my flickr contact mafaldablue posted a beautiful set of photos of matera, which is one of my favorite places in italy. it's the cave town. you can read some info i've wriitten about matera here, and see some photos i took here (captions include "you've got dead monk on your ass," so you know it's worth it).

kriston and i are concerned about the fate of one of our favorite sites, unfogged, after the revelation that ogged apparently reset the tivo:

pablohoney: dude did you read that ogged reset the tivo
Cappseus: yup
Cappseus: unfogged is over
pablohoney: totally

it was good while it lasted.

sigh. well, tommy is back safe and sound in d.c., and i just went on an hour and a half cleaning spree to keep the bad sad feelings at bay. still, though, we had a pretty great weekend. it followed the trend of us being ENORMOUS GLUTTONS every time we spend any time together since i moved to chicago. we like to eat out a lot, so when we have the chance, i guess we just go on an enormous eating out binge to make up for all the other times i, as a poor graduate student and he, as a tired web programmer, end up eating lousy dinners at the end of the day. mmm, mac n cheese!

luckily my neighborhood gives us a lot of delicious eating options. i imagine my following recommendations are old hat to anyone who's lived in chicago for a decent amount of time, but if you're new to the area, maybe they'll help you out. you can find addresses and more info at metromix.com.

I've been meaning to post this for a while: ptunnel is an application that allows you to tunnel internet traffic over ICMP pings. Allow me to explain why this is cool.

Pings are the simplest way of testing connectivity over the internet. They're part of a protocol called ICMP that's used for diagnostic purposes and little else. Ptunnel reimplements TCP/IP b— the internet's main protocol — by tacking your messages' content onto the end of pings. You run a server on another machine that receives the tunnelled packets, converts them to normal internet traffic, sends them out, gets a response, and sends it back to you over the ICMP tunnel.

Why is this useful? Mostly, it's not. But ICMP is frequently the only thing that can get through airport/coffee shop-style wifi hotspots prior to purchasing time with a credit card. ICMP traffic is allowed through because doing so makes service technicians' lives easier. Now that fun fact can make your life slightly cheaper.

I haven't tested it myself, though. The problem is that you need to run ptunnel on a server that can receive ICMP — and most consumer routers aren't designed to let you forward ICMP traffic from the internet to machines on your LAN. I suppose I could make my linux server the network's DMZ host, but that would result in all incoming TCP traffic getting through, as well. Given the lousy passwords I have on my mp3 shared directories, that's not a great idea. Besides, even with a DMZ set I'm not sure that the router wouldn't just answer the incoming pings itself.

Maybe I'll try to get ptunnel running on the router itself — it is a Linux machine in its own right, after all. It would be pretty fun to see if Starbucks can be beaten this way.

Via DCist I see that Butterstick now has his own wikipedia page. Neat! The only problem: the Bandit the Panda people have added their own editorializing. "Bandit is also a popular name for the panda"!? Please. You're going to make people think wikipedia isn't trustworthy!

To be honest, I'm not incredibly keen on getting drawn into a juvenile wikipedia fracas, and probably wouldn't have responded if not for one thing that particularly galled me: the Bandit people constructed a sentence grouping the two t-shirt stores together, and listing an aggregate sum of money raised for the zoo. For the record, cafepress.com/bstick stands at just under $2k donated to FONZ. How much Bandit merchandise has been moved, I wonder? Well, I couldn't help myself, and adjusted the wikipedia sentence to break out the individual store totals. I'd encourage them to provide their own details.

I'll happily admit that this is embarrassingly juvenile. But I can't help myself. As I said before, I don't begrudge anyone the right to conduct their own stupid internet fad — all I'd ask is that they refrain from stealing from mine.

so, this facebook.com thing. i'm doing it. sort of. i became aware of facebook's existence a couple of years ago when my brother, then still an undergraduate at UVa, talked about it. i basically got out of it that it was a friendster for college kids, which sounded fun, but SO BELOW wise old me.

well, now that i am a graduate student, and many of the people in my class happen to be fresh-outta-college kids who are facebook connoisseurs, i have been forced to create a facebook profile in order to appear hip and not-ancient and to maintain my new media internets cred. it is hard, but i am doing it. but generally, i don't understand why facebook is so popular, except that you can stalk people...which you can do with any social networking site. why do college kids prefer it over friendster? maybe because friendster sucks balls and is clunky and cluttered and difficult to use? hmm. maybe. facebook's design and features are pretty slick, i'll give it that - i especially like the photo album/upload features (though flickr is still superior to any photo features any site has going on). i guess its main appeal lies in the school affiliation. undergrad loyalty is a super-strong theme, and facebook takes advantage of that. beyond that, i don't really see a huge difference between it and friendster or myspace. but please, god, don't make me have to create a myspace profile, too.

for those who have a college email, you can access my facebook profile here.

i'm sitting in a coffee shop in lakeview with tommy right now (he had to work today, so we're taking advantage of the place's free wifi, and i don't have class till 2). i'm sipping coffee and browsing this facebook thing (post on it and how i am seriously an old lady to come later).

two construction guys from a site next door walked in to get coffee and are sitting down at a nearby table. one of them has a ringtone. not just any ringtone. the WORST RINGTONE ON THE FACE OF THIS EARTH. it is "shake dat laffy taffy." it is on at an abominably loud volume. it has gone off no less than four times in the 15 minutes he has been there. and he takes his sweet time answering it.

just wanted a record for posterity of how my first-ever homicide will be justified.