Older blog entries for Bryce (starting at number 40)

Today was beat the alarm clock to death day.
The alarm clock I have was given to me by a good friend back in IBM and has a snooze button on top of it thats way too handy to hit rather than being a bit more dextrus and pushing the snib at the side down. The snooze is for 10 minutes at which point it goes into a tizzy of various beep patterns to wake you up... or in my case to slap it down again. (Cheers Mike..)

Made an unconcious effort to get dressed and out the door. I must do this more often as I seem to be more successful in grabbing what I need on autopilot than being fully awake and panicing.

It was raining reasonably hard as I was driving in. This is intresting for comparison with the UK. In North Carolina, most of the roads are concrete or concrete with a thin layer of fine chippings and tar. In the UK it's almost always coarse chippings and tar which gives quite reaonable drainage. The roads in the US being mildly rippled concrete don't drain the surface water off very well, and a saw a two incidents of cars aquaplaning on the road, one as a crash into the meridian and the other as a near miss.

Speed. The highway speed here is 65mph whereas in the UK it's 70mph on the motorway/ual carriageways (unless otherwise posted). In the UK the unwritten law is that you get 3 miles an hour over the speed limit + 10% of the speed limit so a 70 mph zone you can get away with 79mph as your driving speed, and indeed about 1/2 the population that travel the motorways tend to do 80 with a further 10% of the population going to 90mph and a few complete nuts going at > 120Mph (normally with flashing blue lights in tow). In the US what I've observed is that the 65mph posting seems to be largely ignored. Most people seem to drive at 70 and those that don't give a damn tend to to 80-100. Emperical evidence suggests that as long as you are driving at whatever speed the 'pack' is driving at is accepted as the 'corrected' speed limit. (Oh as a side note,.. street lights,.. green = go, red=stop(negotiable), amber = go faster!)

Fiddled with piranha's security model a bit, and made some diagrams. Keith was ment to be back today from canada, however, the planes were canceled or something so he's not in today. Got email from my first advogato groupie 8) [advise: don't live in Durham, bad things happen there, go to Chapel Hill] I'll still have a look at Innsbrook, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I have 3 possible properties in Chapel Hill to potentially look at though I discounted two of them purely on the brouchre.

Dria made comments yesterday about zope, so in a unusual bout of good will, I installed it on ZenII. I've turned over all admin for it to her, however, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink 8) (no offence dria)

Decided to do the tour of duty on the Social Security Agency office again today,... after 2 1/4 hours of waiting I finally got to hand in the forms and the varios documents. The I94 wasn't even asked for this time DOH!!!!! (thats woeful folks,.. ever hear of customer service? after all I'm paying the taxes it's not like I'll get any benefit from it as when I'm finially out of a job they'll simply deport me back to the UK, try and tell me thats fair and just). With luck I can phone up tomorrow to get the SSN as opposed to waiting 2 weeks for the SSN card to arrive.

This will be good, It means I can get around to finalizing the bank account, which in turn means I can get a credit rating from my old bank transfered over to the US (It goes by the name of an international credit check which there is a small fee for). When thats all complete, I need to try and sort out getting a loan for a car. From the market and the prices, I can't see a real reason not to buy a new car outright as it'll only be 3-4000 more than getting a 2nd hand car + it'll have extra cover that a 2nd wouldn't have. Insurance might be a bit more fun though, it should weigh in at approx 900 USD which is kinda steep.

I still need to activate the bank card that Wachovia sent out to me. I might do that tonight if I spot a handy ATM.

Special note: payday tomorrow.. now I'll finally find out what I really have to play with every month/fortnight

Umm seems I've neglected the diary again... oops

Yesterday
Not a particulary exciting day,.. just documentation and lots of design/planning being thought out.

Attempted to go to the Social Security Office in Durham but got hopelessly lost. Ended out by the RDU airport which is just plain bizzare.

Went shopping at WinDixie or whatever it's called. it's disconcerting to find almost no brand names that I recognise from at home in the UK, so I've tentively started buying various foodstuffs to discover what actually tastes like 'proper' cooking. I find the US way of selling produce rather,..whats the word I'm looking for...dishonest. All items are priced without the tax included which is silly. If I'm going to be paying a fixed tax at the desk anyway, then I want to know the REAL cost of the food when I'm makeing the decision back at the shelves. Would it really be that inconvient to reprice the produce?

