Packet Rat: Can a blogger stay awake in the city that never sleeps?
With all the absence of excitement that came out of blogging the Democratic Convention in Boston, the Rat is waiting with bated breath to see how deep a coma the Republicans can lull bloggers into in New York.
Packet Rat: General George and Elvis, move over
The Rat has always hoped to achieve some small fame, some well-deserved recognition for his long and illustrious government service.
Packet Rat: So whose blog post is that, anyhow?
There are few things the Rat loves more than a good whodunit. He's been reading a really good one lately, but it isn't a book'it's on the Internet.
Packet Rat: Dr. StrangeGoogle or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blog
The Rat slid quietly through the shadows at the National Healthcare Information Infrastructure conference, looking for a former colleague who had been drawn to the dark side of HMO tech support.
Packet Rat: The Rat gets all Googly-eyed
The wired one suspects a conspiracy against him at Google.com. 'They're doing it on purpose!' he ranted to his spouse.
Packet Rat: The Rat develops a split personality
Whenever the Rat can avoid using Internet Explorer, which is most of the time, he does so. But when he's stuck with it because of lousy support for Mozilla and Opera browsers in some Web applications, he finds himself neatly split in half.
Packet Rat: Inch by inch, the Rat gets back over the border
The Rat family's quest for a broadband break took them north to Niagara Falls. At the foot of the American Falls, among squawking gulls, the whiskered one found a wireless dead spot and a good place to watch the Rainbow Bridge between Canada and the United States.
Packet Rat: The Rat finds there's no escape from broadband
After a day cutting loose at the WiFi Planet conference this month, the Rat was feeling just a bit too connected.
Packet Rat: The Rat takes a turn as Hans Brinker
It hasn't been a good year for network security. After last month's raft of Microsoft Corp. vulnerability patches, the Sasser worm and other assorted nasties, the Rat figured things could only get better.
Packet Rat: In the big city, bandwidth is there for the taking
The whiskered one headed to New York over the weekend, staying with a cousin while he prepared for a site survey of his agency's Manhattan field office. But his plans got sidetracked on Sunday night when his bandwidth suddenly ground to a halt.
Packet Rat: The Net survives a feeble fable
Sometimes the story of computer security reads like a Tom Clancy novel. And other times, it reads like a nursery rhyme.
Packet Rat: Rat scurries to survive patch madness
The Rat has started to plan his workweek like a five-day package tour of systems hell. He's leaving plenty of room on the old handheld calendar for side trips to Spamville Web Services Limbo. At least one thing however, now must be marked as a permanent, recurring event.
Packet Rat: One good outage deserves another
Monday morning, the Rat rolled into the office on his urban assault mountain bike, cranking tunes on his iPod. The cherry blossoms were in bloom, spring was in swing and the whiskered one was determined to start the season with a fresh, positive attitude.
Packet Rat: The Rat cuddles up to a snake
With the throngs jamming the Washington Convention Center for FOSE 2004, even the Rat'an experienced conduit crawler'was getting just a tad claustrophobic.
Packet Rat: Rodent Avatar Techie reinvents acronyms
With the political season in full swing, the Hatch Act has choked off the flow of wit in and around the Rat's cluster of cubicles. As for mocking Microsoft Corp. over its latest security faux pas or SCO Inc. for its lawsuits against Linuxites ... well, those topics have gotten old.
Packet Rat: Rat rolls his own version of an e-mailer ID
Few things jar the Rat's concentration worse than a ringing telephone'especially when there are plenty of hands available to answer it. 'Will somebody stop that abominable noise,' he shouted from his lair one recent morning, having just soldered his fingers together. The household landline rang a fifth time.
Packet Rat: The Rat seeks shelter from the storm
The month's knockout round of Internet security threats bred a bunker mentality around the Rat's command cubicle. As most of his agency's users meandered through their workdays in blissful ignorance, the cyberrodent and his minions had been at their battle stations for weeks'and the work showed no sign of easing up.
Packet Rat: One good spam deserves another
As Super Bowl Sunday dawned, the MyDoom e-mail worm began to unleash its wrath. The spam-bearing and address-spoofing pest had not yet infiltrated the cyberrodent's networks, but not for lack of trying.
Packet Rat: The Rat rover strays off course
'There's something so ... retro about all this,' remarked Mrs. Rat as the family gathered around Father Rat's monitor to don 3-D glasses and watch the stereo images from NASA's Spirit Mars rover.
Packet Rat: The Rat tests his moo-ves
'You mean, cattle are being turned into cannibals?' asked the Rat's two elder offspring, horrified by his explanation of mad cow disease, which was keeping him on duty at the agency through the holidays.
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