Lydia Leong

Welcome to my home page on the World-Wide Web!
o A little bit about me
o Our Time
o Two moments of personal philosophy
o Campus organizations
o My job
o MUDs, MUSHes, and other vices
o On Volunteering
o Some thoughts on server hacking
o Copyright Notice
o Other information
o The Real World
Last updated February 11th, 1997.

Number of recent visitors with graphical browsers: [Many]

A Little Bit About Me

My name, as you might have gathered from the title of this page, is Lydia Leong. I hail originally from the town of Wheaton, Illinois, a fair-sized surburb west of Chicago. I am therefore a fan of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and its former conductor Sir Georg Solti, and Chicago-style pizza.

I was, until recently, a computer science engineering student at the University of Pennsylvania (in Philadelphia. Not Penn State. I like our non-official motto). I have a minor in music history; I play the violin and am a serious collector of CDs, focused on classical music (1800 and later), movie soundtracks, and Broadway shows.

Now I work for DIGEX, an Internet Carrier (aka, "Internet Service Provider") based in Beltsville, Maryland, not far from Washington D.C. I have a home page there, too.

If you really want to know more about me, you can read my biography. Also, beyond the quotes which follow later on this page, you can, if you really want to, read a bit more about my personal philosophy of life.

There is a picture of me, but it was taken with an IndyCam, which seems to produce, even in brightly-lit rooms, photos which look like they were taken in a gloomy Gothic version of a computer lab. At some point in time, I'll get a better picture. Really. (As an interesting side-note, people have, for the last few years, sent me corrected versions of this picture... it's turning into an interesting social experiment on how many people are neurotic or bored enough to play with the image.)

On March 27th, 1995, I realized that my pages had grown to the size where its index was actually much more useful than the page itself. Therefore, some of the links on this home page now point to anchors on the index page, and this page was revised to be mostly personal information, and quotes. I used to write enormous planfiles which had tons of quotes; I've extracted the ones I like the most for this page. I have endeavoured to make the Index Page only links to information that I personally maintain, while this home page provides other links related to my activities.

Our Time

	Something is stirring,
	Shifting ground...
	It's just begun.
	Edges are blurring
	All around,
	And yesterday is done.

	Feel the flow.
	Hear what's happening:
	We're what's happpening.
	Don't you know?
	We're the movers and we're the shapers.
	We're the names in tomorrow's papers.
	Up to us, man, to show 'em...

	It's our time, breathe it in.
	Worlds to change and worlds to win.
	Our turn coming through,
	Me and you, man,
	Me and you!

	Feel the flow,
	Hear what's happening:
	We're what's happening!

	Long ago,
	All we had was that funny feeling,
	Saying someday we'd send 'em reeling.
	Now it looks like we can!

	Someday just began...

(Steven Sondheim, "Merrily We Roll Along")

Two Moments of Personal Philosophy

My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists -- and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason -- Purpose -- Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge. Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve. Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man's virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.

John Galt (Ayn Rand: Atlas Shrugged, Part III, Chapter 7)

* * * * *

"We each have within ourselves the ability to shape our own destinies. That much we understand. But, more important, each of us has an equal ability to shape the destiny of the universe. Ah, that you find more difficult to believe. But I tell you it is so."

"In the vastness of the ocean, is any drop of water greater than the other?"

"No," you answer, "and neither has a single drop the ability to cause a tidal wave."

"But," I argue, "if a single drop falls into the ocean, it creates ripples. And these ripples spread. And perhaps--who knows--these ripples may grow and swell and eventually break foaming upon the shore."

"Like a drop in the vast ocean, each of us causes ripples as we move through our lives. The effects of whatever we do -- insignificant as it may seem -- spread out beyond us. We may never know what far-reaching impact even the simplest action might have on our fellow mortals. Thus we need to be conscious, all of the time, of our place in the ocean, of our place in the world, of our place among our fellow creatures." "For if enough of us join forces, we can swell the tide of events -- for good or for evil."

