Not Too Much
Clear, warm sun today with that late afternoon light that sets colors crisp against the lengthening shadows. Walking home near the lake I passed some buildings that reminded me of ivy covered buildings at a school I attended one winter in the late 1950's in Massachusetts. Strange times remembered with mixed emotions, but the memories of those buildings in that exactly right light were some of the better ones. Odd. Long time ago.
It's strange how quickly a good night's sleep and a sunny day will change my mood. The forecast says partly cloudy tomorrow, mostly cloudy Sunday. Right now the sky seems to be clear. Maybe we'll get lucky. Maybe I'll walk around San Francisco tomorrow in the mid to late morning, take some pictures. Go somewhere and take some pictures. I'm not believing that I'll do any of this, but it sounds nice. We'll see.
A local computer magazine had an article recently on firewalls and routers for the home. The
phone company doesn't talk all that much about the problems you can run into from hackers, crackers and nephews when you have one of their DSL lines and with my webcam problems at work, I guess I'm going to have my home computer running continuously on the Internet pumping out pictures of the cat or the empty livingroom or the Magnolia tree or something equally exciting sometime in the next two weeks. The tech support people said my camera won't send pictures out through our company firewall the way it's configured and I don't want to set it up so it sends pictures to one of my servers in the lab and then have that server send them out using software that will penetrate the firewall to my web site. So I ordered something called a UGate-3000 that connects to my DSL line and then breaks that connection out into four Ethernet ports, a combination firewall, DHCP, NAT and hub. I know, what's a NAT? What's a DHCP (server)? Doesn't matter. It's a toy that will keep me occupied. It's my birthday present. That, a Nikon camera and a tuna fish sandwich is about as close to birthday heaven as you can get here in Oakland.
Nobody at my company really cares whether I have a webcam on line, the few people who know about it kind of dig it, but we're going through a security audit at the moment and little hobby projects like mine are OK when they're low key and in the background, but, you know, maybe they're really trouble in the making. "He's been doing what!" Adios traffic on Broadway, unless I have a change of heart. Wouldn't be all that hard to rig a server to send pictures through the firewall. One every fifteen seconds, maybe, not too much in the way of traffic.
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