Woke up. Late. As usual.

Surprised to find e-mail from Elika, Princeton Unix User's Group's president, announcing the coming Student Activities Fair. As usual, the P-ug has a booth (half a table long) with power outlets (so we can show off our cool "lappy 486"). She is a lot more pro-active than Dan and I were last year. Which is a good thing.

Her post and my follow-ups generated quite a bit of mail on the unix-list mailing list, prompting a friend, who is not so much into unix/linux, to send a mail to the list asking to be removed from the mailing list because we are "spamming his inbox". There's also a proposal to actually take the old idea of installfest to fruition. Now that's exciting. At least in Princeton an installfest won't be a group of smelly geeks gathering in a tiny room admiring each other's "package".

Elika also proposed a configfest so we can prepare for the configuration step in the installfest: we are betting on many students taking on SCI's offer and buying a laptop through them. Predictable hardware will make the installation a breeze. To complement the configfest, I finally got off my butt and installed MediaWiki for P-ug. It turns out sometime last winter the Princeton University Office of Information Technology silently unveiled a service called LAMP, which stand for Linux Apache MySQL PHP. Now each user's public_html directory can be run from LAMP, meaning that we can use MySQL and PHP on our websites. This does make things easy for installing MediaWiki.

(Incidentally, if I had known that we have access to MySQL and PHP, I would have written the blogOhm engine in it, which makes a lot more sense, rather then in bash.)

Anyway, I am in the process of porting over the Princeton Linux HOWTO from DocBook to the Wiki. Nope, I am not putting up a link just yet. That'll have to wait until I am done porting.

In other news, a high-school boy came knocking on the door today. He was selling subscriptions to the local newspaper called The Messenger Press. Because he actually came door to door, and was standing in the fierce afternoon sun, plus he mentioned that it helps with his college fund, I softened up and bought a subscription from him. It wasn't much, 24 dollars for 52 issues (a whole year). And now I get to learn what's happening in Robbinsville. Whoo-pie.

Recently I have been absent-minded when it comes to steak for some reason. I turned off the heat after 10 minutes in the oven, which was fine. But instead of letting it simmer there for 5-8 minutes, I forgot about it and let it sit for 20. The second time the steak became overdone this month. Thank $Deity that I have the habit of searing the steak first: at least, even when it is overdone, the steak is not dry.