Return to normalcy

Well, after three wonderful, exciting, and different weeks, it's time to get back to the regular run of things. The great part is that I'm feeling very rested and enthused and ready to do tackle that head-on.

I had a wonderful time with company for the last nearly three weeks, both going out and doing things and just hanging out together, watching the Olympics, watching Buffy, going over to a friend's house for table tennis, wandering about Fry's, and listening to music. We didn't get done everything that we'd planned, but then we never do, and there are always things for next time.

This weekend will be cleaning, straightening, and putting things in order weekend, sprinkled with large amounts of reading. The casualty of company, the Olympics, and fairly busy work has been reading. After having not read at all for three weeks, spending three and a half hours last night in Perdido Street Station was a great feeling. I expect I'll be doing quite a bit of that this weekend.

The new WebAuth v3 weblogin servers are now set up and running on Debian, and we're going to be doing general testing next week for an upgrade a week from Monday. This will be my first time doing a major service build on Debian, and the first time we've been aggressive about getting everything into Debian packages. We're going to be using these builds as a model for other servers going forward. I've also been dealing with the Kerberos vulnerabilities; the KDCs were patched the same day, and I now finally have the new software builds done and can announce the availability of new kits on Tuesday for the rest of campus.

These three weeks have also been good for developing more of a sense of perspective about some things. I'm likely to be watching much less TV than normal and listening to far more music than I have been for at least the next few weeks. I took a break from looking at any news sites while the Olympics were on to avoid spoilers, and now I find myself not wanting to return to my regular readings of the headlines. I'm also getting even more aggressive about avoiding anything related to the crappy US election, which I don't even want to hear about any more. Nothing like a break and some distance to help one refocus on what are the really interesting and worthwhile things in life.

Oh, and ttf-freefont has been fixed in Debian. This makes me very happy. It looks so much better than any other browser font I've used.