restless, arab strap
Originally written 04.27.2002.
today i just felt really restless. i wanted this to be a wild and crazy weekend in celebration of finishing exams, but i didn’t do anything too special today. i went to the library and jacked into the net and played around with my user-mode-linux network a little more. added another host to be the syslog server for the honeynet, so now i have 3 virtual hosts up and running: harry, hermione, and ron :-). i’m pretty impressed, actually, because the system is only a pII with 64mb of ram. i also responded to some old e-mail that had been festering in my inbox for a while and sent off a rant about phillip morris changing its name to altria.
while at the library, i helped some korean grad. student set up her networking. it was a bit weird trying to figure out the settings when the fonts were all in korean. still, i was able to get her sorted, and as a symbol of gratitude, she gave me some korean world cup stickers. really odd, but if anyone wants a postcard adorned with cartoon soccer balls, email me and i’ll mail you one.
so i had exams this past week – computer security on wednesday and distributed systems on thursday. they were a little harder than i expected, and i realized that my comprehensive study method was a bit of a waste of time, at least in terms of exam marks. i would have been better just focusing on certain topics that i suspected would be on the exam. the other thing that was hard about the exams was that they were in a really institutionalized setting. all the students crowded into this room full of desks where we filled out our standardized testing booklet that would hold our answers and put our ids on the table to make sure we were actually who we said we were. the hardest part was that the lecturer wasn’t present for the exams, and i would have appreciated the opportunity to have some of the ambiguities in the exam paper cleared up. i killed the ban logic question on the computer security exam, but ran out of time on the question about rsa. i fared better on the distributed system exam, but was kicking myself for forgetting the meaning of the acid acronym with respect to transactions. not a lot of points, but ones needlessly lost.
we were going to play football with the flat below us, but that never panned out. bummer. i did get to watch some football, however, so at least that was cool. one of the things that i’ll miss most about scotland is the football. living with marco and rob, i’ve really rediscovered a love of spectator sport. when i was a kid, i was really into watching sports. i remember always being into the indians, browns, and cavs. but then i moved to pa and found that all the kids who were into sports were jerks and just lost interest. well, here i have people to watch football with and its fun again. there just seems to be so much more passion for sport over here. you hear about families that have supported a particular club for generations and see grown men crying when the team they support loses. one of the coolest things about english and scottish football is the relegation system. you have the premiership which is the top league, and then the first division, the second division, and so on. the best two teams from a given division move up to the next higher division while the worst two teams in a division get relegated to the lower division. this is cool because it creates drama at both ends of the league tables.
this weekend is a big music festival type thing that spans between edinburgh, aberdeen, and glasgow. last night evan dando played a show which i was tempted to attend but decided against it because of hefty ticket prices. tonight, however, i went to see mogwai’s staurt braithwaite and arab strap, both proper scottish musical acts. stuart played some solo guitar stuff that was pretty cool. i’m not sure how much of it was mogwai stuff, but most of it sounded like the song take me somewhere nice which he did play. it was cool, but he seemed a little nervous and even messed up a few times. that was alright by me. it gave the performance a certain intimacy – sort of like you were just watching someone write songs in their bedroom. at the end of the set, stuart played an admitedly “badly advised cover version” of kylie minogues can’t get you out of my head.
arab strap was pretty good. i hadn’t heard much of them before, but i was entertained by their quiet post-folk with strings. their set had the same looseness as stuart’s with some tuning problems and problems with the sequencer. the vocalist drank quite a bit of beer and seemed pretty agitated. still, it was alright. he has a really interesting vocal style, the kind that comes off as genuinely anguished, which complemented the plaintive tone of the violin and cello accompanist quite well. all in all, not a bad way to spend a saturday evening. hopefully i’ll be able to see cuck d tomorrow.