November 2001

Thanksgiving this year was a bit different for me. Although I am going back to Cairo for Christmas, it really isn’t practical to do that for the five days of Thanksgiving break. But luckily, Michelle and her family invited me to spend Thanksgiving with them in Pittsburgh.

I was a bit anxious at first at the prospect of meeting Michelle’s family. However, they warmly welcomed me and made me feel at home. I really couldn’t have asked for a better Thanksgiving experience away from home.

Hopefully I will get my pictures back to scan. When I do, there should be some good shots of downtown Pittsburgh and various candids of the vacation. Look for those soon! On the last day there, we took a cable car to the top of a mountain overlooking downtown Pittsburgh. The clouds parted for just enough time to allow for some nice pictures.

The drive back was a bit frustrating. On top of not really wanting to return to the cafeteria food awaiting us at RPI, we had to drive in pouring rain the entire time. We would get in front of the storm driving east, and then have to drive north for a few miles only to find ourselves back in the heart of it.

But we made it back safe and sound. It has been hard to go back to eating the cafeteria food after five days of home cooked delights. But I’m definitely looking forward to going home for Christmas. As I write this, it’s only three weeks from now that I will board the plane!!

Just as I thought I had everything moved into my new room, I found that my web server would no longer work on its assigned static IP address.

At RPI students who wish to can request a static IP address for their desktop computers in the dorm rooms. Many people choose to host gaming servers or whatever. My desktop hosts LemDesk and a few other websites.

The process for requesting a new static IP address takes several days, hence the outage of the LemDesk server. But now we’re back in operation and working 24/7 once again!

Over the past several weeks, one cannot watch CNN or even check their e-mail without hearing something about the recent Anthrax envelopes appearing in corporate mailrooms in the Eastern United States.

A couple of weeks ago, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released safe handling instructions for suspicious mail articles. This statement quickly disseminated throughout the RPI campus, appearing in everyone’s mailbox and posted about every 2 meters in the mailrooms.

Now just yesterday, November 2nd, the RPI mailroom announced that it will be closed indefinitely while they investigate ways to improve ventilation and educate mailroom employees in safe handling techniques. The announcement came in response to a statement from the Centers for Disease Control.

This is definitely a major overreaction. First of all, the attacks thus far have taken place at political and media headquarters, not at university campuses. Furthermore, the kind of disruption that is caused my mailroom closure is exactly the kind of attack on infrastructure that a biological (or any other) terrorist attack is supposed to evoke.

We’ll have to see how long the mailroom in actuality remains closed. However for a place that processes 200+ packages and thousands of letters per day, this will definitely cause a major backup and disruption in general throughout the campus.

The Onion said it best with their little editorial about the American public’s response to recent anthrax incidents.