Conclusion to the Death Gate Cycle (Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman)

* Campus Organizations

During my years at Penn, I was active with:
o The Dining Philosophers
The undergraduate Computer Science Engineering Society. Named after the well-known scheduling problem in computer science involving five philosophers, five chopsticks, and impending starvation, the Dining Philosophers organizes activities, involves itself in curriculum discussions and other necessary bits of activism, and publishes, twice a year, an on-line newsletter, called Don't Panic! I used to maintain the society's public software directories on Eniac, the main engineering computer; presently, I'm the secretary, and a member of the Executive Board, which can be reached at dpexec@eniac.seas.upenn.edu. Related to this activity is my membership on the Engineering Peer Advisory Council.

o Penn Gamers
A collection of people who like to play roleplaying games; our most recent have been Pendragon, Star Wars, AD&D, the Amber Diceless RPG, and Ars Magica. I am both current president and founder. You might want to just have a quick glance at our activities, or peruse our home page.

o Pit orchestras
For various theatrical groups, usually as lead violin. The shows I've done on campus include Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum for Arts House Theatre, ABBA's Chess and Bock and Harnick's She Loves Me for Penn Players, and the Gilbert and Sullivan light operettas Trial by Jury, `The Sorcerer, The Mikado, and H.M.S. Pinafore for Penn Singers. I've also done Sondheim's A Little Night Music and Into the Woods for the Law School Light Opera.

o Pennsylvania Triangle
The magazine of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, where I'm a staff writer.

o Event Horizon
The science-fiction and fantasy magazine/club of the University of Pennsylvania. I've been a contributing writer of book reviews, secretary of the club, and Editor of the magazine.

*My Job

I was employed, through 1995, by the Computer and Information Science department at Penn, as an assistant systems administrator. A while back, I worked in the Distributed Systems Laboratory, with a rather ornery set of IBM RS/6000 workstations; currently, I'm enjoying a number of far-better-behaved Silicon Graphics machines, in my work for the Computer Graphics Laboratory (also known as the Center for Human Modeling and Simulation, or HMS Laboratory. The lab is mostly concerned with a nifty program called JACK, a virtual-reality human; if you want to read more about him in a hardcopy format, check out the June 1994 issue of Discover magazine.

Then, I was doing some HTML and UNIX consulting (email me for rates and details), as well as a fair amount of freelance writing, including a book for O'Reilly and Associates (see below), and articles for Vision Quest magazine.

After finishing school, I took a job as the lead systems programmer with the Internt Server Producs Group at DIGEX. Essentially, I was developing and integrateingsolutions on SunOS and Solaris workstations, for an assortment of Internet applications, particularly focused on the WWW. I was one of the senior technicians responsible for several hundred machines in DIGEX's "server farm", under the "one customer, one server" program that the company offers. After six months, I got a promotion to manager, becoming one of the senior engineers in the Business Connectivity Group, with the company's central systems engineering team.

* MUDs, MUSHes, and Other Vices

Beyond the boundaries of the mundane world, I am known most frequently as Amberyl. I am one of the three primary code maintainers of TinyMUSH 2.2, one of the authorities on the TinyMUSH server, formerly the maintainer of the PennMUSH server, author of the MUSH manual, administrator past and present of numerous games, and, in general, someone who spends far too much time at the keyboard.

These days, I'm also doing some writing related to the ARPA (the government's Advanced Research Projects Agency) interest in MUDs and Education, and I'm working on a book about social implications of MUDs and other electronic communities, for O'Reilly and Associates (look for it in your bookstore in December!) I generally answer MUD-related email at lwl@netcom.com.

I maintain a vast amount of information about MUDs, due to some odd sense of responsibility and my usual desire to step in when there's something which needs doing that no one is doing.

My "specialty" is the MUSH ("multi-user shared hallucination") variety. I've been a "wizard" (one of the half-a-dozen or so hardy souls who adminstrate the game and babysit the players) on about two dozen MUSHes, mostly on themed/roleplaying ones. I'm not a complete stranger to the combat-variety LP-MUDs, though, having been an Archwizard (a second-rank administrator and coder, more or less) on one, hack-n-slashing and questing my way up.

In the past, I ran The Belgariad MUSH (both of them), and Robotech MUSH. I also hold the (perhaps dubious) distinction of having been a PernMUSH wizard for nearly four years (March 1991 to February 1995). I have held an administrative position on Bloodletting: Dublin by Night, Dragondawn, DuneMUSH, Elysium, IronMUSH, Mua'Kaar, MythMUSH, NarniaMUSH, SouCon, Taeis, TinyKrynn, TooMUSH, Two Moons, Werewolves of London, and too many others to list (some two dozen in all). The level of my involvement has varied widely; I've been everything from a "visiting consultant" to one of the founding wizards, heavily involved in every aspect of the game.

