Friday, January 24, 2003
A small work reunion
I had another reunion today, this time a reunion of people who formerly worked for XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, an ISP we all worked for in Boca Raton. The venue for today's lunch was Lucile's Bad to the Bone BBQ, a favorite locale for us high tech workers in Boca Raton.
Rob and I arrived first to find the restaurant without power (in fact, the entire strip mall was out of power). Consequently the available menu was quite limited today—grilled items only and no soda (except for diet rootbeer which were bottled) or draft beer. Despite the lack of power they were still doing brisk business and it certainly didn't bother us that much—burgers and ribs were still available.
Joining us for lunch was Tim (the former web designer), NeoMike (former sysadmin) and R, (former network admin) who was still working there as a consultant. The place has passed from being an ISP to a bona fide spam house with fairly insane security (as Rob found out trying to visit R at the office) which is understandable—being a spam house and all.
Quite a bit of conversation centered around the duties that R does for SpamHouse. As reprehensible as spam is, the technical challenges do sound facinating what with having to route taffic out one circuit with inbound traffic coming in from another, and updating the BGP tables to keep connectivity. It's the technical challenge that makes the job interesting; something like the technical challenges inherent in writing a virus. Or nuclear weapons.
Chaos
Chaos.
Complete chaos.
Bob, the DM of the Friday Night Game, set up a WAP so I borrowed the wireless network card from Rob to test the network (obviously it works). But it's a mad house here right now with scores of people visiting (since he himself is having a reunion of friends tomorrow.
Oops, food is here. Gotta go …
