Flashes of Panic

This seems to be the week of stumbling around things I thought I was good at, or at least was in the groove with. Not only did I flail in the pool last night, but now I’m getting back to the final configuration of Kinglet and I’m flailing around at that. First I tried to compile an FTP daemon only to discover that, paranoid that I am, I hadn’t put a compiler on this box. (Make the script kiddies compile their own binaries for their rootkits, I say.)

I almost committed to a configuration rebuild from the CDs before I figured out that not only was an older version of the daemon already installed from my first setup, but I could download a decent binary of the current version as a package.

I stumble around things like this, while there’s a flyer on my desk for USENIX ‘04. Now, that looks awfully appealing, to be sure, but days like today, I wonder if I’m even qualified for the training track. (Or if my employers see my job as one that would justify attending something like this. I don’t think they consider me a systems admin.)

Let alone… refereed papers and invited talks? I read the summaries of the papers from LISA ‘03 that were published in ;login: and they almost made sense. How do I bootstrap myself up to the point of understanding them? Well, education. Remind me to discuss that catch-22 sometime.