Holidays, Earthquakes, & Ubuntu

Merry Christmas belated to you all, we are currently enjoying ourselves in Beijing for these lovely Christian holidays. I wonder if the origins of that word come from holy days. If anyone has an answer to that, much appreciated. We've been doing a lot of eating, we bought some things for our expansive apartment, Meng Zi lost his cell phone and China telecom is proving the idiocy of its customer care employees as he tries to replace his sim card. Turns out 45 RMB was used on his phone after he misplaced it, possibly in a cab, possibly in a pedicab. Who knows? We were thinking about how a rural guy just found the phone and was calling back to his hometown: "Hey, yea doing well in Beijing mom, got me a cell phone. That's right. No no, talk all you want, doing well I can handle it."

An earthquake in Taiwan supposedly busted the G-damn DSL and to quote Nathan Explosion from Metalocalypse, "now it takes ten minutes to get to tits." Though really my problem is FTP access to the servers I rent (thanks for the help Harr, you da man) since I have to show the companies I make web sites for what the hell it is I've been doing with their money. If you know a little bit about the way the internet works you can figure out that this doesn't make any sense, not being able to get to websites and servers in North America just because of a severed connection in one location doesn't make any sense. The partial origins of the internet in Arpanet and the way that system worked explains it all. Check it out:

Pretend that puzzle pieces A through E are computers, both client and server computers. If puzzle node computer A wants to communicate with puzzle node computer C, then it can go right on through the connection it shares with E. But what if Node E got washed out by a , oh I don't know, an earthquake? No problem, A can go through connection B or D. B is down? D is down? Well what the ef? Then I can't get to node C. Except of course, the real internet is made up of more than five nodes. Its made up of let me see, one, add five hundred thousand, multiply by...carry the one million...You get the idea.

On another note, Meng Zi may be working on a Linux distribution project, version code name "Ubuntu" and there is some serious hype about it, in fact people thate created blogspot, the google empire, hosted a summit about it recently. If you don't know what Linux is, it is an operating system like Windows is or OSX is, but it was made with the sole purpose of being free. You still pay for linux packages, but the price is significantly lower and what you pay for is not the product but for support issues or the convenience of a bundled package, like open office (free program compatible with microsoft office suite), graphics editing programs, little games where you can be a penguin racing down an ice chute, etc. This fella Mark Shuttleworth had something to say about it, but seeing as the earthquake has disrupted some server access (my ass) I can't check it out. You people feel free to do so then tell me how it goes. Christmas was great, looking forward to the new year, happy holidays to you all and all of our friends participating in the holiday diaspora from India to Georgia, USA. PAX.