Into The Weeds

For those who are not aware, when I went to MIT I lived in the East Campus dormitory, on the hall known as Second West (a.k.a. Putz). These days, Putz has a pretty neat group of people and an informal tradition of holding "slug talks," or opportunities for someone to give a brief presentation and have a chance to share some knowledge with the group. Most of these so far have been computery in nature, and specifically computer-sciency. I hear there's going to be a good one next week on neural plasticity and long term potentiation (LTP -- it's how we learn and form memories in our brains pretty much).

Since my day-to-day life deals with computer science in a more practical and hands-on way, the topics that I have chosen are more practical in nature. Last semester, I gave a talk about MySQL in production, and specifically how we use it at Linden Lab to make Second Life work.

Just last week, however, I gave a slugtalk describing how DNS works out here in the real world. I think it went pretty well. Download my slide deck as a PDF here.

From an entry on ugliesttatoos.com(site is somewhat NSFW but this entry isn't):

That said, in a few years there will be a generation of adults for whom The Goonies is not the nostalgic icon that it is for us. And those people are going to ask you why you have a tattoo of a retarded pirate on your arm. If there are any measures you can take to prepare yourself for this outcome, you should probably do it.

...and that's sad.