ramblings of a {sys,net}admin…

The Bloomington Linux User Group (LUG) will be having it’s 11th meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 13th, 2005 in conference room 1B of the Monroe County Public Library starting at 7pm. See the meeting web page for more info.

The Ohio LinuxFest 2005 will be held on Saturday, October 1st, 2005 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in Columbus, Ohio. It’s a one-day event that runs from 8am when the doors open until midnight when the conference officially ends.

Lindsey and I will be travelling there for the event, mainly due to weez. I had considered going, but October 1st is the first day of an extremely busy 10-day period for me (hamfest, GCWN course, then Lindsey’s birthday), but since weez’s FreeLists is a sponsor of the event and he’ll have a booth there, I figured I better go check it out. I’m sure I’ll have a good time there (not so sure about Lindsey — she’ll probably be bored outta her freakin’ mind), so we’re gonna head over and check it out (either staying overnight Friday night or Saturday night, depending on her work schedule).

The 59th Annual Persimmon Festival will be taking place from Sept. 17-24th, 2005, in downtown Mitchell, Indiana (my hometown). Check out the web site for more information.

The Hoosier Hills Ham Club in Bedford, Indiana, will be hosting the 44th Annual Hoosier Hills Hamfest on Oct. 2nd, 2005. Please see the club and hamfest sites for more information.

Today and tomorrow I’m in Indianapolis on the IUPUI campus for the 2005 Indiana Higher Education Cybersecurity Summit. There are some pretty big name InfoSec people speaking here, as far as .edu’s go. It’s only been underway for 35 minutes or so, but already it’s pretty interesting. Fortunately, there’s free wireless here…

Thunder of Louisville, the kickoff to the Kentucky Derby Festival is this Saturday!

Thunder is so totally kickass… there’s a huge airshow throughout the afternoon with shitloads of military aircraft (I love aircraft and flying). There are live bands playing all day long, you can carry around a cooler and get drunker than shit in the middle of downtown, and when darkness falls, there’s an absolutely rockin’ fireworks show off the Second Street Bridge.

Lindsey and I are going down Saturday to check it out. I got us a hotel room reserved at the Marriott in Jeffersonville, just this side of the bridge separating Indiana and Kentucky. We’ll go down, I’ll get drunk, catch the fun, go to the hotel, and get freaky in the Jacuzzi. Sounds like fun to me!

So I spent four days in Dallas, Texas for the 2005 PTK International Conference, and, I have to say, rather enjoyed myself.

To make a long story short, there was lots of sex and drinking (ate quite a few times too), we were right downtown and hit a few of the bars there, went up into the (former) Texas Schoolbook Depository Building where Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy (allegedly), stood on the grassy knoll, and drank some more.

I somehow ended up with a credit card account at Neiman Marcus (about two blocks down from our hotel) and a $225 shirt that I wore to the final banquet dinner thing on Saturday night. I forgot my camera most of the times we left so I didn’t get many pictures, but Jennie did take quite a few. I’ll get them from her, scan ‘em, and put ‘em in the photo gallery sometime (just realized I haven’t even posted the ones from my Florida vacation last month).

Well, it’s been a few weeks since I really updated, except for that bit on Easter.

I’ve been keeping pretty busy what with work (and my “on-the-side” projects) and Lindsey is getting a substantial amount of my time too. We’re actually hopping on a plane from Indianapolis to Dallas Thursday morning. I’m treasurer of a National Honor Society at school so we’re going down there for a conference.

I got some new toys delivered yesterday: a Dell Inspiron 600m laptop (Pentium Mobile 1.6GHz, 1 GB RAM, 60 GB HDD, etc.) and a Dell Axim X30 PDA. Both are fuckin’ sweet and I’ve spent way too much time playing with them yesterday and today. I intend to use these mostly for my work (my “on-the-side” work), so it’s pretty much been a software installfest. The laptop came with XP Home Edition which I promptly replaced with Windows XP Professional. I also have SUSE Professional 9.2 installed on it, just in case I ever need access to Linux real quick. I had to get it set up with the PDA and my phone (Samsung p107) so that everything plays well together, which was a fun bit — then installing all the required software (Microsoft Office 2003, Adobe Acrobat, Firefox, Virtual PC, etc.).

Anyways, that’s it… back to playing with the toys!

It is my sad duty to report that at approximately 7.36am this morning the Easter Bunny was struck and killed while attempting to cross the road to hide easter eggs. While this means that Easter will have to be cancelled this year, the Easter Bunny committee ensures us that they are currently in talks to choose a successor for the next year.

It is our recommendation that you simply tell your children that the Easter Bunny must have gotten lost, but that he will return next year.

The aforementioned party at weez’s was pretty much a success I think. I just got home about an hour ago from partying there last night. Lindsey and I went up to Indy (Carmel, specifically) yesterday after she got work. We checked in to our room at the Courtyard by Marriott a bit before 8pm. It was 9:30pm before I got around to calling a cab (blame it on her). They told us they’d be there at 10:15. At 10:15, some guy calls my cell phone, says the cab company is extremely busy and has asked him to come get us, but tells us it will be another twenty minutes. Fine. Finally, he gets there.

We get to weez’s crib sometime just before 11pm, I think. I’d already drank a few back at the hotel. weez wasn’t feelin’ any pain, so far as I can tell (never partied with him before, but I think it was pretty obvious he wasn’t just starting to drink). He had Heineken on tap, so I was drinking that. A bunch of his (and his wife’s) friends were in town from out of state and were partying. I vaguely remember nipple being exposed at some point, I think.

weez apparently made Lindsey a drink called “brain damage”. I’m supposed to tell him that it causes memory loss. :-)

Whenever we decided we’d be ready to leave in a bit, I called a cab, fully expecting at least a 45 minute wait. I think it was like 10 minutes when somebody mentioned that the cab was there. After calling me two times, the cabbie ended up inside the house so we finally left. I remember getting in the cab and leaving weez’s pad for the hotel, but the rest of the night is just bits and pieces. I know I got some s3×0r, and from what I remember it was damn good s3×0r too. I believe the exact words that came outta Lindsey’s mouth this morning were “most amazing sex ever” (I’m just good like that).

The 6:30am wake up call arrived (way too damn early, I might add). I had a 7am meeting scheduled for today, but got permission from $boss to just connect in via VNC (free hotel Internet) and over the phone. We had allocated four hours for the meeting and it went the whole four hours, too. Imagine laying in bed with a beautiful half-naked woman beside you and not being able to do anything because there’s no mute button on the phone. I was doing okay until she got outta the shower and was walking around the room naked… complete loss of concentration. Finally, my meeting concluded and I jumped in the shower myself. We got our stuff and split. I was starving like mad so we ended up swinging into a Denny’s on the south side of Indy and getting some grub. Made our way back to Lindsey’s pad in Blgtn. and chilled there for a few hours (more s3×0r). She was going to meet her mother and (four) little brothers for dinner so I split and came home. I’m now laying in bed once again, tired as hell and about to go to sleep. I can’t believe Monday’s almost here already, this weekend went way too damn quick.

Oh, and if weez shows up at work Monday with a pair of black eyes, $10 says it’s because of Chris B. :-)