Though once I juggled up to seven simultaneous active wizbits, these days, I mostly act as a consultant. Currently, I'm an administrator on AmberMUSH, and I hang out on TooMUSH. I'm also the "God" of a new MUSH, called Pax Magica, based on the Mythic Europe world of the roleplaying game Ars Magica from Wizards of the Coast.

I attempt to serve the MUD community as best I can, out of the sense that there are things that need to be done, and that if I didn't do them, it's quite likely that they'd be left undone. Thus, I put a lot of time into server maintainenance, documentation, and the moderation of the USENET newsgroup rec.games.mud.announce.

On Volunteering

I've done a lot on the MUSHes. Most of it has been fun. A great deal of it has been aggravating. I've never managed to adequately explain why I continue to stress myself out voluntarily in VR, until I came across this quote:

"I guess it's for the same reason I keep going back to camp as a counselor: although you want to rip the campers' heads off when you've spent five hours planning a game so that they can have fun and then they tell you it was the most boring thing ever, somehow you still know that you managed to run the game without anyone breaking a leg."

Jennifer Mars ("Shandra", to the PernMUSH Weyrleaders)

Some Thoughts on Server Hacking

There are no problems. If there were problems, they would be your fault. If there was, hypothetically, a problem, and it was not your fault, it would be impossible for us to fix. That's not a supported configuration. That sounds like an unholy combination of a pipsqueak dictator and a DEC salesman.

Andrew Molitor (in a post on alt.fan.pern)

The correct approach to fixing MUSH is to pitch it. Face it, MUSH is a horrid lump of unsalvageable sh*t. You can file the evil grot off the huge warts, and get nice shiny warts, but that's it.

MUSH has a long tradition that: Player X wants a GefreebleNotzMitBlinkenLights.

Whoever is currently working on the server MUST without one instant of hesitation head over to the salvage yard to pick up a broken GefreebleNotzMitBlinkenLights, a collection of big rusty nails, and a large hammer.

Said whoever must then bash the GefreebleNotzMitBlinkenLights into the server in as crude and buggy a way as possible.

Player X then writes 2 lines of MUSH code using, not the GefreebleNotzMitBlinkenLights, but the semantics of the particular way THIS GefreebleNotzMitBlinkenLights is broken.

Now it's a Standard (tm), and can never be backed out, and must be supported until WE ALL DIE. It's a hell of a way to write software.

Andrew Molitor (to the TinyMUSH 2.0 server hackers' mailing list)

Copyright Notice

Insert company name here Confidential.
Copyright 1992 Big Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

The piece of code you are now perusing was written in the service of a huge and powerful corporation. We know who you are. We know that you're reading this. We know what you're thinking. And we'll know if you even consider trying to copy even the slightest idea or concept from this code. We are everywhere, and if you do copy us, we'll be forced to buy you, your company, and probably even your home state, and crush you like the nothing that you are. And that's just if we're in a good mood that day. You don't want that do you? Good. Now run along...

(From an internal humor newsgroup at Microsoft)

* Other Information

"I was saying," continued the Rocket, "I was saying - what was I saying?"

"You were talking about yourself," replied the Roman Candle.

"Of course; I knew I was discussing some interesting subject when I was so rudely interrupted..."

The Remarkable Rocket (Oscar Wilde)

My interests include, as might be obvious from the above, computers, fantasy and science fiction, roleplaying, creative and serious writing, and the theatre, particularly musical theatre. My lighter moments include tinkering with Lego and a fascination with animation (and parodies, like the Disney Heroine's Roundtable). I also play various computer games, particularly the action-puzzle games of the Tetris variety, and a long-time addiction, Sim City 2000. I read USENET sporadically, and my email regularly, though the volume of the latter frequently causes messages not marked as urgent to be put off for days or even a week or two.

This home page has been brought to you by lwl@graphics.cis.upenn.edu, the letter P, and the number 4201.

The Real World

Real World, The n.:
  1. In programming, those institutions at which programming may be used in the same sentence as FORTRAN, COBOL, RPG, IBM, etc.
  2. To programmers, the location of non-programmers and activities not related to programming.
  3. A universe in which the standard dress is shirt and tie and in which a person's working hours are defined as 9 to 5.
  4. The location of the status quo.
  5. Anywhere outside a university. "Poor fellow, he's left MIT and gone into the real world." Used pejoratively by those not in residence there. In conversation, talking of someone who has entered the real world is not unlike talking about a deceased person.
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Lydia Leong / lwl@graphics.cis.upenn.edu / July 16th, 1994