Second night of Hannukah, at my parents' house, with other family

I really don't remember all the stuff Lis said I had to blog so that she wouldn't have to. It was my niece's birthday, approximately, (she's now nine) as well as Hannukah. So presents were had.

We gave Winter a swiss-army knife, which her parents will hang on to, and let her use when she asks for it and can be under supervision. She also got a Problem-Solving Kit that I put together. It's got, y'know, stuff in it. That can be used to solve problems. Like duct tape, and a sewing kit, and band-aids, and a screwdriver with multiple heads, and a mirror, and a brush, and a pad of paper, and a pencil and pen, and a small waterproof container ("I could keep medicine or something in this, and then, if it fell in the water, it would still be good!") and a little thing of WD-40, (which her parents may confiscate, because a. they don't trust her with it, and b. they may use it), and a bandanna, and a small poncho -- I think that's most of it. It all fits into a particularly overstuffed camera-bag-sized bag.

Her parents want me to put together a couple of those kits for them, too. Tony wants his to include a Pantone kit. I said, "Wait -- doesn't that cost, like, lots of hundreds of dollars?" He confirmed it does. Much as I like and respect him, um, no.

Lis made a holiday music mix CD, which we didn't play for folks. It's good, though -- the Kinks, the Waitresses, blink-182, bunches of other stuff.

After we got the kids to bed (which, y'know, is significantly different from getting them to SLEEP, but one does what one can), we sat around sharing stories of our geeky past, and random hacks and pranks we've played on people, or had played on us.

Um. Those of you who are under thirty and have never used legacy systems may not get most of these. They depend on things like how DOS works.

Like changing someone's C prompt from
C:\>
to
C:\>format c

That was funny.

Or figuring out how to EXACTLY duplicate the sound of the tone that told people that it was time to change classes, in a school which did a sort of tone over the loudspeaker instead of a bell.

And then playing that tone fifteen minutes before the end of class.

In a school which used a recording of a bell as the signal for changing classes, swapping out that recording for one of "Flying Purple People Eater."

Messing with the bells so that, over the course of the day, every class period was progressively five minutes shorter.

Breaking into an instructor's email account, and then sending him email from his own account informing him that he might want to consider choosing a harder-to-guess password.

I don't remember them all. But it was clear -- we're all pathetic geeks and have been our entire lives.

And it also was clear that being a pathetic geek is actually a hell of a lot more fun than most other ways to be.

Cross-posted to failed_recipe

"When did H. P. Lovecraft start writing our latkes?"