"Black Excited to Return to Projects"
The above is still the best/worst headline the Maroon has ever published, about a Professor (Robert Black, I believe) leaving some post and pursuing independent projects. I am not sure whether they considered the alternative reading of that headline.

Anyway, as winter sets in, with its ice storms and such, I've been trying to start my own projects, such as webmastery, telature, and birdkeeping.

-The bird is a dove by the name of Erik Emanuel the Orange (aka Erik, aka Birdman, aka "a little communist"). He is mine for break by way of my roommate Rob's girlfriend Lindsey. He is surprisingly entertaining, and today has displayed an enthusiasm for full-throated cooing. He almost sounds like an owl.

-Also in my living room is Falcon, the name given to the computer I got for free from the library in June. It is basically my Dell desktop minus a graphics card and a hard drive. Fortunately,we had a spare hard drive lying around in Lurch, the Shady Dealer's old webserver. However, Falcon seems to disagree with Lurch's hard drive, and may be expected, whenever something must be loaded from disk, to flail wildly for a second, bewildered by the existence of its own hard drive, before loading the data.

-Falcon is running Kubuntu Linux 7.04 (aka "Feisty Fawn". The latest version is "Gutsy Gibbon", with "Hardy Heron" on the way... Programmers, they're quirky. ). Goddamn this OS is secure in ways I'm not used to dealing with, such as requiring a password for commands that might bone your system. Which is reasonable and all, but mildly inconvenient. Despite this, it is now equipped with Apache (webserver), MySQL (database), and PHP (server-side scripting language). After some more effort, all these things became aware of each other and play nicely. So now Falcon is hosting my in-progress update of the Max Palevsky Scav page... but only for my local network, since letting in the internet at large is going to take more finagling.

-I am maybe also designing the Shady Dealer's new site if I have enough time.

-I've been recording random things on guitar and trying to figure out what to do with them. Chord progressions in need of lyrics, mostly. I also have a version of "Man of Constant Sorrow" that mostly works, even though I'll need to rerecord the vocals. And I did it with a chord arrangement that I haven't seen before.

-People have been telling me I need to be more aggressive and confident so here: "Dammit you motherfuckers, I'm pretty goddamn awesome!"

-End of Quarter Score for my workplace: MacLab 30, Professionalism 4. As recorded by "MacLab vs. Professionalism: The remote server program". Yes, I wrote a program to keep track of an arbitrary measure of the ridiculousness of my workplace.