Went home. I went to make a pizza, but got farenheit and centigrade horribly mixed up. Retrieved the burnt offering 15 minutes later. Bit dissapointed about that. Fortunately I was able to lift off the burnt cheese skin and scrape out the surviving cheese/meat layer which wasn't too bad even if it was messy. Welcome to the US, the last surviving bastion of Imperial units.

Watched the TV^H^HAdverts got bored and went to bed

Today
Woke up 5 minutes before my alarm clock went off. This was probably something to do with the guy outside mowing the lawns at 07:55.

Tried to get a grip on reality. Failed and tried to get back to sleep.

Unortunately the gardner outside was having none of it so got ready and drove off to work. In early. The way things work in the US is that EVERYONE tries to avoid rush hour if they can possibly do so,.. either they go in very early or they go in late. Oddly enough this ment that 'rush' hour didn't have that much traffic to contend with.

Made a start into redesigning piranha's web interface. I think it'll work out ok, however, I'm not going to spend any time at all on graphics if I can possibly avoid it.

Got some proper instructions on how to get to the Social Security office from HR. (Never trust a MicroTwit based map finder...). Got to the Social Security office ok, however, now, in addition to all the documentation they requested I bring, they've now decided they want the I94 as well which they did not ask for,... *mutter* Now I have to go back there tomorrow again.

Made some formal apointments to go touring around some apartments. Everyone says not to live in Durham, however I have found somewhere thats only 2 1/2 miles away. If it's not a cesspit and seems a reasonable area, I might go for it otherwise I'll expand my searches to 6-12 miles out from the RH office.

Watched the stock market crash again today,.. I notice certain stocks have taken a *severe* beating. Good,.. maybe people will start trading more responsibly now 8) The markets havn't collapsed however they need to realign themselves on a more credible basis.

Important discovery of the day:
  You shouldn't think that the US goverment is out to rob you with taxes
  They REALLY are out to rob you through taxes!

The summer head cold that I got from flying around the country from Denver has come at me in a big way. Not pleasent. From previous colds, I guess I should be ok again by the weekend though my throat is a bit raw and I'm feeling dizzy.

Decided to wait for the dizziness to subside before going in to RH. It's rather odd trying to keep upright when you've lost most of your sense of balance. Kept over compensating for swaying 8).

Eventually things settled down and I went off to work. Nothing much to do except documentation which I have to point out (again) I'm not particulary good at.
Got annoyed as I discover I've been using dockbook 3.1 extensions which jade can't grok. That makes a real mess of things 8(
Choices,.. leave it as is and hope the web group can handle it or redo the tags and hope I don't miss any. Sod it, I'm supposed to be getting new features into piranha rather than docs so the web group are going to get a DocBook 3.1 deliverable.

Started work on the piranha home website. Joy...NOT!
Oh well at least it's HTML which I'm far happier with using. So for the moment I'm just writing out text content and will chase back with pictures, diagrams and other fun HTML effects later.

Went to HR about the SSN to ask if they had any advise on the situation. Looks like I'll have to go to the Social Security Agency tomorrow and sort it out. They have a choice,... give me the SSN or give me back the $930 that was paid in (though how RH managed to pay in a social security payment against a non existant SSN seems a mystery to me)

unfortunately there isn't much you can say about a day which is composed of waking up, coughing lots, going to work, writing documentation, then going home.

Something is wrong. For the past few weeks I've been getting up ridiculusly early,.. typically 04:30. This wouldn't be so bad but I'm generally going to bed at ~02:00. In theory I should be a gibbering wreck but I feel ok. Wierd.

Tis Sunday.
Wandered around the aparment a bit poking at various appliances working out their capabilities since there were no manuals kicking around.
Got bored.
Watched some TV^H^HAdvertising.

The apartment is perfectly adaquate. Just it's in a dead end area of NC with zero activity. Wandered over to the local food store and got some bread, butter, potatoes, sweetcorn and cubed steak to make lunch.

After lunch, gave in to boredom and went in to the RH offices to finish off the whitepaper on piranha (yes I was really bored). Caught up on some email and fixed up the intel box so that it could play the BBC news audio and video items under linux. At least I can get some decent news coverage rather than the over-hyping US news casts. Thank heavens for the BBC world radio service.

While collecting a printout of the drafts, I noticed that the mailroom has finally gotten around to putting in a mailbox for me,.. complete with two letters.

