the fortress of doors

Friday 09 September 2005 at 12:56 am Our lives are measured by transitions. Graduating from high school, college, graduate school, etc. Getting married, ending old jobs, starting new jobs, moving. Sometimes, a transition isn't so physically profound as it marks a change in direction or philosophy. At the end of October 2001, I walked into the physics department office at Indiana University, turned in about 6 keys. Each of the keys I turned in had a code stamped on it that indicated what door it opened ("P37" or "P14" or something) along with a serial number that indicated which of that key it was. Each of those keys had belonged to many people before me; they were well worn. In return for those keys, I received a single key with "P" stamped on it, no serial number. It was brand new, the edges crisp; I was the first person to ever own that key. I received that key because as a postdoc, I was able to have a master key to the building, which would open almost anything. Over the last couple of days, we moved to a new building at work, from an older kind of ratty building to a brand new one. This new building has been years in coming, but perhaps it too will signal a new paradigm of thinking and problem solving. (I got a new key too; I dig new keys). (As a side note, I get my computer set up with a three-screen Xinerama setup. Yay!) Perhaps as part of that response, I cleaned out my Debian stuff (while watching the season opener between the Pats and the Raiders. Patriots won again; ho hum). It's been so long since I've actually done anything about becoming a Debian developer that the best thing was to flush all the files that I'd been trying to work on and start over. Perhaps this time I'll be able to get some momentum going.

one of these days, one of these days...

Monday 05 September 2005 at 09:36 am My sympathies and prayers go out to everyone that has been effected by hurricane Katrina, which to some extent has been everyone in the country, but particularly the folks who left New Orleans knowing that they wouldn't have anything to go back to but left anyway. I was trying to blog earlier this morning, but blogger wouldn't come up right. The last time I was working on it, I was trying to installed Movable Type, but I couldn't seem to get it to work. I was going to try to work on it this weekend, but I just didn't get to it. I read a book over the last week which was a sylabus on glider training. I shouldn't be, but I guess I'm surprised at the sheer number of lessons, each one with a different thing to have learned. There are apparently going to be some upcoming tournaments at PokerStars to raise donations for the Red Cross. Everyone attend!