Getting back into life

Back again. Yesterday was definitely a catching up day. I spent the morning doing laundry, getting a few groceries, and getting locked out of my apartment (thank goodness, our leasing agent down the street still had keys for the building and could let me back in).

I went down to school afterwards and discovered that I couldn’t get online. Every year MIT cycles the MAC address records on the DHCP server to ensure that graduated or expelled students aren’t leaching high-speed access from the Institute, and I had to re-register my card. Only problem was, I couldn’t connect to re-register it: the nameserver addresses they had given us were either wrong or offline, or I just couldn’t get to them. Another item on the to do list for today.

Another ongoing project: got to get our HP 2100M printer (from Lisa’s work) accessible on our wireless network. I need to get the JetDirect card working, which should keep me occupied for a while. I also need to arrange some tunes for the “E-52s” (and updating the web page). This should help keep me busy until Lisa gets back from Italy (work–she’ll return on Friday).

Whatever happened to…


The morning’s surfing turned up a couple of names that I had been wondering about. Philip Greenspun dropped off the map last spring after his company kicked him out and his VCs started suing him. He’s apparently teaching again and getting linked to by Dave. I never got a chance to work with Philip when “e-MIT” was working with “ArsDigita”, but secondhand gossip suggests that he never strayed too far from his passion for teaching. Hope that he can turn his current misfortunes into a renaissance in his other life.

A more surprising link: Blogdex has had Wil Wheaton’s blog in the top ten for a few days now. Yes, that Wil Wheaton. It turns out he’s an articulate, web-literate 29 year old trying to find meaningful work and avoid being miserably typecast for life. That doesn’t sound familiar at all :). As I fight through trying to understand myself in my world, newly expanded by a summer at Microsoft and entering my second year at “Sloan”, I sometimes feel a little typecast myself. Good luck, Wil, and I’m sorry I laughed at your character. (Though I do have to give you a shout out for helping to popularize the alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb newsgroup naming convention, as in alt.ensign.wesley.die.die.die. A web pioneer even in 1992.)