sidebar 2006.04.12
Try going to Sacramento on Easter Day. That city stops for Easter.
--The_Lex Wed Apr 12 11:32:31 2006
Easter is always on a Sunday, so there's going to be less disruption in general. Nationwide here public events seem to be limited to churchgoing and easter egg hunts. There's also a dinner tradition for a lot of families.

The whole Easter Bunny thing is kind of odd when you get right down to it.
--Kirk Wed Apr 12 13:00:32 2006
It's those pagans. . ..

I always find it amazing when the bunny marketing happens, though.
--The_Lex Wed Apr 12 13:17:23 2006
TCP connections take a long time to completely disappear to account for packets which were duplicated and resent. i.e. If the sender doesn't get an ACK from the receiver, it will resend the packet. Well, what if the original packet shows up after the connection has been closed?

At one point I was working for Nortel on an X.25 encryption device. Everything worked great until they cranked up the rate which sessions were opened and closed. It turned out the problem was the "open" request was somehow passing the "close" request in the X.25 fabric. So the destination would get an "open" request for an existing session, causing it to freak out.

--ericball Thu Apr 13 16:17:28 2006
Hardcore, baby!

TCP is pretty magical to me. "Guaranteed" packet delivery over any old flaky wiring in between was a real revolution in Network protocols, a break from a lot of the rigid "assume a spherical cow" kind of perfect-case coding that preceeded it. Fractally, the Internet had a similar philosophy of prefering utility over perfection.
--Kirk Thu Apr 13 17:41:53 2006
I miss the Marlboro College Easter Beer Hunt...
Here in Hollywood things come to a stop for Passover and stay on pause thru Easter.

And the for us pagans: Goddess Ostara Bless You! She is Risen! The Earth Lives Again!!!

Or, as my dad related told me (from something he heard somewhere), all celebrations are: They tried to kill us, We survived. Lets Eat!!
--ErinMaru Sat Apr 15 01:30:42 2006
I thought I heard the last attributed to Jewish holidays in particular.

Goddess Olestra?
--Kirk Sat Apr 15 10:37:21 2006
Heh, I'm the same way. Used to be that the only harbinger of Easter was a family dinner that my late grandfather would put together, but it was generally a dinner held in contempt because of the production it ended up being, always on Easter Day, which is when everyone wanted to be having their family get-togethers.

Anyway, since I'm not religious and don't have kids, Easter's off my radar, and the only sign of Easter this year is all the candy available-- but for all that indicates, it could be next week or could've been last week.
--LAN3 Mon Apr 17 06:41:50 2006
Kirk: the Easter Bunny thing is nothing but a symbol for Spring and the, ahem, sap rising. All good clean fun :-D

ericball: cheers! I'm still grappling with the mighty and multifarious field of networking, but new bits are slotting into place every day.
--Catherine Tue Apr 18 21:37:16 2006