So, they went and changed the proxy server on us *again* without telling anyone. Thanks guys! I was going into use.perl withdrawal, so I finally broke down and called the help line. It worked, too.
In other news, I'm taking baby steps with a new module I'm working on. I figured I'd start simple - get the bootime (btime) and wrap it as an extension. Sounds easy, right? Well, the problem is when I tried it at home, the results of the C call 'getutxent()' and the btime value of the 'stat' file were 19 seconds different.
sigh...why can't anything be easy?