Ever have one of those nights?

The In-Law Christmas gathering was at our house last night – we have the only place big enough to hold it. Over all it went fine except for the normal in-law in-fighting. I am honestly thankful to come from a small and very close family. We don’t go through all this melodrama. In any case, everyone eventually left for their respective homes (other than my MIL who is staying here for a few days). Everyone else headed to bed which gave me some time to relax. Finally I too was ready and crashed.

Instead of peaceful sleep though, my mind decided to kick into overdrive. I have no idea why. In my dreams I was writing parallel programs to run on a grid cluster and comparing them. First, I rarely program much and when I do it usually is something to automate some sysadmin task. The last time I wrote anything to run in parallel was several years ago as part of a grad course project. At about 5am, I told myself that I needed to think about something else and found myself having just been hired by the U. of Nebraska CS dept. their senior sysadmin. I hadn’t even told my current boss yet. Huh? I spent 6 months in Oklahoma ages ago and there is nothing out there that would attract me. While many may make fun of calling Indy a city, I prefer and nice sized metro area to lots of rural space. Finally got up at 7am though I hope to crash again in a bit.

Now that I am typing this, I noticed there is a very tiny thread holding it all together. Perhaps two intertwined ones. Last night in the background, the IU Butler basketball game was on. During halftime was a 5 minute segment about IU and it’s efforts in "Cybersecurity." Most of the people talking were people I work with there to include my second "boss" in the IU security research center. Earlier yesterday I got an email from one of the other associate directors of that center concerning my graduate work next semester (after eons, I finally applied and was accepted to grad school – another story). His big area concerns phishing (if you read slashdot, you may have seen something last summer about an experiment done on the IU students). Before I get started on readings he is going to send me, he wanted me to start thinking about what things could be removed from a system that could make it more vulnerable to attack. I think that has been percolating in the back of my mind all day.

Hmmm… maybe I am ready to go back to sleep now and after reading this, so are you. Sweet dreams…