Did you know Dr. Seuss’s name was Theodor Seuss Geisel? I do, now, because I have Dr. Seuss stamps. And that makes me cooler than you. I can also tell you that 860-880 Lake Shore Drive is architecturally significant, according to the USPS.

This has been one of those weeks where every minute seemed long, and in hindsight was over in a blink. I’ll give you the highlight reel.

Summer band started — only a few familar faces in the group, and we’re all looking older. I’m still sitting first part (third seat, inbetween three students) and I’m still wondering why I’m third. Loyalty? Recognition? Clearly Pete hasn’t heard me play, but somehow otherwise appreciates me coming back year after year (p.s. this is summer number seven.) The music is almost becoming rote. My hand magically moves the slide to the right place in Armed Forces Medely, Stars and Stripes, and the Glen Miller piece. Our first concert is Wednesday, and because there’s no CU community band anymore, we’re doing a full set on three rehearsals. Oh, and Monday’s rehearsal doesn’t count because there was no A/C in the band room and damn it’s hard to practice when it’s 90. The next rehearsal it was 70 outside and like 60 in the band room. Anyway, this coming Wednesday, 7pm on the Quad.

I might have hinted about this before in the blog, but I submitted an application to Google’s Summer of Code contest. My project is documenting and packaging a distributed file system called MogileFS by the gang at LiveJournal. I worked on that most of Monday and Tuesday night. Chuck and Eric helped me proof it and trim it down. I’m one of 8000+ applicants vying for 400 paid slots (it was 200, but Google raised the numbers because of the publicity.) I’ll find out in two weeks if I was accepted, and if so, I have two months to complete my project and claim at $4500 bounty. Not bad for free software development. I’m excited to start working on it, and hope I get picked for the money.

As far as my other eternal struggle goes, I’ve watched two Netflix movies and finished season one of Dead Like Me in the last two days. Triplets of Belleville was nothing like I expected, and not in a good way. Cellular WAS like I expected but I was hoping for either all suspense or all hokey comedy – this one rode the line between them too close and cheated both sides. Next up is About Schmidt, which I would have started tonight but the Internet pulled me away. If I watch that one tomorrow, I’ll have seven’d out my run and need a new shooter to bring me three more goodies. Dead Like Me was good. Season two will be out soon, and I’m looking forward to it. The main character is a 19 year old crappily drifting through life when hers ends (by an incoming toilet seat from Mir) and she becomes a Grim Reaper. I think I’m getting older when I associate more with the adult figures in her life (her Post-It-Note giving boss, her real job boss, and her previous life’s mom) than her teenage angst.

Earlier tonight my computer rebooted on me. No notice or warning, just a warm boot. Then it wanted to install some updates, and now the dumb yellow shield in the system tray keeps popping up and reminding me to reboot. Yes, yes, yes. I’ll do that later. I also need to buy some DVD-Rs and backup my machine. One of my student’s campus house was broken into this week and they stole his laptop and Xbox. His main gripe about it, besides not having renters insurance and returning home just 20 minutes after the vandals left, is that three years of his life was documented on stuff in that laptop. Pictures, music, emails, IMs – gone so someone could have a crappy three year old laptop. I’m real good at backups at work; I need to do better at home. (But at least I’m insured. I’m also not worried. As cluttered as this office is, no one would be able to find the computer.)

Work is going well. It’s been quiet on the user front (I swear there’s fewer profs this summer than I have seen gone in a long time,) so we’re all working on our projects. CSIL’s moved to AD and the new SAN. I’ve got an SNMP and fping script (written by a student,) that can give me a snapshot of our network (several thousand ports and several thousand IPs) in less than a minute. My projects to redo our IP space and DNS/DHCP backend are moving along nicely. The switch and AP upgrades are sliding in, sometimes with nice benefits (like the APs finally being able to broadcast more than one SSID on a radio.) And, I got my annual (s/nu//g;) review on paper (the actual face-to-face is next week.) It read as a very nice resume of what I’ve accomplished this year (things I hadn’t even remembered,) and was good across the board.

Bored, I know, me too. When I was home last weekend (which I should blog about, because it was three packed full days of stuff,) I didn’t really read blogs or talk on IM that weekend, and I haven’t picked it up much since. I’m a few thousand news posts behind — it’s only a matter of time until I say “screw it,” and mark them all as read, which is what you should do to this posting, if I’ve even kept your attention this long. Part of the problem is I added a bunch of feeds to bloglines and I haven’t been able to keep up – even if it’s stuff I think I should be reading. I _should_ be reading _The World is Flat_ so I can give that back to mom to read, or the Harry Potter books to get read for next month.

Somehow, people get in these tightly connected networks with blogs and Flickr and people know when you post and post replies, and I just don’t know how they do it. I don’t know people make their stuff findable. I don’t think my content (pictures or this blog,) is bad. I’d just like to get it in front of some eyes. (NO WINDOWS I WILL REBOOT LATER QUIT BUGGING ME) What I am finding is there are lots of babblers like me on the Internet, some who even make advice like “how to blog so people read it,” and “how to live a more productive life,” but I don’t think they know much more than I do. Yet I found their junk and read it, so maybe they do know something I don’t.

Plan for the weekend? Be a homebody and take care of things around here. Lounge around, watch movies, work on MogileFS. Get caught up. You should too. Have a fudgecicle bar and enjoy yourself.