The first letter was from the Coastal Credit Union trying to entice me in to open an account with them,... Well after their previous fiasco that went straight into the bin. The second letter was from the Social Security agency who has rejected the SSN application. In rather typical government style, they didn't bother to cite why. I'll have to talk to HR tomorrow about this.

Nothing much more eventful happened. So went home, watched more advertising, gave up and went to bed to the sound of downstairs stereo thumping out bass resonance notes *mutter*...

Odd, woke up at 07:15,..(having gone to bed at 04:20)

Looked outside, it's far too early, went back to sleep.
Rewoke at 08:40.... back to sleep
Rewoke 10:20... back to sleep
Achieved conciousness at 12:20

Mulled over what to eat, made a bacon sandwich. had a glass of milk and a cinnemon bagel. Watched TV. I use 'watched' loosely. Most the chanels were polluted with more advertizing that actual programming. I think the metric in the UK is 4 minutes of advertizing in a 15 minute period which is substantially less than the US. I'm slightly annoyed that I couldn't get BBC1 TV. Gave up on TV and drove to work (yes, I'm aware it is Saturday). Did a lot of recovery of zen. There is dataloss but I have recovered a substantial portion of the user population files. No word from the Australian police. I can't believe the police would be a monday-friday only service in Australia.

My first taste of bad weather in NC. Lots of wind and rain. I think I saw a flash of lightning as well but I wasn't really looking. The wind was fairly impressive as I watched a lot of the fir trees bend almost 30 degrees off their upright position, which is impressive considering the tree density outside being close enough to call a forest. So much for a forests wind break effect.

_A_ seems to have made it back from Norway safely. Doubtless there will be many digital photos to look through later if/when he puts them up.

Been in contact with my old dept trying to catch up on all the fun ails and troubles. The one thing about working back with IBM/AT&T was that every day was laced with problems political and technical. Thats not to say that it was all bad, far from it. I left lots of well clued people to come work for RH. Most problems were always down to communication and misunderstandings between people. ie people would say one thing but mean another, submit the various requests to the dept, we'd do the work as specified, and then get a rollocking for not doing it 'right'. It was always a struggle to convince people that what they wanted was either unsuitable or tecnically inadaquate. From what I can tell AT&T have effectively split the dept up and seem about ready to sell it off or shut down portions which is going back on their statement of intent when they bought the group from IBM. One thing you should learn from this. NEVER TRUST ANYONE. Businesses like AT&T have depts that promise the earth an all the reasurances you could wish for, unfortunately, having got the goods, they seem to have gone on a slash and burn mission with no understanding of what they are up to. Pity.

Busy times.

Moved out of the hotel I was in to some temporary accomodation out at Cary (~13 miles away from Redhat). It's a nice enough place, however, it's a bit far out. I'll be staying there for the next two weeks while I get the bank to formalize my credit rating. Hopefully by this time a normal paycheque will have been paid in my RH which will aid me when I go to the bank to work out a loan for such useful things as,... a car.

The US public transport system is a myth. If the planet finally chokes to death on car fumes, I think we can all point our fingers at the US public transport policy (though there are plenty of other contries that are as bad if not worse). I can forsee a time when there will be no affordable petrol in the US in my lifetime. From what I've seen so far, there is no adaquate infrastructure that makes for a viable economic public transport system. In my mind, the mechanism of all office business is going to have to evolve. Working from home will probably have to be encouraged through some form of goverment subsidy. The data communication network will have to handle a volume of bandwidth FAR exceeding todays paultry offerings, to handle the population growth that will be in place in a few decades time. As that population grows, fuel and energy consumption will geometrically rocket. I guess now would be a really good time to invest in renewable energy markets as a long term investment. Whats rather unfortunate is they way that it's logically obvious the above is true and yet the populus of the planet don't seem to care,... it's like they want to abducate responsibility and pretend it's not their problem.

Moved into the temporary accomodation (1BA 815sq ft). I was ment to go with Petere to the crabtree for a night out with pakrat and co, unfortunately I was too busy to go 8(. The apartment is in a nice quiet area. Later on some new neighbours moved in with all their furniture being dragged up and down the steps (it's an upper floor apartment). They seem pleasent enough. Come about 21:30, the people beneth me reintroduced me to the idea of seperate housing as they cranked up their bass on their hifi. Structureal integrity of the walls seems to have survived after 2 1/2 hours of 'bopping' (mutter)...

