alpie lives & a rye twist

[spatch]

Dragged alpengeist out of the closet tonight, shook the dust off it, and added it to the hub. Lo and behold it works, and can even grab an IP and everything. Too bad I don't have any actual space in the place for it, and will have to move it off my bed when I decide to pass out.

At any rate, I'm currently transferring over several fine files for to work on when I can. One is named catatonic.tar and maybe some of you can take wild stabs in the dark as to what it may contain. It's 40 megabytes.

Hmm.

Hint: No, it won't be a total revival. Just an, er, retrospective, if you will. Annotated and whatnot.

I also found a nice little chestnut of a short story I remember writing a while back. It's behind the cut.

Rye Twist

Once upon a time there was a man who was always right. He was great as a
friend because he always gave the right advice. When playing Trivial
Pursuit you always wanted him on your side because he could never answer a
question incorrectly, and that includes even the questions from the
super-tough set you bring out only when guests come over. 

Then one day he woke up to find he couldn't be right no matter how hard he
tried. He dressed inappropriately for the weather and wore his white shoes
after Labor Day. He gave his neighbor directions to the airport which
included four wrong turns and a detour through the worst construction in
town. At work, he incorrectly priced a great deal of usually-expensive
automobiles and claimed the Lincoln Navigator got 38 miles to the gallon
(though he did try to say it was all highway mileage.) Then for lunch he
recommended the minestrone at Chez Guevara's, which everybody agreed was
the worst-tasting soup they'd ever had and nobody wanted to go back to
that restaurant again. 

He made it home from work a tired, shattered, disillusioned man. He sat on
the sofa with his wife and explained the events of the day. She listened
sympathetically and stroked his hair while he lay his head in her lap. 

"I just don't understand it, " he said quietly after several moments'
worth of reflective thought. "All my life I've always been right in every
situation, no matter what the context or the problem. Then suddenly I find
I couldn't be right to save my life. Oh, that's it, honey. That's it. My
life is over. I'll never be right again for as long as I live." 

His wife just smiled and kissed him softly on his forehead. 

"Wrong." 

Now that you have read this far, here is your rye twist: ><><> 
It tastes really good with tomato soup.