Sunday afternoon after the ballgame I was leaving my buddy Marty Spazarollia's house, amidst a minor blizzard, and the 86 Escort didn't want to go into gear, any gear. That's odd, no? Quite odd. I let the car run and kept trying and finally I was able to cram her into first and head out on the open road. She let me shift gears but wasn't real happy about it, for sure.

As such I took her in to see my Ace Number One mechanic yesterday, Resmo Zambiliacoric. Resmo called me and told me the "master clutch cylinder" was low on fluid, which he remedied by cramming a bunch of approved fluid in there. Resmo told me he couldn't find a leak anywhere (that's good and bad news) so we should just play it by ear and if it happens again we'll have to replace the MCC. Bleh. I didn't ask what that would cost but I'm assuming any repair that involves replacing a MASTER something or other is gonna lean towards the higher end of the scale.

She's shifting like new now, silky smooth and fast, but I'm supposed to drive 1,200 miles on Christmas so that'll be the test. I think I may buy some clutch fluid and leave it in the trunk just in case. Be prepared - that was the Cub Scout motto, as much as I recall, as they tossed me out of the Scouts after a couple months due to a minor misunderstanding and whatnot.

Then, to make matters even more worser, when I got home to my room at the YMCA Rehab Centre it was strangely quiet and the clocks were all blinking 12. It turns out the blizzard knocked out the power for a while. Not a big deal, right. So I went to power my Looonux box back on, as it serves as my Internet proxy server/firewall. I pushed the power button and instead of hearing the hard drive start to whir and beep and crap I heard a little clicking noise. Click, click, click click. That's odd, no? Very odd.

I turned her off and poked about a bit then turned her back on again and this time nothing at all happened. That's odd, no? So it looks like she's dead. I don't know if it's the power supply (my best guess) or maybe the motherboard is fried, either way I'm not going to throw any money at her, she (PII 866) lived a good long life, serving up millions of bits over the years. So now I have to hook my Windows box up directly to the Internet until I decide what to do and that's an exploit just waiting to happen, eh?

In other news I've been kicking around what kind of project I want to undertake on the U60. I was thinking of making some kind of IP Proxy Spoofer, something that you connect to which takes each packet and changes the IP info, then sends it back out to the intended destination. Easy enough to do, right, but the problem is how to get them to send the packet back to you instead of the bogus IP adr. Therein lies the difficulty.

Now this is purely for the sake of playing about, and not for nefarious uses, so don't get your panties all balled up here. I mean, I'm an adult now and I haven't done anything stupid for over a decade now. Although who among us doesn't look back and fondly recall the time you crashed the Continental Airways reservation system by utilizing the buffer overflow in Netscape 2.0, but I digress. Anyways, since I've always been fascinated with networking and the like I'll come up with something packet related to hack on. I plan on keeping my name out of this one so I'll release the software to all the Husers too. Course you'll have to be running Solaris to use it.

The Husi FFL Championship game takes place this week, with the HuSi Maulers taking on alprazolams Chumps. I'm looking forward to a good match and with any luck I'll come home a winner!! All hail the Maulers!!! Down with the Chumps!!!