Happy Thanksgiving!
It's been a long term.
Are you:
- counting down the days?
- missing home?
- sick of Slobdell food?
- mind-numbed by
LSC flicks?
- frustrated and exhausted from:
- grungy problem sets?
- long grueling nights?
- baffling exams?
- seemingly pointless labs?
- lecturers' lame jokes?
- all of the above?
Well, most people at MIT are,
but there are few who will not feel some sense of pride and
accomplishment when/if they walk up to receive that pretty precious
piece of parchment at the end of it all. That may seem so far away
from the present.
But Thanksgiving is right around the corner - a chance to get away from
this all, take a break and come back afresh, ready for the final stretch.
And there's more!
Today is Drop Date!
Go ahead! Grab a drop form. Take that heavy load off your over-burdened
shoulders. Then maybe you'll be able to:
- sleep once in a while
- do laundry for a change (if desk has quarters)
- carry out a complete conversation!
- relax and allow brain cells to regenerate
Don't Panic!
This harmless little surprise was meant to brighten up your day and
hopefully even the rest of your semester. There is nothing wrong
with this workstation. You're one of the [lucky/unlucky] people to
still be at MIT to experience this Thanksgiving Hack!
What just happened?
In case you didn't notice, this hack was triggered on most public
Athena workstations around campus within a 5-minute period. The hack
included running xsnow and xpanic as well as pointing
you to this local WWW page.
Precautions taken:
In the true spirit of
MIT hacks,
some general precautions have been taken to ensure that this hack is
ethical:
- No alterations will be made to any of your files.
- All Athena functionality is still intact.
- The activation timings of all workstations are random over an interval
of 5 minutes to ensure that the outland server for xpanic and
xsnow is not over-accessed.
- The http daemon serving this document is run on every workstation so
that there isn't too much net traffic when everyone decides to access this
page.
- Just in case you're not happy with your current username, you can
renew your kerberos tickets by typing renew at the athena
prompt.
As for Santa Claus and the snow, it's going to get much colder
within a couple weeks so you might as well get used to them now.
Okay, well that's all folks. Now that you've just taken a little refreshing
diversion, you can get cracking once again.
Tip: It's probably better to finish your work now than to
procrastinate until after Thanksgiving. Don't even think
of taking your books home this Thanksgiving; they'll just be extra
payload.
So happy "Athena-ing", use Drop Date wisely and make
sure you have an enjoyable and relaxing Thanksgiving Weekend.
Philly Trino Singh (ptsingh@mit.edu)