Big long protruding chapter meeting, starting at 1PM, to elect officers for next semester. One of the positions up for election is Sergeant-at-Arms, whose job is to call “Chapter!” every Sunday and shepherd people in and out of the chapter room as necessary. Traditionally, the candidate who performs the most disgusting act (as his “speech”) wins the post. Mike, in advance of his performance, did something fairly nasty, which then he shared with us — but he lost to Nick, who didn't so much as give a speech. I think this was a nod to Nick's general disgustitude. I feel for Mike. He really made a concerted effort and lost to someone who didn't try (even as he didn't have to).

Dave converted his Linux gateway (doing NAT and ISDN, among other things) to OpenBSD. He hit a few snags with the default serial driver settings in the GENERIC 2.6 kernel, but got it working well enough to download -current in order to build a kernel with the new support for his serial chipset. So his flatmates have their network back up and running.

Bybluk missed his pledge class's initiation. We held a specially scheduled initiation for him tonight. (I improvised for a few minutes afterward, on the fantastic Steinway in the chapel.) It was my first initiation ceremony as a brother. I am getting a lot of “first as a brother” experiences these days. I narrowed my list of committees to a few that I am truly interested to run next semester.

Schmoozed at Denny's afterward with Ron (alumnus), Brian (alumnus), Ben (alumnus-to-be), Will, and Ken. Ron and I discussed work and life and found that we have had many similar experiences in our lives. It's great to find someone who really understands some of the choices I've made and situations I've been in because he's been there. This is rare for me, because my approach to life is apparently somewhat non-standard. So we enjoyed chatting and had to cut ourselves off due to the late hour. I look forward to spending more time with Ron.