KingLou Drops Science 2.0

Sorry for the absense of Lou oriented blather as of late. My life has been boring and busy all at the same time. Work has picked up with a vengence. The repetitive task of reading graduate students incorrect, outrageous and just plain stupid requests has final begun to wear on me after a year of it. I have been in a funk about the whole thing. Overall the onset of fall has really brought me down. I was hoping for an indian summer. Instead we get real full on fall weather right on schedule. I have continued riding my bike to work but if this keeps up I will be freezing and then riding the train before I know it. On top of general work angst I have been dealing with anti-mac foolishness. I have been asking for my office Macs, some of the only macs on the Arch school network to be given some extra freedoms. The answer has been repeatedly "no." The reason being that there are vunerablilities that could be exploited to attack the schools network. Despite my insistance that there are currently no exploits available for the mac, help from friends to back me up and articles stating my point the IT guys refuse to conceed. Then this past Monday my boss showed up at my office window looking like he had just won the lottery. "Be careful what you wish for," He said. "One of the Macs upstairs was compromised over the weekend." I asked for more information and he smugly told me that the main school network police had sent him an email about it and so on. I said I needed more info before I would belive it. He had our IT guy forward me the email. The email said "the machine in question may have been compromised because it is trying to access forbidden ports." or something to that effect. It turned out that what happened was that the owner of that computer accidentally was sharing his wireless network card. So his computer itself wasn't compromised at all. The network being shared was being picked up by a student with a corrupt PC laptop that was trying access the net for who knows what purpose. I wrote back an email to the IT guys explaining that whole deal and never heard from them again. Seriously retarded. I wish I had a picture of that guys face when he was at my window. So pleased that I was going to have to hang my head in shame that the platform of my choice was indeed vunerable and not worthy. Just the "Marginally useful, over priced machines" that he bitches about. I spend too many of my own clock cycles thinking about that already. I am watching the World Series. It is a surprisingly tight affair. All the games so far have been 1 run contests late into the games. Right now it's tied in the 12th inning. Nuts! What else... Halloween is coming. Jodi and I are ridiculously broke so Ace is going as a monkey again and we are going as some kind of infectious lab specialists. My friend Dyna made a great suggestion of having Ace be a bird flu bird. But all the kids bird costumes I looked at were totally gayballs. I recently bought the video game The Warriors. It's based on the movie by the same name from the 70's. The game is a lot of fun. Classic Rockstar ultra violence. Mug people, kick peoples asses. Smash and grabs. Do really ugly graffiti. Everything is there. They do a great job with the story, too. Finn just ordered Stubbs the Zombie which I was also interested in. Now I am starting to look forward to the xBox360. If I get one I am definitely turning my current xBox into a media center. A friend was explaining how you do the whole conversion and it sounds mind boggling. I don't see myself getting a 360 anytime soon anyway but It's fun to think about it. I will probably buy myself one by the time Halo 3 comes out. I will buy an xBox360 and a pistol because my life will effectively be over. Ace is doing well. He picking up new words all the time. Surprisingly he isn't cursing at all. He is definitely in the terrible 2's big time. Nonsensical crying and fit throwing offset with moments of sheer joyful sweetness. Unsolicited kisses and hugs. The sweetness is mindboggeling at times. Then just when you are falling in love with the little guy all over again something crazy will be happening and he'll have a fit. It's pretty classic. Oh! In exciting news I was riding my bike down the brooklyn bridge yesterday and my rear pannier (bike bag) got sucked into the rear wheel. It sounded like someone threw a giant sack of garbage at my bike or something. It didn't damage the bike but I did manage to destroy the pannier pretty well. It may be fixable but I am not counting on it. Sigh. It's so late now....

2 Sundays ago I sat in on my first SNR as a writer. The guy who estabished the show, Erik, has been asking me to sit in since the enception of the show. Until this weekend I was never able to find the time. I have to admit I was a little scared of doing it. I have never written for a show that I didn't perform in, I have never written in a group with people who I don't know, let alone write for something that I had to produce a sketch in 4 hours for. Outcome? I wrote a sketch called "Jet Blues Clues" It was a silly piece and it didn't need any revisions. I didn't realize that as a writer I didn't need to stick around for the actual staging/rehearsing part of the show. So I stuck around and watched the chaos of the whole show getting set up and run and performed. My sketch... well... it was brutalized by forgotten lines and so on. I didn't really mind. The sketch still went over pretty well anyway. I am going try to do it more often. Anytimes would be more often than before but I was thinking maybe something like once a month or every other month. We'll see. Work has been driving me crazy for a variety of reasons. The students are driving me batty. The red tape is driving me batty. The extra work load is driving me batty. Boo Hoo for me.