All day I sit in class next to a sarcastic Frenchman, we have great times. And now I've got the Gmail chat going with everyone all day...oh man, it's fun sending data over a vast network spanning thousands of computers to tell the guy next to you that he's a jerk.

Got to see the computer room at work today. Wow, a computer geek's (like myself) wet dream. Thousands of computers, petabytes of storage (google that fools!), and air conditioning out the wazoo. It was quite interesting to see how they manage problems of topology of the network and how this is evolving over time. Without breaking any contracts here, it is comparable to how music was being traded over the internet. From a hub based system like Napster which everyone connected to and it dealt with individual connections, to the distributed Torrent based system is a comparable evolution. Small, self contained nodes are much more resilient than a big lumbering architechture. If one node fails, no big deal, but if one part of a large architechure does, you're screwed.

I hate to be one criticizing the US gov't (since everyone else does), but CLICK!

Looking at it, and actually being in Houston here, I believe it. America is slowly becoming a fascist state, there is propaganda everywhere, the looming threat of police, rights slowly being taken away. It is all being perpetuated by this relatively new belief of Americans that they think they need to protect everyone, including people in their own country from themselves. Benjamin Franklin put it best, "Those who are willing to sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither"

We are all giving each other nicknames in the office, so far: I'm Frostback, Aaron is Vanilla Face, Yann is Hpot (he's a French Harry Potter), and Tommy is Eggroll/the Asian Invasion. Still a few to figure out hehehe.