No, it's not night. And up until I started playing the cd, it was fairly quiet in here. But it's a cool tune, and since we're past the phase of excessive radio overplay, I thought I might start enjoying these songs for myself again.

Last night's quake3 match didn't turn out to be quite the glorious spectacle we all had hoped for. Much time was spent trying to figure out how to get us all on versions that would work together. Jaeger: Linux demo, no full version. Myself: Linux demo and full version available. Zan Lynx: Windows full version, no demo. Neelix: Not present.

Getting the demo and the full version to talk to each other proves to be a difficult to impossible task. Much time was spent trying to figure out how to get the proper files to the right people (complicated by the fact that Zan Lynx was on modem so he couldn't grab the whole demo in a trivial amount of time, and neither Jaeger nor myself had the ability to run Windows executables which would have been required for us to extract the Windows executable binary sans data files to send to Zan Lynx).

It actually ended up being a night in irc. Zan Lynx and I eventually decided to play a one-to-one game, since we both had the full versions. As luck would have it, Argo crashed (or at least close enough to it -- q3 had full keyboard control, went into an infinite loop, and I didn't feel like running upstairs to try to telnet in and fix this.) Reboot.

Then the lovely revelation came that I must have missed something when putting together the list of iptables commands used to construct Argo's firewall last week. I had them in a nice little script, but I obviously forgot to put in something I had done on the command line way back then. I couldn't access the outside world until I flushed the tables and set the default policy to accept. Lovely security there.

I carefully examined my script, and verified that it indeed made no sense. No rules to allow packets from open sockets to return. Doh! I went back to look at the howtos, and saw what I thought should work. Tinkered around a bit, decided I was way too tired to figure it out, set something resembling a semi-working while not totally insecure config, and went to sleep.

That's what happens when you sit and tinker with iptables without being relentless in recording every nuance. Duuuuuuh.

Last night's Xena ep was very cool. If this is the level of quality we can expect for the rest of the season, I would say Tapert, Lawless, O'Connor, & Co are indeed making good on the promise to take this show out in style. As for the who is a better dancer, Xena or Gab? I'm still undecided. I think my true answer would have to be "both". :)

Fuzzy brain right now. I had actually typed half a rambling last night, which I foolishly left unsaved while engaging Zan Lynx in battle. A formidable opponent. I lost by... I think the score was 10 to 6 for the first and only match. (And I even had the advantage of a local server, while he was on a modem line.) T'would be worthwhile to polish my skills and meet this foe again someday soon. Hopefully with better luck on the technical setup next time.

Alrighty. I think I'll take another crack at getting Argo's iptables configured properly, give my visual language processor a little exercise, and then ready Tobias for some adventure into the unknown. Real.