I’m pretty sure my Airport Express is hosed. It doesn’t seem to want to fully join my home network. iTunes can’t connect to it. Power-cycling accomplishes nothing.

It’ll show up in a Bonjour-browsing utility, but that’s about it. I attempted to reconfigure it using the Airport Admin Utility, but it consistently timed out after password authentication. After putting the thing through a hard reset, the Admin Utility saw it easily enough, and I was able to configure it as a wireless DHCP client, feed it the WPA password, and watch it pick up a DHCP address.

As soon as the Airport Express restarted after the update, the damned thing immediately gave itself an autoconfigured IP address, and attempts to configure it with the Admin Utility timed out after authentication again, and iTunes can’t find it. Time and again, the stupid thing sent me back to square one. Googling the problem was more disheartening than helpful; apparently a lot of people have found that their Airport Expresses simply die on them after a year and a half of service. Bummer deal.

I remember playing tag as a kid with all the other neighborhood urchins. There was usually some object such as a tree, rock, manhole cover, whatever, designated the "base"; whoever was "it" couldn’t tag you if you were touching the base.

There was a kid down the street named Neal who’d sometimes host these games of tag in his yard. Though we always agreed to tag when he suggested it, games at Neal’s house invariably provoked arguments, because Neal liked to cheat. Invoking the "because it’s my house" rule, Neal would shift the base around on the fly as it suited him. If he was "it", he’d invalidate your claim of sanctuary at the fencepost, insisting that the base had been the mailbox all along. Conversely, those who were "it" and caught him could expect an earful about how the patch of earth he was on at the moment was the base, not the garage door. Sooner or later we would all revolt and either leave for more equitable fun, or declare there would be no base at all.

I bring this up because I read a recent article in the L.A. Times discussing how Orthodox Jews in the L.A. area want to set up this thing called an eruv chatzeirot. In a nutshell, an eruv chatzeirot is a roped-off area that allows activities normally prohibited on the Sabbath to take place. On the Sabbath, observant Jews are prohibited from moving objects around outside their houses. This means anything. Loaf of bread? Prohibited. Car keys? Denied. Slab of bacon? Doubleplusungood.

The eruv alleviates such cumbersome restrictions by basically declaring entire neighborhoods—heck, even entire islands—one "house". Now, I know I’m oversimplifying things here, but I immediately thought of Neal and his fudging of the rules:

God: Thou shalt not carry things outside your home on the Sabbath.
Rabbi: What, nothing? Seriously?
God: Yes, seriously. This is God speaking, remember?
Rabbi: *grumbles*
God: What was that? I didn’t hear you.
Rabbi: Oh, nothing.. *shuffles around*
God: Whoa, what are you doing? You can’t move that thing around. You’re outside.
Rabbi: Chill out, man, it’s still in my backyard. That counts as my house, right?
God: Well… sure, OK. Fine. Go nuts.
Rabbi: Thanks. *keeps fidgeting*
God: Hey- what’s that? What do you think you’re doing with that box?
Rabbi: This box? Just moving it around the house. We’re cool, right?
God: No. Uncool. You’re totally carrying it across the street.
Rabbi: Yeah, well, the neighborhood is, like, my house now. Yeah, that’s it.
God: Riiiiiight.

I realize that the concept of the eruv was decided upon by a bunch of very serious bearded men somewhere who carefully pondered this as a weighty theological matter, but the original eruvs apparently adhered much closer to Sabbath proscriptions; contemporary interpretations sound extremely silly. I mean, really. If you have to make up bullshit workarounds like this, maybe you should just change the damned rules. If it doesn’t even pass muster with a bunch of seven-year-olds playing tag, what makes you think God is going to fall for it?

Being a big fan of Nerf guns, I was pretty excited by the recently-released CS-9.

That is, until I saw the custom-built FAR.

At this point, it’s only a matter of time before belt-fed Nerf becomes a reality.

I was hungry after getting out of a four-hour Active Directory training session, so I decided to visit local quasi-landmark Redrum Burger for lunch.

I found it less than impressive. The burger was a good, solid representative sample of its ilk, but nothing special. Instead of fries, I ordered onion rings. I love a good onion ring or three, and consider it a veritable bellwether of a burger joint’s culinary repertoire. I must, however, sadly report that Redrum’s onion rings are the worst I’ve ever had.

While I vastly prefer crumb rings to battered rings, and thinly-sliced onions to thick, I will happily devour pretty much any ring placed in front of my face. Redrum’s rings, though, were essentially inedible, being not only thick and battered, but thickly-battered. How much batter was on these rings, you ask? Imagine, if you will, an onion doughnut: a chunky torus of fried cake with a belt of onion at its center. Sound appetizing? It wasn’t. This is no exaggeration; the cross-section of many of these ruthless artery-blockers measured a full inch in diameter.

I managed to choke down a couple of the things in a vain attempt to habituate my senses to the breading overload, but I simply couldn’t even contemplate nibbling at a third. They were terrible, not only because of the glut of batter, but in the same way cheap, rubbery escargot is terrible: the more time you spend masticating the stuff, the more time you have to actually think about what you’re eating. In the case of escargot, the realization goes something like "I’m chewing on a fucking snail". In this case, it was the cognizance that I might as well be sucking on a dish sponge full of lard. I think I’m going to ask Santa for a box of stents this year.

…for bloggin’, anyhow. Busy week at work. All I have for you is haiku about my fourth week in this strange new environment. Because writing haiku is far easier than being clever (not that I would know anything about cleverness).

It’s been an interesting four weeks.

irate faculty
IET clearly to blame
plug it in first, prof

freshmen with laptops
"all I did was click the link"
malware paradise

yeah, we shut you down
port sixty-three-forty-six
no warez for you, kid

Jesus will save you
(except for all the homos).
Zealots on the quad!

When one uses toilets that serve a large number of people, it is not unusual to find evidence that others have been there before you (heck, that was the first inspiration for this blog, which probably explains a lot about this site).

Tangible proof of disgusting biological processes is, while distasteful, is expected to some degree. Skid marks, errant sprinkles, and the occasional floater are sights that we are all conditioned, to some degree or other, to handle as a matter of routine.

It was, until today, outside my experience to find hair all over a public toilet seat.

I’m not talking about the odd curly hair perched precariously on the porcelain. That’s nasty enough, but no, this was the aftermath of a veritable explosion of short hairs. Somebody had shed all over the toilet. It was as if the stall’s previous occupant had chosen this restroom as the perfect place to shave his ass. I’ve never seen anything like it outside a barbershop. Truly, wondrously, staggeringly vile.

While I’d had previous warning about some campus bathrooms, the one near my department is little used, quiet, clean, and heretofore undefiled by strange acts and rituals. No longer, I fear.