Watched some TV. Bored... wish I had been able to to to the Crabtree

There is something wrong when you wake up to the sound of shouting in the corridor. I don't think it was anything serious. Whatever the argument was about, it wasn't in English.

Arrived at work and continued typing up the whitepaper. I hate writing documentation. Just to make things more intresting, Keith has to do loads of other things so I'm running with the piranha project solo till next thursday. Wanger also wants a piranha web site up and running. Ugh....ok...

Andy got back in touch. He's installed a copy of RH6.1 on one partition of zen. I poped on and hunted around to see what was salvagable. managed to pull of the uni web site intact, as well as a few home directories and a chunk of the medical data. Salvaged the .bash_history list and looked at the commands our not so bright cracker was issuing. Except for the damage, his unix knowledge is close to zero. I'm hense forth labeling this prat a 'script kiddie'. Recovered the Irc transcripts which show malicious intent. Recovered the messages log file. Still need to pull apart some inodes to recover some of the other security logs. Even without them, I have more than sufficent evidence to nail this fool. There is a slight complication given something I spotted in one of the log files, I'll be investigating that as well. Nothing new from Scotland yard, CERT, AusCERT or the Australian police. Need to get in touch with Adian to get the ISP logs secured with CERT. I really don't see how this guy is going to avoid going to jail. I want financial compensation as well. So there will probably be two court cases, one criminal and the other a civil suit. Should be straight forward.

Unfortunately a side affect of all this will be that zen will be leaving UWE. I'll have to find another home for it. 3 choices spring to mind....

• Send it to _A_... advantages.. not many, disadvantages.. telsa will hate me forever
• Give it to Al,.. advantages.. gives him a test box to play with, disadvantages. he lives with chaz and zen would probably develop a bad case of screwdriveritis
• Send it to planet... advantages.. could be setup as a sandtrap for exim.org and uk.linux.org disadvantages.. space and street cred (would you have a box that looked like zen in your rack??)

Oh well I should be reasonably happy, zen has been serving the linux community for well over 7 years.

Nothing much new or exciting beyond recovering inodes happened all day. Had lunch at another burger joint. I need to get an apartment soon so I can make some proper lunch. Eating out is realatively cheap here, however, it's not what I'd call proper food.

Ugh,.. someone left the coffee machine on,.. it's boiled down whatever fluid it had to a tar that started to burn off in the office kitchen. The place reeks of burnt coffee. I'm mildly surprised the smoke detectors didn't notice it.

I'm sure I made a diary entry last night,..
Maybe I've been eating too much cheese.

Oh well lets recap yesterdays events as well then (briefly)

Yesterday
Called up the credit union and asked very specifically what I would need to bring for to open an account, very carefully explaining that I didn't have a SSN as yet and would this be a problem. I was told this was ok and simply to turn up with a drivers licence (UK was ok) the passport with the visa, the employers letter and a payslip. So I went off to the coastal credit union where I waited 50 minutes in a queue to be seen. Having explained everything, I started filling out paperwork when I was asked for the SSN. At this point everything collapsed and they refused to open an account. Severly ticked off, my entire morning having been wasted by a false assurance.
Went back to RH to ask HR for advise. They very helpfully (and thus get added to my christmas card list) phoned around some more banks to see if the SSN dependancy could be circumnavigated. Bank of America and Wachovia both said they would happily open an account without the SSN though not all the banking facilities would be available untill the SSN was given to them. Now I had thought of going to the Bank of America, however, I couldn't find their branch from their directions. I found the Wachovia bank and opened an account there. They had a very helpful clerk who actually bothered to try and understand my situation. Possibly the $7,789 cheque may have aided 'understanding' however thats being cruel and cynical. So I opened a checking I and savings account. When the SSN gets sorted out I'll apply for the credit cards and get the online banking sorted. Wachovia may not be a well known name outside of NC, however, I doubt that will be a huge problem.

Returned to RH to try and sort out my hotel room 8/
That morning I'd asked them to extend my stay a few more days but was told my credit card had been declined,... Major panic! The long and short is that RH are paying up to Friday then I'm being moved to temporary accomodation out at Cary for two weeks while the SSN gets sorted out, hopefully I can get a decent apartment sorted out during this time. The only exta caveat is that the rental car has to go back to Hertz this saturday... umm....

