The Treehouse Blog

Well, that makes the third rattlesnake I’ve seen this year, and this time, there are pictures. Chris and I walked up to the Gunter Valley Dam tonight, and this was on the bridge over the spillway. The road now bears the signs and rules of the State Forest Service, which probably means that they now own it.

Maybe Doug‘s right about pipelines… Walking down the some one we did that night, only this time in the opposite direction and in daylight, I encountered two rattlesnakes (yes, one rattled), and had a little slip-and-fall resulting in a stiff hand and a sprained (that is, hopefully not broken 😉 toe. Other than that, it was a pretty enjoyable hike. The mountain vistas were quite clear, giving an opportunity for the new camera to hopefully show its worth.

Other than that, not too much happening. Still sorting things from the LAN party. Also reading… Chris lent me his Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide, and I’ve been reading it, uncovering many references I’ve heard elsewhere. Realizing that no work on NetMRG has really happened this summer, I’ve also started hacking at that…

School is looming ahead, only next week at this point. Pam (the math department secretary at Ship) added me to the class I was hoping to get into, which should bring me to a 14-credit semester. Things are still looking on-track for a Spring ’05 graduation. I still need to do the math on my schedule, see if Ian and I have any lunch overlaps, and plan the rest of my time.

John Harvey Alleman, my great uncle, passed away on Saturday August 7th 2004. I can’t say I know most of my great aunts and uncles very well, but John was an exception. He visited us often, usually weekly, sometimes more often. I’d be surprised if none of you had noticed his green Festiva parked at my house at least once. He will be missed.

Despite my mother unplugging the phone line before the storm got very close, my newer ISDN TA got fried hard. The old one is back in place at the moment, all quirks included. I was driving home when it was storming, and a lightning strike was visible directly ahead of me (probably in the field, maybe half a mile away). A second or so later I briefly smelled unhappy electronics smell in my car… nothing seemed unhappy though, hopefully it was the cables along the road. We didn’t have any power problems (except blips) at home, but AT&T had at least one nearby site down most of the evening. Doug called after the storm had passed to say that they had lost phone and power, a good while after the storm had passed them. The tornado potential kept the local news on the air until 8PM.

Despite what Doug says, I really enjoyed most of that hike! Well, except the part about wondering if the road was actually a river. It’d be good if DCNR put out some maps where mountain-sized hills aren’t displayed as two elevation lines. Besides, Ian, Isaac and Chris all have similar stories and I don’t hear them complaining (well, very often, anyway) :).

Now that’s what you call a non-trivial pile of Cisco! The 3550s (qty: 45) are all for ResNET. The 2950s (qty: 70) are all for campus. The whole order is meant to facilitate deployment of “Campus Manager” (someone’s proprietary software on their black-box linux machine) throughout campus. Somehow this is all supposed to get done before the start of the semester, despite the fact that Campus Manager hasn’t arrived yet.

Ship isn’t the only thing doing replacements. I purchased a 3361 off of eBay to replace my 3360 that has the squeeze-hard-to-make-display-visible and the characters-are-inverted-or-something issues. Moving my account to the new phone was relatively painless… call in, they tell you to turn old phone off, power on new phone (that’s already AT&T-ified) and dial a special (probably one-time) number. Just about instant.

Lastly, Doug forwarded me an e-mail from Dennis saying that the Kodak DX-7630 6.1 MPixel camera was on insane sale at Office Max. Although $250 for a $400 camera is a great deal, the Office Max experience was a bit of a pain. First, it was in-store only. Carlisle didn’t have any in stock. Their default warehouse (queried thru a Unisys amber-CRT terminal) had none either. Their raincheck system (a web browser based thing in the back of the store) wouldn’t work either. But, the manager used the Unisys again and is getting one shipped to me from Denver. I just hope it can do landscape shots as well as Doug’s can.

LAN party tomorrow… getting ready.