Questions from Bronzite

Well asked to ask people questions. I took him up on his offer. Other people are certainly welcome to ask me more questions, and if you really want I could try to think of questions to ask you.

1. If you had the opportunity to have a company sponsor your Ph.D., and living expenses while you go it, but you had to quit your current job, would you do it?

Possibly, but I think no. I’m quite content with where I am now, and I think I want to leave the world of academia for a while at least. Also, there’d be a lot of other factors involved in the decision, such as where I could live, what the topic was on, how much I got along with my advisor, and so on.

2. Now that you’ve had the opportunity to run several Magic tournaments, do you find you like administering or playing in tournaments better?

This is a hard one. I think I’m better at running them, and I enjoy the game mostly for its rules interactions and depth of strategy. However, it’s still a fun game to play.

Perhaps a better way to answer is this: tonight I intend to go a store called Card Stop in Dudley to see if I can help set up new sanctioned tournaments there on a regular basis, and tomorrow I’ll be judging at the Champions of Kamigawa prerelease in Boston. I have no immediate plans to attend a Magic tournament as a player.

3. Do you worry about the security of your home network on a regular basis?

Well, “worry” seems like a bit strong of a word. However, I make sure to stay up on date on my patches, subscribe to the security bulletin email list for both Microsoft and FreeBSD, and visit the SANS Internet Storm Center page daily. I’ve very carefully constructed my firewall rules, and run my web server on a non-standard port to avoid web server worms and dumb hackers. When I saw “failed password attempt for root” in my log several hundred times in one day from the same IP, I blocked that IP at my firewall despite the fact that root can’t log in via SSH directly. I regularly use passwords with at least 17 characters.

4. Now that appropriately sized hard disks are hitting the market, should we expect TERRA to replace EDGAR soon?

I recently bought a new computer for Jessi, and my computer suits my needs just fine. I don’t expect to purchase another computer within the next few years. After that time, I will evaluate my computing needs further.

My next big computing-related purchase will be wiring our new house. I plan on having several network ports per room, and at least a dozen in the main living room.

5. When Castle Cooper(tm) is finally completed, what’s the first thing you’re going to move in?

That’s an odd question, as it may be hard to define “finally completed”. Some rooms may be vacant and unfinished for quite some time until we need them. I would suspect that we’re going to be moving in furniture and such at some point, along with several vanloads of our accumulated stuff.