Playing with Putty

Adventure doesn't feel like adventure when you're in it. It's hard, it's tough, you have to make decisions and trudge through drudgery. Adventure involves long journeys to walk and bigger-than-you monsters to fight. I've been too busy slaying dragons to notice any reason to be excited about this whole Life thing.

But it's 4am - there must be something exciting enough to keep my awake at this hour (besides the coffee).

It has been quite a day. I approached this weekend with much trepidation, and in explanation as to why I will list for you some reasons. First of all I have three things due for Monday - one being a big maths project which I couldn't wrap my head around until today, an English research essay due for Wednesday which is my entire English mark for this semester, a maths test on Thursday, and work stuff for Friday. Besides all the usual hand-ins.
I postponed the essay, and the other later stuff is chilled, which leaves the three most stressful things for Monday, and they are:
A Matlab project I thought was an Insurmountable Mountain of Horror, but is actually Not That.
A Matlab tut to hand in.
A pre-interview test for a position I applied for for next year, and the thing I want to talk about now.

I applied for the geekiest job on earth. And possibly the most daunting: System Administrator. Basically, looking after the Rhodes network (all the connections and servers and mail systems and everything). In true geek style, we aren't getting interviewed for this job (well possibly, but that comes later). Instead we've been given A Task. It looks like this:

 

A nice little system which is running FreeBSD which I've never used in my life, and I now have to install Apache, mailman, Postfix, etc etc before the end of Sunday (meaning midnight). Fun things. What makes life amazing is that Rhodes uses a proxy. That just makes connecting to the internet (and installing things via internet) Pretty Tough.

(If you have no idea what I'm talking about, then you're basically on the same page as me).

So why did I apply for this job again? Not because I know anything. I applied because I really want to learn. I do have some idea of what these things are all about, but I want practical knowledge of it. And I'm gaining that just by doing this task. Google is my friend, yo! Except that nothing seems to work...


Yeah. I should probably get back to it. It's almost 5am now - that means it's already Sunday and I still don't know what I'm doing wrong. I also still have to finish my project, and maths tut, and hopefully sleep at some point too. Or maybe just drink more coffee coffee coffee..