Okay, several things covered today:

SOCOM: US Navy Seals

Well, anyone following this diary will undoubtedly know I have been excited for SOCOM: US Navy Seals for the PS2. Now that I have finally gotten it, I must say I am very pleased with it (network troubles aside). To read my thoughts on it, check out my Wiki entry on it. Also, for those who have the game, play with me online! I go by Sinister_Sam there, and am always willing to play (unless the map is Rat's Nest... I hate that one....)

Tux4Kids Funding Ops

Okay, I did a presentation for some potential grant-writers on Friday. (Note, this presentation was designed specifically for Mozilla 1.x, running fullscreen at 800x600 with all toolbars minimized. Viewing it other ways may not produce the same results!) The presentation went very well, and I thing that we may be able to get some funding over at Tux4Kids.

Hmmm... may write more later.

2002 Sep 16 (Mon), 20:26 Mango

Ugh... too busy to stand it. I have totally neglected Tux4Kids these last few weeks, and I am ashamed of that. However, I do have a few really good excuses.

1) We have been having tons of security problems at my job. See, for all the Win2k machines I'm in charge of, we have about as good security as one could expect from a Windows box. However, since we have a lot of faculty and staff that bring in computers or laptops that they set up on their own (or purchased with some factory stamped install) we wind up having many insecure Win2k machines on our network. Now, none of these machines have anything of interest on them, but they do serve as nice jumping points to bigger and better things. Well, two weeks ago we had someone figure this out, and proceed to make my last two weeks a living nightmare. I've had to run all over the dept. putting out small fires, rebuilding systems here, securing systems there, only to have to continue on with another as soon as I'm done. Add to this the fact that I've had several faculty and staff members wanting my services and being overly demanding (one is this retired particle physicist who openned an e-mail attachment called "Midget Porn" which turned out to be a nasty virus and hosed his system. This guy is retired, and this was his personal system, yet he wanted me to drop everything and restore his system back to normal. I'm sorry, I have some really serious problems, Dork, I have an orchestrated attack on the entire dept. to deal with!) Anyway.... it's sucked.

2) School sucks. I'm finishing up my degree (must be finished... can't take another semester) and I have no interest in Physics anymore. And I am taking a very hard class (high level E&M).

3) My router died. I may have mentionned that before... but it makes me feel very vulnerable on the internet.

4) My webhoster's mail delivery system is screwed up so I can't send e-mail to Tux4Kids' dev server (and any mailing lists or users that are there).

Needless to say, I haven't had much free time. I hope to have some this weekend.

I have started my own gaming clan, which has given me some relief (last week, anyway). Plus, I wrote my own SOCOM Strategy Guide for SOCOM US Navy Seals (though, that was two weeks ago, haven't had time to play it since :-/ ).

2002 Sep 24 (Tue), 12:11 Elegance and Refinement

Okay, still busy. But I have managed to unwind lately with my little gaming clan. Last week we had some intensive Unreal Tournament gaming (see the screenshots here.) This week I hope we can play SOCOM US Navy Seals, but we'll wait and see if we can get enough players interested.

Some pretty neat things are going on between my Tux4Kids and OSEF... but I can't really go into it just now... But I can say that they will probably be pretty cool.

I used my SAMport to do some pretty nifty little mailing list snaps that Bill is using over at TuxPaint's list page. Other than that, I've done pretty much nada. I'd like to do more... but I need to make my life calm down first.

Hey, have you seen Google News yet? It kicks ass.

2002 Sep 28 (Sat), 20:04 Idiots

Okay, this AGAIN isn't much of an update... but I was dinking around on someone's Windoze box and got this obnoxious pop-up ad. I don't know which is more depressing, that someone would actually do an ad like this to fool people, or that there are Windoze lusers out ther who would actually be taken advantage by it.

I didn't actually click on the ad... it pissed me off too much and I closed it before my curiousity got the better of me.... so I have no idea who it was or what they were selling. If anyone out there knows... please e-mail me (criswell(at)geekcomix.com).

Other than this, I am sick... literally. I think I have the west nile virus (perhaps not.. but I do have several mosquito bites ;-) I really dont want to come down with something... but it looks like I will be anyway.

Oh, and my spam-filtering over at Tux4Kids Dev Server ain't working like it should. It's a long story, and I'm too ill right now to retell it, so if interested, check the t4k-admin list links here, here, here and the TFUG querry here. I've ultimately figured out what needs to be done to fix things... but I'm too sick right now to do it.