeah, I was looking for a machine connected to the network so I could read my email.”
Him: “Well, they want you to stop pinging.”
Me: “I did about 3 pings of relay.foo.com, and then when I saw it was connected, I telnetted to it.”
Him: “Well, I’m going to have to disconnect that machine from the network.”
Me: “DUDE! WTF?”

So I’m down in the lab again, doing this test that takes over an hour to run, and using a different computer to check my email. And this time I was careful to test its network connectivity by attempting a telnet, rather than using one of those evil nasty pings.

A few days ago the sysadmin at the National Capital Freenet emails me to ask if the news system relies on any files in the /, /usr or /var partitions, because he wants to upgrade to the latest and greatest Solaris and doesn’t want to blow anything of mine away. I said no, I don’t think so. Ok, he tells me, I’ll be doing that on Thursday.
Continue reading “I needed that like I needed a hole in my head”

Today I had to go over to the legal office to sign a patent application. Have I mentioned before how much I hate the very fact that software is patentable? And that I was relieved when our first patent application was rejected by the patent office?

Still, it would be an ego trip to get my name on a real patent.