Pigsflew.com

When the day came, I went to the spot and waited.

And I seriously pity anyone who didn’t go.

They had jugglers. Live music. The best jungle gym ever. There were playpen balls and random toys. There was a mattress that got signed by Randall and I jumped off the jungle gym onto it. There was a dancing velociraptor. There was a dancing velociraptor.

This was amazing.

I’m doing research this semester on the structure of the internet, specifically by studying bandwidth information between bittorrent users. In order to do this, I’ve been collecting packets this morning using WinDump.exe, a windows port of the unix tcpdump command.

This program effectively spews out information for every packet, in or out, that touches the selected interface. Here’s something I noticed this morning:

The internet ebbs and flows. Like the endpoint computer is a pristine beach on the sea of information, packets rolling in and out in bunches; the local computer responds to everything that comes in, and a quarter of a second passes before the next incoming wave arrives. And while it may be something people have remarked upon before, this is the first time I realized how true it is: I’m watching the waves crash in and out as I write this. If the browser is like scuba gear for safely navigating the water, then TCPDump and WinDump are the beach towel, so I can sit here, sip my powerade, and enjoy the view.

this is nice.

The ocean rolled onward in all directions, disappearing under itself in the distance. The sun pushed forcibly on the barrelman’s shoulders, threatening him with the daunting fall from the crow’s nest.

His eyes were tired. The light flashing off of the waves had filled them with dull purple, and when he did occasionally glance at his maps and the tools in his hands, the lines he had drawn only moments ago were lost to his vision. “I wonder what they’d do if I told them we’re lost”, he said aloud to himself, but quietly.