We are home from a weekend in Tennessee, which was absolutely splendid. Tonight, however, I’ll leave to drive to Macomb, my ancestral home, to spend the next couple of days roofing my fathers garage. Then I depart for Abbott Labs on Sunday night that I may report bright and early Monday morning for orientation. I’m actually very excited about that, though I’ll miss seeing Brandi through the week.

I rushed excitedly to the phone this morning, saw that it was Abbott on the phone, and then had my hopes smashed (sort of). I am one of two candidates they’re considering and it may be another week before they make a final decision. Oh well. Brandi and I spent the weekend in South Bend with my brother and his family and mother and step father. My nephew was celebrating his second birthday. He’s such a happy little kid. If we had some sort of guarantee that we wouldn’t end up with a monster we might have some of our own one day.

I went home for the weekend and had a great visit with family. It’s such a hike to Macomb and back. I spent all this week doing an inordinate amount of homework only to discover that not one bit of it was due this week. It’s kind of funny-usually I’d make the opposite mistake and not realize the homework was due until very late. Woo-hoo. If you live in CU you might find this interesting. The IMC. in cooperation with others want to build a citywide free, highspeed wireless network. See their website. A couple of people have expressed their misunderstanding of the current state of the Linux desktop so I’ve taken some screenshots that I’ll post on Tuesday that they may see it’s modernity.

3 things today. First, sorry Dad, you didn’t say that, but I thought it would sound funnier if I said you did. Second, snow days rock. Brandi and I went sledding Monday and Tuesday, which was great fun. Who knew that one of the funnest sledding hills in the Midwest was hidden in the ‘ham. Third, it’s snowing in Champaign and I wanted to share it with everyone, especially Brandi. So, here are some pictures- 1, 2, 3, 4.

Elvis was awesome and the kids were great. If you’re running a linux that uses syslogd you can download my first python program which parses your security log looking for login failures parse_log.py. I wrote it for LIS317 and hopefully I’ll be able to work with it the rest of the semester and create something like Epylog from Duke University. Only maybe I’ll write it to feed into a database or port it to html and post to the apache server.

I’m going to the Bainter birthday party tonight. I’m told they’ll have an Elvis impersonator and I’ve never actually seen one in the flesh, so that’ll be cool. More machines have been hacked at GSLIS, but so far none at Prairienet which means we’re either lucky or I’m doing something right. Want to read about UIUC routers and traffic monitoring policies? Here is a presentation for you.

I just returned from a wonderful visit home. All is well in the universe at least as far as friends and family are concerned. Time to get back to work. I’m writing this in the reference library. Woo-hoo.

My grandmother’s 80th birthday!