Although most normal people when it is nice out go outside, as a Freshman I tended not to. I sat in my
room and played with my computer. While all the guys were screaming down the hall, "ULTIMATE FRISBEE!" I
sat and typed away, accomplishing very little.
Several days before I left for Highlander some of my friends from home said, "You need Linux on that
computer." They sat there and did strange things with weird CDs to my computer for a few hours and finally said,
"There, it's done."
It was. When I turned on the computer and waited for a while, all that showed up on the screen was a large
mess and then
Linux 2.0.28 (tom.houghton.edu)
tom login:
from where I would have to type in my name and password. Then the following would appear.
No given system, no matter how good, will work.
----Crazy Eddies 43rd Law of Computer Architecture
tom:~$
this was completely unencouraging. I knew nothing of Linux and had to figure out a lot. Soon I found about
Houghton's Firewall and all the fuss that was. This was all going to take a lot of work. I spent hours upon hours
trying to get it to work. Day after day I tried and tried to make things go the way I wanted them too. After several
weeks it got to the point where my dreams looked like this:
10.0.60.32 --> 10.0.0.5 --> 128.118.202.101
Dreaming everything in IP addresses. That night I woke up at about 3:00 a.m. and realized I needed a change in my
life. I walked over to the computer and turned it off.
"A week of abstinence," I said to Luke.
"Wow, that's admirable," said Luke, "is it really neccesary?"
"I think so, I was dreaming in IP addresses," I said.
"I should pray over you," he said, and he did. "That the demons of IP would leave his mind." First time I
knew that the KJV referenced the demons of IP addresses.
I felt the demons leave my body, and my GPA drop about a point. Because that was when I discovered that
I didn't hate everyone as much as I thought I had. Suddenly dozens of women were chasing after me and I had
millions of friends.
I walked down the hall that afternoon and heard Christafari playing in someone's room. Christafari was my
favorite reggae Christian group. I looked into the room, and nervously realized it was Justin's room. I remembered
my prayers before about being friendly, and took a dive in.
"Hi," I said, "Christafari, huh?"
"Yup," he said, and looked back at his laptop.
"So," I said, "You like Christifari?"
"Yup," he said, and looked back down at his laptop. He had a computer enshrined as well, but didn't seem
as in need of a obsession demon removed from his life as I had.
"They have three CDs ya know," I said.
His world was shattered by the statement, and he looked up from his laptop and with a little interest said,
"Really?"
"Yeah, they made a 'Reggae Worship' CD for some other label before they got popular," I explained.
"Cool," he said. He didn't look back down at his laptop. I think he didn't hate me anymore. He didn't look
like a Hasidic Jew so much this time. And wasn't quite as intimidating. Though he was full fledged in camo.
"Nice grenades," I commented, as we listened to the beautiful reggae tones.
"Yeah," said Justin, "They're demilitarized, I got them at an army surplus shop."
"What's demilitarized?" I asked.
"That means," explained Justin, "That they won't blow up anymore."
"Oh," I said a bit disappointed, "Well, they look awful cool sittin' there."
Sometimes my life feels like some emotional Christian girly drama. "Some guy looked at me weird, he
must hate me." "I hate him too." "Hating him is wrong, I should love him anyway." "He likes the same music as
me!" (Squeals of emotional delight.) I'm disgusted with myself. Here I am sitting here, writing with my shirt off
and my fat belly hanging over my shorts, squealing like a little girl. It's what I do for fun in the afternoon.
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