Below is a letter I wrote last Friday while stuck in a bus station in Portland, Maine. It’s kind of a stream of consciousness thing, and quite possibly not that interesting, but hey I wrote it for this journal so here it is.
I’m writing this stuck in the Portland Maine Amtrak/Concord Trailways station. Due to lack attention of detail on my part I didn’t realize Amtrak didnt have a train to Exeter, NH on Fridays. So instead of being able to be picked up 4 minutes from Emily’s mother’s house, my mother has drive up to Portland. Duh. I think their website could be clearer on this, but then again, maybe I should read things closer. No matter, we might have done it this way anyways, since it’s better than driving all the way down and then having to drive back in two cars on Monday. Now, I do wonder why the last southbound train on weekdays is at 4 PM. So much for being useful for business people.
My mother should be here in a half hour or so, hopefully AFTER the pizza I ordered arrives, otherwise I’ll feel pretty guilty ditching out on that.
I’ve got my laptop plugged into an empty outlet behind the Amtrak automated ticket gadget… which I notice has power and a cat 5 cable going into the wall.. is this thing on the internet? wonder if it does DHCP? If people didn’t keep coming over to it to buy tickets I might have tried it. Already had one person ask me if it was working since here I am with my laptop with a wire drifting to the back of the gadget, looks like I’m a tech doing maintenance on it. Wish I was sneaky enough to say something like ‘Sure you can use it but you might get the wrong ticket.’ OK not super funny, if I had more time, and was bold enough to actually say something, I’d come up with something funny and disturbing to say.
I’ve realized my laptop has very few things I can use on it if I’m not on the internet. A few silly shareware games, but ones I can only tolerate a game or two of until I get bored. Other games on here require you have the CD present, so thus I never play them, hell I don’t even remember where the CDs are at this point. So basically, I’m very depenendant on the internet for a majority of my hobbies. Here without a net connection all i can do is pre-write a blog entry.
I also realized today that i’m very dependent on my server on the net, Svaha.Com for my internet hobbies/life. I realized that around 11:15 this morning when it went down. It took a major hit today when our /usr directory got corrupted. (for those of you non-geeks, lets just say a major part of our ‘engine’ is corrupted). Luckily there are a fleet of us sysadmins sprinkled from Maine to Florida who were able to get it up to some degree (mail works), and tonight some folks local to the machine will be doing surgery on it in an effort to get things running. I would like to help, but alas I’m in transit today, no net until I reach my destination. Without this server, I’d be totally net crippled, all my websites, all my e-mail. Wow, funny how this ‘Gee it’d be neat to get our own server on the net’ machine from 1994 has become such a part of my life. I’m sure there are lots of other people wondering where their websites are right now. Sorry folks 🙁 We do our best to keep it stable but well.. sh*t happens. Luckily, (knock on wood) it’s a rare occasion that we need to do this level of maintenance on the machine, usually it runs without much intervention on our part.
Since I have time here, until my garlic & black olive pizza arrives (i never ate lunch so I’m starving (it’s 7 PM as I write this), I figure i’ll just continue typing my stream of consciousness and go whereever this note takes me (as opposed to trying to edit it so it follows any logical essay structure. I do find myself editing this in my head for content that might be at least mildly amusing (though I suspect those of you reading this might find that hard to believe).
Pizza arrived. What’s that saying, the best spice is hunger? This pizza does taste really good. I’m a pizza snob. I grew up in suburban NY and had years of pizza experience to hone my tastes. I tend to go in ‘NY PIZZA’ places and rarely find them to be a close match. When I was cooping in Sunnyvale, CA I remember this conversation in the local ‘New York Pizza’ joint
“I’d like a large pie”
“Pie? Dude we only sell pizza here’
Needless to say the pizza quality was about as advanced as the person behind the counter.
I finally realized that most places that say ‘New York Pizza’ meaning “a thin crust non-Chicago deep-dish” pizza.
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My Pizza arrived and a few minutes later my mother arrived to pick me up so thus this letter ends.