Venture Capitalists are Made of Money. And Breakfast.

[edit: forgot my footnotes!]

Here at the Mad Scientists' Home, we have taken to renting out our spacious, well-rigged auditorium from time to time as the NIH aren't nearly the sugar daddies they used to be and, well, Mad Science ain't cheap, nor is a shiny new mortgage.

This morning, and afternoon, we're pimping out to some venture capitalists with whose name, Gentle Readers, I shall not burden you. They wanted a pet IT lackey, and the tips must be nice, because my manager has been in there, as their lackey, since seven this morning.

The Bay Area's plutocracy, naturally, moves on its stomach. Being plutocrats, they can afford a most excellent breakfast spread, and being the Bay Area, it's primarily reasonably healthy stuff: a full bagel & lox tray (yes, with capers), bitty quiches, sausage, some sort of rolled omelette logs, berries, fruit, and yogurt, and so on.

At quarter of nine, I enter, accompanied by a Mad Scientist/Knitter^*, who wonders who you have to know to get a piece of that.

As I round the receptionist's desk, I find out. The early crew of Administration (your Purchasing, Accounting, usw) is flocking, en masse towards the spread^†.

It is the honor and privilege of the Administrative Staff to clean up leftovers from such buffet presentations.

I drop off anla-shok, my humble Powerbook G4, and come about to join them.

"We shall fall upon it like ravens!" I declared with good cheer amidst the happily babbling, mildly orderly, throng.

"Shh!" hissed someone who cared.

"We shall fall upon it like very quiet ravens," I amended, as I loaded up my plate for Second Breakfast.

This is the second day in a row that the wolves have left us a nice kill: yesterday, a vendor show came with an embarrassment of small burritos, quesadillas, chips, salsa, and guacamole, and lo, it was both Lunch and Afternoon Tea.

The fruit usually disappears last; I shall have to see if I cannot also procure Elevensies from yon carcass...

-- Lorrie

^* - She had a fresh new pair of socks on her DPN's, in a lovely sage heather wool. A bit scratchy when knit up, but we expect it to soften in the wash.

^† - usw is short for und so weiter, which German for et cetera, and therefore we have had our Inevitable Dash of Pretension for the morning with a trilingual sentence, woohoo. 8-)

LiveJournal E-Mail Address Disabled; Lorien Software Upgrade

I have disabled my LiveJournal E-Mail forwarder--it was getting me nothing but spam, and was only used by people who didn't yet know my real address.

This is only a feature that applies to Paid and Permanent members: your usedname at livejournal.com will forward to your real e-mail address, which is great except now it's a favored target for dictionary spam attacks--i.e., "throw a bunch of letters @livejournal.com, some are bound to work". This, by the way, is one of the several reasons why large free webmail providers (Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail, et al) are particularly spam-prone. It's not that Microsoft sells your e-dress, it's that any alphabet soup is more likely to work than not.

Should you, Gentle Paid or Permanent Member, find yourself plagued by this feature and have no real use for it, descend into LiveJournal's dank, drippy, geeky sub-basement and issue the following comment:

set no_mail_alias 1

--then click "Submit"

Should you ever wish to enable this again, go back to the basement and say:

set no_mail_alias 0

---

In other news, a whole pile of software was just upgraded on lorien, my server. Until I can dedicate the days required to migrate everything to the new snazzy hardware, the best I can do is patch what I've got. Thus, with the new release of Debian GNU/Linux, I have upgraded lorien to 3.0/etch from 2.1/sarge.

What that means to you is that stuff might have broken. wolfs_daugher cannot access my webmail, but I can. How's the weather out there, O Flying Monkeys of the Lazyweb?

Also, as usual, if any of you want a e-mail address that doesn't come with prying corporate eyes of any of that crazy government bullpucky, drop me a line (or comment) and we'll talk.

-- Lorrie