Finding a school that fits me wasn’t exactly the easiest.  I don’t want to attend full time and I especially do not want to physically be at the school.  I do not mind taking exams at the university physically, but finding a university that allows the use of a proctor is always a plus.

Well, good news, I found a school!  I am not 100% sure what I want to take, but I’m looking at the Engineering-Computer Science camp.  We shall see how it goes and see how much I can get done

Start date: August 2008

On a positive side, let’s talk about fun ways to mess around with metermaids!  Back in Ottawa, there is a LOT of snow.  Plows are fairly active, but it is not uncommon to find 5-6 feet of snow on the side of the road with a car under it.   Generally, if there is room, they send a towtruck to drag the car from under the snow.  Before they tow, they usually ticket the car.  This is where the fun starts.

 Required tools:

• snow shovels
• car door
• snow bank on the side of a street

Essentially, you will be building a snowman, just a lot bigger, and shaped like a car.  Our first step is to place the door in the snowbank; you really want to get this at least 1 foot deep in the snow.  After the door has been placed, you want to shape it properly to give a “natural” look. 

Once you are done the door, you can easily start working on the rest of the car.  What you are working on is a simulated car under this snow.  Always assume a foot of “grace”, so it will be a bit bigger, and way more believable.  If you are successful in pulling this off, add some random car parts to give it a more real “feel”.  Also, spray as much water as you can to really harden up the snow.  Getting a 2inch think layer of ice will ensure guarenteed laughter.

That’s about it!  Sit by and keep and eye on the “car”.  Make sure to have a camera ready to capture the fun!  I will post pictures tomorrow, too late tonight to get anything clear.

Before I give an example of a round of this game, I must warn: It is a very geeky game and it can become very addictive. 

Example of my last round played, that I can remember… You are brought from the year 2000 and placed in 50,000 BC.  You have no tools with you and your task is to generate electricity.  You do not have to power anything fancy; you just need to create electricity with some amperage (no static electricity).  You have plenty of firewood, stone, unrefined steel, natural earth magnets, and copper ore. 

There is not much else to it: find a creative way to get the task done.  There are many ways of getting the job done and you do not always need to use all the items that were given to you.  You cannot make up items, but natural resources should be assumed to be available (in this scenario).  Discussions with other players are frowned upon, but confirmation with the leader is generally ‘okay’ to make sure you are on the right track.The above scenario was simple and involved creating a stove, forge, developing advanced foundries and finally refining the ore.   From there, you would create some form of simple generator and you would have an output in AC.  Normally, most rounds are not laid out this easy and the results can be much more “random” and unpredictable.    I have never attempted to put this game online or attempt it in a digital format. 

If I get enough requests (say, 10+?), I will create a separate page and post rounds there.  So, people coming in to geek out, do not have to catch a random and useless article!

What do I plan to do with this server?  I have no idea.  I put in 1TB of storage on a RAID 10, 4×500GB drives, SATA2.  There is about 2GB of ram and it is running Windows 2003 Server as its host and VMWare server running another Windows 2003 Server and Debian J  I will most likely use it as a form of storage and offload my web traffic on it when my other servers are overloaded. 

Nothing like hosting your own backup solution, just need to upgrade my encryption algorithm:  3DES (encrypt/decrypt/encrypt, 1 KEY).