Athena Account Deactivations

Athena account deactivations happened last week. I generally don't shed many tears over this; on some level, it seems right to me that people should eventually leave the MIT community. In turn, this means that I've gotten slightly bitter over people who have managed to keep an online presence somehow. It's certainly easy enough: a private Un*x machine is sufficient to get you access to MIT's internal messaging system, a friend can get you a mailing list that forwards email for you, a student group or MIT employee can even maintain your account. (And also a somewhat hypocritical attitude on my part: if I wasn't staff, my account would be preserved by student group affiliation, and I doubt I'd abandon it.)

This begs the question: why does MIT bother? Is there some actual resource that's being recycled by deactivation and isn't growing faster than new accounts? Political-level implications of trying to be able to claim that only students and staff have accounts?

Mystery Hunt

Well, Mystery Hunt is over. IHTFP/Lebowitz's Urban Achievers/EC Come EC Go didn't win. We did get over half of the puzzles we saw, which is probably good. And I got to hack on RT a bit. I wonder if I didn't throw too much into it, though; spending a night in the East Campus Talbot Lounge probably wasn't good for me. I spent way too long staring at the puzzles I thought I could do; for example, I spent most of the day staring at the cross-sum puzzle trying to do half in base 10 and half in base 11, but it got solved fairly quickly (all in base 11) once I handed it off. I probably put 8 or 10 hours total into the genealogy puzzle, and had one of the two important insights that would be needed to solve the problem.

I think the best thing I can say is "okay, now I've done that". I don't think I feel particularly compelled to do it again next year, even if it is an MIT Experience (TM). Working from home yesterday meant that I got sleep, at least, which was good. (Oh, and nothing I brought to campus specifically for Hunt seemed to get used, which was a little disappointing.)

More Post-Hunting

Genealogy had eight kinds?

Bastards!