Au secours!
Well, I'm off for a lovely weekend (more like week, as I rather recently discovered) just outside Paris. Gabriel and I just barely made it to the train this evening (having forgotten that trains are dependably 15 minutes late) and then we had a relatively calm ride to the Paris station. The route the train takes along the cote d'azur and through provence really is beautiful.
I arrived at l'Ecole Polytechnique with high hopes, after Gabriel's insistences that it was the best school in the world. Little did I know that I would be trapped in an over-secure internet prison. After several frustrating minutes attempting to get my laptop to connect (through rounds and rounds of alternate DNS servers, proxies, complicated systems for calculating one's IP, and my computer deciding once again to let "SYSTEM" take 100% cpu for 10 minutes) we finally succeeded. I gleefully went to check my mail... only to discover that smtp seems to be blocked. And ssh. Telnet is out of the question, not to mention irc, aim, and icq. What the hell? How can these people exist without at least ssh to link them (securely) to the rest of the world?
I guess that's why students here are so successful: there's nothing to distract them. With no girls (well, 13% is pretty insignificant) and no real internet, the campus seems to be in its own little universe.
So, um, with these circumstances in mind, I humbly request that my dear readers send love letters to my berkeley address for the next few days (I'm not posting it here out of fear for spam-trolling bots, but you should be able to find it if you know me), as it's much easier to check on the web.
Last note: Romanian is an odd language. Listening to Gabriel speak it with his friend who picked us up from the station, I had the impression that I was hearing snatches of French over and over again. I guess it's a combination of it being another Romantic language, and the fact that I'm used to Gabriel's Romanian accent in French, so they start to sound the same.
Oh, real last note: when I referred to him in a previous post as a "crazy Romanian", I think I did so because the words go so well together. I mean, wouldn't you agree? But now I know that he really is crazy. :)