My neighbor is out of town, and I'm handling his mail until he gets back. Apart from a large package (furniture?), his pile is identical to mine, viewed as a pile. Advertisements in a huge bundle, with little visible to distinguish. Mass production, lack of distinction. Postal mail is another tool of showing how dehumanized we have become. I wish that all I recieved was mail that was personal. I guess I need to start calling the people sending me this junk again and get myself taken off their lists.

Another of my friends without much of a homebase on the internet has joined me on my server. Hurrah. A welcome to Justin.

At work, I found out that my way of doing backups was inefficient, so I'm redoing it. Unfortunately, it takes forever. On the upside, by consolidating all the static content onto one disk, I should never need to backup that disk again, meaning one less disk swap during regular backups, provided that nobody ends up digging into the static content. This is a very good thing. I already have taken that backup home, and am redoing all the rest of the backups. Also, on Friday, I ran the first subject in my second fMRI experiment. It went pretty smoothly, I think (although I still need to look at the results).

Relating to the backups, note that, at least on Fedora2, mkfs.ext3 does some very bad things if you run it on partitions that don't have the right partition type. I ran it on partitions of type fat32, and it swallowed all my RAM (causing the kernel to kill a lot of other stuff) and then blocked in kernelland for about half an hour before I could kill it. Oops. Be careful about that.

Last night, I got a *lot* of sleep, catching up on what sleep debt I had from last week. I feel great, and it's fairly early in the morning, for a weekend, for me to be up.

So, this coming week is election week! Everyone go out and vote for Kerry, not because Kerry is the right guy for the job, but because BushJr will win otherwise, and he's a lot worse for the job. If you can think of a way to do it, push for a reform in this country to move towards coalition-style government, as the two-party system is very bad. Also, wear something reasonably warm, and try to spend some time outside this weekend, because, at least where I am, the colour and smell of the leaves is incredible.