Arranged to meet up with Jlbec/pakrat at IBM's RTP site. Had a nice tour around the IBM facilities/machine rooms,.. It felt very nostalgic even if I only left IBM 4 months ago. Lots of ancient kit that I could instantly identify and chuckle about. One thing, IBM RTP is *HUGE* it's not a company premise so much as a corperate town/city. They really need to consider putting in internal bicycle routes between the buildings. IBM RTP fell into my mould of what I expected IBM to be like... full of seriously intresting kit, hopelessly mismanaged. I just want to fall down and cry when I see the potential in some areas being so badly ignored/unused. Comforted by pakrat/Jlbec's recants of previous disasters on site. Hehe, In my book it's ok to make a screwup of ridiculous proportions as long as you learn from the mistake and are open and honest about it. In the US it sees that mistakes just DON'T happen and sealed rooms with forgotten keys really do exist. Pakrat has an intresting computer desk,.. the monitor plinth seems to be a grocery store wire shelf balanced atop 4 full height hard disks... he tells me that 2 of them may even still work 8)

Today
Wanger looking for the whitepaper (still not finished) for piranha's GUI. Lots of furious typing. Keith didn't show up today at all, pity as I just burned the CD he asked for. I was reasonably certain we were ment to go over the new feature lists and time planning for the next set of improvements to piranha. Left the CD sitting on his desk. Spent a bit of time going through log files and the mail system on ZenII. Looks like the linuxchix mail list archive site..isn't. It's mysteriously utterly unreachable from anywhere. Seems to have been like this for 2 weeks now judging from the mail queue. Informed Dria. She didn't take that too well. I guess I'm going to have to buy a black habit (similar to what the emperor in Star Wars wears) and wear that when I tell people bad things have happened.

Went out for an early dinner with Wanger to the local chicken slaughterhouse. Unfortunely I only had 3x1 dollar bills and 2x $100 bills. Wanger paid for my meal (~ 4 dollars). Talked about how his weekend went, also how I don't speak 'american' 8) seems to cause intresting moments 8). He also correctly pointed out that piranha needs a home web page setup. I think I can safely put all code on the back burner for the next week and just do documentation. I really hope someone will chase behind my scribblings for gramatical/spelling errors.

Finally got through to my bank in the UK to try and sort out my apparently maxed out credit card. I'm appauled. It turns out that my credit card is <U>perfectly</U> healthy. I've well over $1000 credit on the card so all the feking hassle caused yesterday was completely unnecessary. Transfered 400 UKP from my current account into the credit card account as Wachovia will eventually be asking for a credit check from my bank to get a US credit rating. I'm rather hoping I'll be good for a $2500 card I don't see why I wouldn't be considering at home I've been turning down 25,000 UKP credit card signups for years. La Quinta (the hotel) gets a lemon award from me. Otherwise their service has been quite good.

Spent a load of time running through the Piranha GUI with xv's grab facility for screen shots to embed in the documentation.... (sidenote: I'm not a technical writer, I'm crap at writeup's) fortunately I hear that there is capex available for a technical writer. All decent tech writers go see wanger please 8) (no time wasters please)... ahem 8)

19:00 went out over to 'Oh Brians' to link up with Jlbec for a sit in meal. Talked about his impending departure to Scotland, US/UK differances, zenII, mail lists, advoagto, dns and other geek talk.

Ok, woke up ~ 07:20.. you should note that this is FAR too early to get up.

Got ready to go to work, walked out the hotel door and discovered that it was pelting down with rain. Thats ok... err no it isn't. Where I parked the hire car last night was a mini lake as surface water from behind the hotel surged past it into the drains. Bugger 8/

Dutifully obeyed the rules of driving in NC by making sure my headlights where on while using the window wipers. (It's in the book to do so though back in the UK, depending on light levels I would have only used the side lights)

Oddly there was only 5 cars already in the parking area outside the RH offices, can't imagine why...
Quickly ran in and started fiddling with whitepaper documentation and email. Nothing eventful happened until about 09:30 when I visited HR to collect my long overdue paycheck... It didn't quite work out as I expected

The gross pay was $15000 (~9600 UKP) for the 3 months I worked at home

From which
4937.03 went in fedral tax
930.00 in social security
217.50 in medical insurance
1122.30 in state tax

Leaving a rather thin
$7793.17 (~ 5000 UKP)

Thats *almost* 50% of my pay gone in deductions! I can't believe that! Thats extortinate! Even the UK at it's VERY WORST was only 40% deductions though at my previous scale I was paying ~25% in deductions.

Unfortuneately I didn't get around to visiting the Credit Union to open an account, however, thats something I'll be doing tomorrow.

