I don’t dream often. At least, I don’t think I do. So, from now on, whenever I /do/ dream, I will try and record it here.
Now, to not post for another month.
All posts by GauntletWizard
I’d like to take a minute and tell you all about my new Porn site, entellium.
This is why I’ve never show my parents this blog.
Anyway: Story behind this is that I have a friend working at “Entellium”, the real company. He suggested that he hates the web developer they’ve got their currently, and another friend suggested that she’d love to kill him and take his place. They then get into a brief discussion about SEO, to which I cut in with an obvious “Yeah, but at some point your gonna have porn masquerading as you”. He said “Well, I doubt there’s any ‘Entellium’ porn.” And that, my friends, was a challenge.
Anyway, the idea is that I am to, over the next few weeks, get my site up on the first page of google results for “Entellium”. Easy, right?
A failure of society
Monday I was trapped on a bus for a good 15 minutes. I think the story was fairly simple: Some little old lady didn’t pay her fare. The bus stopped at the Bellevue Highway station, a little bus stop on the highway, about a city block’s walk from a park+ride. A bunch of people got on, and slipping between people was this little old chinese lady. Now, I’m fairly certain she didn’t pay the fare: I was somewhat looking up, and I did see her slip past. I don’t think she even noticed the fare collector, though.
She wanders to the back of the bus, everyone sits down or finds a handhold, and prepares to move. The bus driver shuts the doors. And doesn’t move. Just sits there. After a little bit, people started to notice that we weren’t moving, but nobody did anything (Including I). Finally, the driver got out of the bus, and a police officer got on. He walked back, talked briefly to the woman, and then escorted her off the bus.
Now, all in all, this was not a horrible result. No violence, no angry yelling. But, at the same time, there was no human interaction. There was only a sort of cold machine-logic to it. The busdriver didn’t even attempt to explain the issue to either the cause or any of the rest of the passengers. And, probably, he couldn’t, by law or union rules.
Now think of it this way: This bus was filled with business commuters. I was the least dressed person on the bus, and was wearing a nice leather jacket and a collared shirt. Most everyone else was in a business suit. Further, it was a double-long bus. Every seat was filled, and there were multiple people standing. Every one of these people was 15 minutes later to work that morning. Over a $2.25 bus fare, and probably a misunderstanding of one at that! Society has built safety buffers so that there are not “incidents”, but at the cost of far more than the incidents could ever be. If this were downtown LA, maybe the caution would be warranted. But this was Bellevue, Washington, and the “criminal” was a little old asian lady to boot.
A very wise webcomic author once described a risk/reward chart for crime: The amount you gain from the crime, the chance of succeeding, the fines/jail time if you get caught. It’s important to balance it so that the risk*failure chance is slightly greater than the gain*chance of not getting caught. The chance for not getting caught sneaking onto the bus is relatively high, but the gain is so low it’s barely worth bothering with.
There are two courses of action that are fairly obvious, and produce better results: Either A) The driver went on with the trip, calling a metrocop to meet us at the next station or b) The driver said something, casing her to either Pay the Fare, get off, or worst case, I woulda just paid it for her! It’s $2.25. It’s simply not worth the bother.
Stupid Mail.app
Mail.app decided it wanted to download all my messages again today. Fscking Sucks. But, I am a Coder! So, I spent a half hour playing with it, and figured out a solution to convince Mail.app it had already downloaded all the messages in my inbox.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to fixing your list of downloaded messages. It requires using the terminal. If you’re not comfortable with that, you’re probably out of luck.
First, you’ll need to grab you UID list from your mailserver. If you’re OK with connecting unsecured, simply fire up telnet, and connect to your mailserver on port 110. If you want SSL, it’s a little harder, but there’s actually a relatively painless way. Use “openssl sclient -connect <mailserver>:995 -crlf”
Once connected, type “user <username>”, then “pass <password>”. If you’ve connected successfuly, it’ll respond “+OK”. They type UIDL, and it’ll return a list of message UIDs. Copy-Paste that to a textfile.
Next up, grab a copy of my script: It writes the proper plist file for your messages. http://thomashahn.is-a-geek.com/fixUidls.txt
Rename that file to fixUidls.php, and chmod u+x it. Then, run it with the parameters “<inputUidFile> <outputUidFile>”. Don’t save this directly over your current UID file, just in case.
Once you’ve got the new UID file, copy it to “~/Library/Mail/<Account>/MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded2” First, though, you should rename the file already there (if there is one) to .old.
When you next open up Mail.app, it shouldn’t download anything! Hurrah!
A Holy Symbol
[\[\e[32;48m\]\u\[\e[0m\]@\h:\w] $
The Mark of the Beast
A Cause, and suspension of disbelief.
There exists a book entitled “An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa“. For several years, it was considered the authortative work on the customs and culture of what we now consider Taiwan in Britain. This amuses me to no end. The customs and culture described within are little short of ridiculous. In one section, it claims that “Men walked naked except for a gold or silver plate to cover their privates”. Yet, it was taken, if not seriously, to be worthy of curiosity by many educated gentry. True, it’s writer and backer did much to help with this claim: His strange habits included eating raw meat and sleeping upright in a chair, and was good at arguing the point. Still, even as a novelty, one must wonder how people were willing to suspend their disbelief to play such a game.
It is my intention to find a copy of, scan in high detail, and transcribe this gem of hoaxery. It’s an important historical document: It’s author and the claims within are referenced in “A Modest Proposal”. It’s also an interesting view of what a large world it seemed in the early 1700’s, and what people were willing to accept.
Things not to forget.
I
Here’s a little about me. It’s taken from what I get from typing I into the firefox search bar: A list of searches I have done that start with I.
I KISSED YOUR LIPS AND I TASTED BLOOD
I am a beautiful animal, I am destroyer of worlds
i attack the gazebo
i think so brain but
idlerpg
in the year of our lord 1994 we conquered the floor
inma no ranbu
invoid
ip over dns tunneling
irssi messgage level
irssi script
irssi trout
issaquah post office
Khoo
I always express my satisfaction with a simple phrase: “Coo”. At one point, it was, as most children once used, “Cool”, but in a horrible holiday accident, it was left with no ‘l’. I’ve used the word in almost every conversation I’ve had since. It rolls off the tongue.
Most anyone you meet wants to be great. They aspire to be the one on all the magazines. To be the life of the party. To lead people. I can’t say that thought isn’t appealing. It’s NICE to have power and prestige.
On the other hand, what I really am more satisfied with is being the “Right-Hand-Man”. I like having someone to defer to, if I feel I’m not qualified to make a decision. I also like feeling like I am part of a bigger picture. I’d rather not be a cog in the geartrain, as I like to be able to see that bigger picture, but one or two rungs down feels like the best place for me.
One of the people I most admire is Robert Khoo. He’s the PA right-hand-man. He’s more than that, actually: He makes things get done. He saved PA from Gabe and Tycho, who’re funnymen, and not businesspeople (Somebody needs to be Sluggy’s Khoo). He made PAX run. And he’s a cool guy.
That’s my inspiration. One of these days, when I’m the CTO or Vice President of a major corporation, someone will ask how my career has been. It’ll be a one word answer: “Khoo”.