It seems I have died and reached nirvana for CAS-nerds-who-like-Unix: as a realization of the general principle that Caltech has its stuff in order, maple, mathematica, and matlab are available by ssh tunneling and X forwarding. I wonder what other little goodies there are out there on the servers that I don’t know to look for.
I noticed there’s a public-html directory in my home dir, but what is the corresponding URL?
I arrived in Pasadena yesterday, after 3 days of 8 hours drives: from Houston, through New Mexico, through Arizona, to California. Coincidentally, we covered about a state per day: on Sunday we drove from Houston to Amarillo, on Monday we drove from Amarillo to Flagstaff, and we covered the remaining distance on Tuesday. I hadn’t realized that California was so much desert; the final day’s drive took us through at least 5 hours of Californian desert.
There’s not much going on yet. I checked in at the registrar and started unpacking my stuff at the apartment yesterday; today so far I’ve gotten my CalTech ID card, my IT account activated, and a long ethernet cable (for some reason the desk and the ethernet jack in my bedroom are on opposite sides of the room, and I can’t rearrange the furniture without the bed ending up somewhere awkward). Later I’m going to clean the kitchen and bathroom, and stock the pantry. Also, I met one of my apartment mates– George, a second year grad chemistry major– who seems to be a nice guy. The other two haven’t yet arrived.
The main point of all this is that I’m back in business: the last couple of weeks I didn’t do much on the Internet besides check my email, but now that I can access it without crawling through the molasses of a dialup connection, I’ll be updating the site more frequently.
