Welcome to Smuggle Me

I’m personally a complete lover of sports. However, I do have a specific bias to playing Ultimate Frisbee. It is by far my favorite sport to play and I probably spend too much time playing it. My excuse is that is my plan on how to stay skinny.

I think on one of my ultimate frisbee email lists(probably las vegas ultimate frisbee) I got an email with a link to a google video of a new frisbee sport called DiscHoops. The video wasn’t the best, but it was pretty good for an ameteur video and the game definitely intrigued me. I found a better description of the sport and it’s new rules at the official DiscHoops website. I really can see some good points about the game.

I’m not sure why the website has to try to knock ultimate frisbee as a game to promote DiscHoops though. Why can’t both games coexist and have people playing both games. That part of the website was a bit of a let down for me. It reminds me of how society thinks that 2 people can’t be great because if you are great then that means I’m not great. It is so completely messed up. I digress.

DiscHoops looks like fun. The major problem I have with it is getting 2 goals and enough people that know the rules to get started playing. Ultimate can be played with bags or sandals as the goals and many more people know how to play it right. However, you can be sure that if I see a game of DiscHoops being played I’ll be asking if I can get in and play too. In fact, that’s how I started playing ultimate. Oh the days of feeling like I know how to play a sport and then realizing that I didn’t have a clue.

I found a great story about a great use of Xbox as a server. Stories like this happen all the time. Education seems espescially prone to these stories because they have students who do the craziest things.

Public Universities are always running on a limited budget which means they sometimes come up with “innovative” solutions. A couple of years back, an X-Box with some variant of Linux installed had been put in the server room to support a subject designed to teach computer-illiterate Philosophy students how to build their own web pages. This unorthodox platform was chosen because one of the techs was a Linux enthusiast and had convinced “the powers that be” that a cheap web server solution for this subject could be implemented using an X-Box rather than a standard PC or server. Grateful to save money where they could, the project was approved.

Several years later and most of the staff in the department had moved on to bigger and better things. There was a new manager and a brand new set of helpdesk techs. The department’s Unix administrator was one of the few people left who knew what the X-Box was used for. Each year before the second semester class began he powered up the X-Box and updated its software. Few of the other staff ventured into the server room so there was little reason to wonder why an X-Box was sitting on the rack.

Five weeks into the “Web pages for Philosophy students” class the excrement encountered the rotary cooling device. The IT department’s help desk started receiving calls from Philosophy students who were unable to access their web projects.

Flummoxed, the help desk staff escalated the job ticket to the Unix administrator. Unable to remotely access the X-Box, he trotted off to the server room. He was surprised to find that the X-Box was no longer present. He did a quick search of the room but failed to find it. As it did not look as though someone had broken in to the room, there had to be another explanation.

The administrator went down to the new manager’s office to report the missing X-Box. The new manager was quiet for a moment and then sheepishly informed the administrator that it was he who had removed the X-Box. The manager had thought the X-Box was just a games console that the IT departments staff used for recreation when it got quiet. Noticing that the X-Box hadn’t been moved from the server room for some time and that his son was going to be at home on school holidays for the next two weeks, the manager decided to take the X-Box home so that his son would have something to entertain himself with. The manager then drove home and retrieved the X-Box. The administrator got a labeling machine and plastered the words “This is actually a server” all across the console.