A lot has happened since the last time I posted, it’s been a series of very long days.

Tuesday I went into work early to finish up some of the cabling (which is still going on) when mid-afternoon I got a call from John Greiner asking if I could play lead alto with a big band that night. He said they needed another alto too so of course I called Rene and we were all set for that night. I left work a little early to try and get a head start on traffic because I had to pick up my horn and stand from my house (Southwest), pick up Rene (Northeast), and go to the gig (Northwest). It was going to be a squeeze but Sarah offered to give Rene a ride and that made things so much easier.

The gig was a blast! It was the first ever performance of this group, which is basically a rehearsal band of musicians from around town. It had some funny parts (most of us were sight-reading) but it’s a great group and the good news is we’re going to be performing every Tuesday from 7:30–9:30 at the Pasta Co. on Woodway. Come check it out next week!

Yesterday was pretty crazy because the gateway/firewall/mail server here at work crashed pretty badly, to the point where I had spent so much time trying to fix bizarre problems that it became apparent that it would be faster just to set a new machine up. I was also surprised to find out that the machine was only a 166mhz Pentium with a mere 40mb of RAM! Before I saw the box itself I just assumed it was some sort of nice machine because it ran so well. Linux rocks! Anyway we set up a new one with some more modern hardware and I dropped Red Hat on it (something was wrong with our Slackware CDs) and then I spent the rest of the evening becoming intimately familiar with iptables. After that I drove all the way down to Sugarland to help some people out with some computer stuff and setting up a wireless network, and that went very well and it was a pleasant change of pace to have everything work the first time! Since it wasn’t enough having been working or driving for 16 hours that day, Josh called and we went to House of Pies, of course.

Today we’re getting three new T-1s installed!