We'll start off by saying why FedEx rocks. That screenshot should pretty much speak for itself - something shipped ground yesterday evening arrives today and even with residential delivery to top it off. They always seem amazingly quick. Like stuff shipped from Malaysia arriving the next afternoon (don't remember how that was shipped, but it was cheap and happened multiple times). Anyways, that something was the package of electronic parts I ordered Sunday. I ended up pulling out some of them and having a little fun with the soldering iron. The goal was to get a VU meter built out of an LED 10 segment ar graph, a LM3916 IC, a resister, and some wire. Somehow even though I was typing half the time trying to figure out some perl craziness it even worked the first time. Now I just have all the rest to do and figure out a permanant way to power them. Work went well today, I probably caused well over 20,000 emails to travel around the mailing list server. I now have multiple forms of temporary archives for logging, spam detection, duplicate message detection (if someone sends the same message to multiple addresses for the same list, it'll only let one through), and a few other cool things. Plus we started talking about storage possibilities. When you start getting into massive amounts of user data and high availability there start to be some really cool things you can do. After work I hung out at the Help Desk for a bit, watching (and playing one level) of this thing called "flea circus". Weird game, but sorta interesting since it involves strategy and is a lot harder than it looks. Then it loops back to the beginning. And since I've been writing this, someone decided to start probing a few of the announcement email list addresses apparently trying to send a message about a soccer game to all the students at Bethel from a hotmail account. He probably wasn't expecting to get a nice email to his Bethel account from one of the sysadmins at 1am commenting about who to contact for existing lists and new email list procedures. Somehow I'm guessing I won't get a reply. :)