Yesterday, despite the fervent belief of many of my friends that I am still 18, I turned 33.

Sarah has assured me that I’m not old, because I’m not 100 yet.

This weekend has been positively wonderful. On Saturday afternoon, we went to Boyd’s Orchard. Plans to go to Bi-Water Farm were changed at the last minute due to rain. Boyd’s is much less Six-Flags-ish. Just a playground, shop, hay ride, and corn maze. And it rained there, too, but the hay ride was covered, so we didn’t get soaked. They had two *huge* slides of the sit-on-a-sack-and-rupture-your-sacroiliac variety. Ow. Very wet, and very sore, posterior after that one. There was a mattress at the bottom, but apparently it was purely cosmetic.

Today we had lunch with my brother and his wife. Somewhere between church and lunch I baked 4 pumpkin pies, and they turned out pretty good. After lunch we went to the annual pumpkin carving party. I really wan’t particularly prepared for it, and didn’t have a pattern picked out. I carved a meta-jack-o-lantern. That is, I carved a jack-o-lantern as part of my pattern. But someone broke it before I could get a picture, making it a virtual-meta-jack-o-lantern.

Sarah carved two pumpkins – one was a goofy face and the other was her name I got a picture of the latter, as well as a number of pictures of various folks carving. This year we had less time than usual, since it was on a Sunday rather than a Saturday, and tomorrow there’s school. But it was still really fun. I still have another pumpkin, on which I intend to do something more elaborate.

Anyways, I’m tired, and Sarah is asleep, and I think I’ll probably go to bed now, since tomorrow is likely not to be any fun at all, and I might as well end the weekend on a good note.

It’s increasingly evident to me that the IRS strictly enforces its “Persons With Brains Need Not Apply” policy. When will we elect a leader with the vision and guts to abolish the IRS and impose a sensible form of taxation?

I received a note in the mail today from the IRS. They mistakenly refunded me some money on my taxes. A small matter of $1500. They have corrected this error. Not only do I owe the $1500, but, on top of that, I owe another $150 in fines and interest. Fines and interest on an amount that was their mistake. How does this make sense to anyone?

I just wrote a LONG posting, and Firefox crashed.

I’m not amused.

This morning I had one little victory. I’ve been parking in the garage behind the courthouse. The attendant at the gate obviously disapproved, since I am not a government employee, and I’m not a juror. But I assured her that I’m teaching a class, and this is where I’m supposed to park.

Each morning she has scowled disapprovingly, and I have smiled and wished her a nice day.

This morning, she smiled, knew immediately who I was, and said “Good morning”. And, I have one more day left! It can only get better. 🙂

Last night I went to City Place, which is a very nice shopping center. I had dinner at Brewzzi, and signed some books at the Barnes & Noble. I visited the Palm Beach Winery, where they had a dozen or so different fruit wines, as well as a Muscadet (sweet grape wine). I didn’t care for any of their wines, but I bought a few fridge magnets which I then left on my table at dinner. Hopefully they will still be somewhere there when I stop by after class today.

Class is going well today. I always enjoy the Security day of the class. Having 12 people in the class gives a rather different pace to the class. Exercises take considerably longer to get everyone done on. And the questions are a much wider variety than you have in a smaller group.

Of course, people will probably still think that I go too fast. It is a *huge* amount of data to cram into 5 days. I remember when they first asked me to do 3 hours on Apache at OSCon in Monterrey, and I could not figure how I was going to fill that much time. Ha!

Apparently, somewhere along the line, there was some miscommunication. Anways, I arrived at the airport at about 2:40 and my flight left at 2:50, rather than 4:30, which I had written down. So I’m on a filght at 7:10. And now I can’t find the email that lists my itinerary. Interestingly, this is the only time I can ever remember being on a flight which stops, but where I don’t change planes.

So I’m back on the wireless network (outbound 80, 443, 21 permitted. Not much else. Fortunately I’m running sshd on port 21. Ok, I’ll say this one more time, folks. If you’re going to use a public wireless network, don’t share out your entire hard drive “Everyone, Full Control”. Don’t set your Administrator password to “”. Don’t label your directory of important documents as “Important Documents”. That is all.

So, looks like I’ll be in West Palm this evening, despite my attempts to miss the flight. 🙂 So I should probably begin to figure out what I’ll be talking about tomorrow.

This morning I discovered that a drive controller had failed in a rather important server. The server just happened to have 5 nics in it, and be serving as a rather crucial router on our network, so that failure made a lot of people upset.

So, that consumed my entire morning, and then some.

And a few moments ago, as I was drifting off to sleep, an insistent beeping made me aware that my UPS had failed. This swiftly took down my three servers here in my little server room. So, rather than getting to be early, I spent the last hour dragging in another UPS that I happened to have on hand, and wrestling around the servers in order to get them plugged into this UPS. Now, however, I’m completely unsure what got plugged into the UPS, and what got plugged into the unprotected power strip. So I’ll likely have to do this all over again tomorrow. *sigh*

And, wow, it is really quiet in here with the servers off.