Grandma is now online, dialing in to EnterAct with a term program called
"Black Night" and reading her email with pine. But
It will take her awhile to get the hang of
things through a shell. Luckily I have her password and stuff so I can wander
in and set things up for her when need be.
q
is what I type
to start Quick Mail at work!
As we were leaving her work at the University of Chicago, I remarked that this was the second occasion I had to be on a college campus during my vacation. The nice thing about college campuses being, imho, a good number of attractive women my age. I wasn't particularly revelrous, if that is even a word, recalling my earlier occasion to be at Northwestern to attend a memorial service for Marcus Marinho, an EnterActer.
I knew Marcus very little, but he seemed like a good guy. This was affirmed over and over again as friends of his spoke of his good nature, his helpful attitude toward things. I didn't feel such a loss, except for the fact that I don't get a chance to know him. His comrades felt a very deep loss, which I could only barely grasp, I think. After all, he was a great guy, and what's most jarring perhaps, was that he was young, and the fateful car crash in California that took his life was something people don't normally expect from someone in their twenties.
And among the number of his comrades was most of EnterAct, which closed for the day so everyone could attend. I could tell that they were each grieved in some way, but they seemed to be taking things pretty well. I liked the chance to get together with all of them. We went out to a restaurant in Evanston, and sat together, seventeen people at a table, like a great extended family, and I a cousin come to visit from afar. I knew most of the people there, but some were new faces. I felt comfortable with everybody. It was nice to see Mike, Elyse, Tracy, Jim, Jess, Juan, Charlie and the others. I'm even more interested in working there now, having been reminded of what a good group there is that I could so easily be a part of.
I just sent Tracy my resume. Mike said they need people in the Network Operations Center.
Of course, if they find out that due to a brain fart I typed rm
/etc/* the other day they might try to keep me away from the Unix
systems. Moshen was helpful in my crisis when he told me that he had once
accidentally nuked /etc himself on his own system.
For the unenlightened, that command kills off the important system configuration files. That kills a system, basically, if you don't know what you're doing. Luckily I'm half competent enough to have pulled my shit out of the fire even without backups to fall back on. As backups go though, I was lucky to have sasquatch at my disposal, and doubly lucky that it's running the same, or near-same version of FreeBSD as stumpy here.
Mom's buying a new computer. A Compaq. My single greatest misgiving is that the memory system on there seems very non-standard, and despite Compaq's promise of ass-kicking performance, I'm wary of it's limitation of 48M of RAM, in an apparently proprietary format. But then, mom's not much of a power user, the price was damn right, and in the worst case it's not hard to replace a motherboard. She bought the system mail-order from Milwaukee, WI. No sales tax that way.
I payed bills today, and am now broke. Maybe I shouldn't buy that harddrive I wanna get off Inspector's Gadgets when I get back to town? I thought today that the beauty of credit cards is that you can spend money that you have not yet earned. Well, I know I'm in line for the money, about $300 or so ... it seems kind of extravagant but I'm telling myself the most important use is supplying stumpy with enough space that it can keep a directory of FreeBSD source code and track -stable or maybe even -current if I feel bold. With source in hand, I can learn a bit more how the system works you see?
I can also amass more mp3s.
Thu Jan 15 23:18:07 CST 1998
The eighteenth is my birthday.
6 January
<<
Journal Index
>>
20 January
H O M E