  Slow day Hmm... I hadn't noticed how much of my life revolves around my friends until now that they're not here. Yeah, most of them went to Houston to Ren Fest. The day was pretty uneventful, leaving out work.
That is, because all hell was breaking loose when I got there. Evan got the crazy idea to try to get the Dell gigabit switch on the cluster again, even though I've told him a million times that it's a piece of crap, so the entire cluster was freaking out, and it was up to me (again) to fix everything. *sigh* Well, once I got everything back to normal, I worked a bit on the password updating scripts. The problem was that I had to run those scripts as root, and had no idea how to do it. Well, eventually I told the other members in my SAD group to go look at alternatives (namely nis and ldap), while I kept hacking away at the scripts. It wasn't until much later hat I got a half-success - I managed to figure out the whole setuid thing.
Basically setuid lets me run a program as the creator of the program, without my account needing the creator's permissions. So I tinkered around with it for a while and managed to update two out of the three files that I needed to synchronize. And I have a good idea of what's wrong with the third - it should be only a problem with the uid and gid settings in the rsyncd.conf file. And I also improved on the other scripts we had written the day before - the monitoring tools, and the updating and setup tools.
In the evening we had Philosophy of Science Fiction. Well, it turns out that I was the only one who did his reading (well, part of it - I read some 30 pages out of over 50), so I did a wee little presentation for about 1/2 hour about it. Then we talked about the next writing assignment (gee, and I haven't even turned in the first one), and then we somehow came to the topic of the Game of Life and emerging computations.
I really wish I had had my "The Science of Discworld" book on me for that (that reminds me that I have to ask Evan to return it to me). After class I went home, got online for a bit until my network connection crippled itself, at which point I gave up and just went to bed for a few hours. I skipped anime club, as I really wasn't in the mood for that. I had planned to clean up my room this afternoon, but I figured I'd better do that by daylight. It's much nicer to stay in bed, all warm and cuddly with my softy blanket. Sure, it would have been so much better if I had my cuddly blanket and was with me friends, but you don't always get what you want. My only fear so far is that this kind of feeling will become common once I'm in Canada. That would make me a sad, sad panda. 