Had lunch at Wendy's. Ummm I think I better hurry up and get accomodation. I think I'll start taking sandwiches to work when I get settled in. It's about time I thought of getting fit again. (You think I'm scarey now? just you wait til I'm fit!)

The muggy weather has given me quite a headache. Looks like this weather will continue to cause a load of grief.

Sctoland yard have been in touch with Al re the vandilism of zen. The Australian authorities have also been contacted. I'm hoping for an arrest real soon now. I'm dissapointed that UWE hasn't managed to resurect zen as yet. Thats well over a week down now. If I was there I'd have it up and running in a few hours, however this is not the case any more. I guess I'll just have to wait patiently while email bounces around.

Found out today that I'm being kidnapped off to NY for some Install fest at a LUG on April 22nd. Sounds as though we'll be driving up there. I'll bet good money that wanger completely ignores the speed limits.

Ok, I've been a bit remiss on diary entries.

Spent a couple of days up in Denver with wanger (we were there at the inviation of SUSE). Finally got to meet lmb. Happily, ther was free food (cheers guys). SGI turned up with some very intresting material and annoucements look for a fun item called 'Rhino' in the comeing weeks. Freshmeat will probably be in overdrive when that hits the ftp servers.

Back to matters at hand. Making a jump to the US is a horrible affair. The US needs to get away from its dependancy on social security numbers. If it doesn't it'll soon be law that every child born in the US have a SSN tattoed on it's buttock or some form of security ID tag slipped beneath the nape of the neck. If we were ment to be cataloged and filed, we'd have been born with ID tags.

Anyway, it turns out that SSN processing will take about 3 weeks which is pathetic. I still need to open a bank account. I think I'll use a credit union for my paycheques though I might also open a small account with Wachovia as well. Both want ssn's though the credit union will happily open one without the ssn as long as I promise to supply them with the ssn when it comes through.
Provided I get the account setup I can then get RH to pay in the money they owe me (~12000 before tax). Now while that may seem a lot, I have a lot of outtakings from this. An apartment (when I get that far) will cost ~800 dollars a month, there will probably be a deposit and a months advance rent required as well. Then there's the rental of furniture as well. so we'll say 2000-2500 goes up in smoke immediatedly. Then there is the matter of transport, ie a car. I had a look around in carmax (a second hand dealership) however the financing is awful, plus I now have a chicken eg problem. To get the car I need both accomodation (residence) and a land line. I could give then the office address/phone line but thats probably not good enough for them. Also, being a foreign national (oh sorry, I have to say "Alien" as the US gov think they are the only humans on the planet) , I have no credit rating in the US (bugger) despite have an excellent one in the UK. A second hand car looks like it'll eat up ~$7000-8000 in deposit/finance (*OUCH*) and then there are the repayments on top of that. So at the end of the day I end up being flat broke 8/

Found the North Carolina driving rules in pdf format (yuk). Spent about 1 1/2 hours reading though it. I wish it had spent more time on road manoving than on the fines and taxes. Also looks like after I finally get accomodation sortted out, I have 60 days to learn the damned literature before applying for a NC drivers licence. I collected a hire car from Hertz on Saturday, I drove out behind wanger who kinda shot off into the distance (bloody viper maniac). Missed my exit and spent a merry hour trying to reorintate myself to getting back to the hotel. The only saving grace was that it was night time and few people were on the roads. This gave me a chance to do things slowly and become a bit more familiar with the road system. Driving on the right is an intresting experiance when you've been driving on the left all your life. The US needs to invest in the idea of European roundabouts,.. though we'll probably not recommend the French 'magic roundabout' as a good example.

More fun with zenII. The mysterious hangs still continue, DMA has now been turned off in an attempt to keep it alive. I hope it's not DMA cos the disk performance drops from 25Mb/s to 4.4Mb/s which is a HUGE performance loss. I think we may be closing down services like telnet shortly as we start locking zen's access down. _A_ is thinking of adding userland sandtraps as well. I've been adding some extra security as well. ZenII gets backed up nightly which helps my sanity.

CERT got back in touch re zen's rm'ing, that just leaves the Australians to get in touch. Need to talk to Al about handling Scotland yard as I'm in the US.

I have an engineering meeting in the morning for HA/Piranha etc. It promises to be opinionated, loud and possibly annoying. We'll see if anything good comes of it. I hope so.

Must get around to installing a pgp option for elm.