jbailey | I bet that I'm the only one speeding on the 401 grooving to Loreena McKennitt

Wow. I can't beleive that I still remember stuff from my datacoms course that I challenged in 1993. The short version of the story is that right after graduating high school, my new boss decided that we should be able to all do our Novell CNEs. At the time, one of the requirements was a course called "networking technologies". Studying it was pure hell - a 5 credit course, it involved memorising ethernet framing headers, tcp/ip headers, ipx headers, and how all the various leased lines worked on the wire. Totally overkill for what most CNEs would ever need to see, but it was perfect as the launching point for me and doing wide area networking design and troubleshooting. I spent this evening as part of a team of 4 people troubleshooting why a circuit wasn't working, and was constantly surprised at the relevant and accurate facts that kept popping into my head.

A bit of a downside is that the circuit is in another city, but it means that I got to rent a car and go for a drive. When I return to Vancouver, the roads here will possibly be the only thing that I miss. There is *nothing* approaching a 12-14 lane freeway back home.

In Debian land, ajmitch needs me to sponsor some of his packages so that I can stop doing gnue packaging. I think the problem is that if I had enough time to spend sponsoring them, I'd just maintain them. I'm a bit behind on other Debian commitments because I've been working quite a bit. At this rate, I'll be able to do all of Debconf on lieu time acquired since mid-April. I'm quite concerned about the CD booting problem on Sparc64. I don't have the skills to hack it, and there doesn't seem to be anyone available who does.