My Heroes

Exhibit A: "Frank W. Chu"

Needs no explanation.

Exhibit B: Today's youth.

Today's youth. Bear with me: Yesterday I spent the evening drinking strong beer and playing Tekken 5 at a friend's. You can't imagine how much my left thumb hurts; another finger actually has an abrasion where the outer layer of skin is missing on a round spot. These kids today have it much harder; things like that never happened on my Super NES.

Grotesque: Murderer Sues Against Being Called Murderer

Multiple murderer and RAF-terrorist Mohnhaupt gets uppity after being released for no good reason at all.

So, "murderer" is out if the German courts are at their usual level of sanity. Still legal: "Sockpuppet for tyranny", "socialist scum", "evil bitch" and maybe "cold-blooded killer" (at least unless there's a precedent for synonyms).

Run, Fatso, Run! (Also, Shut Up)

Running

As I've been unhappy with my performance in a few regards (not that, you pigs!) recently, I've taken to the whole "mens sana..." thing once again, which for me means jogging. I won't revolt you with further talk of my sagging gut, but am I the only one who looks way fatter after running than before? I'm attributing the sag to the loss of ATP in the skeletal- and abdominal muscles, and general loss of water in the tissue, but I'd really be interested in the right explanation, so if anybody of my extremely comment-lazy readership is in the know, please share for once.

I know you're out there; I have (a little bit) of access stats because I used to embed canary pix from my own domain in the Blogger template. :)

No Talking!

In other "trying to get a somewhat decent performance out of myself" news, I'm trying to quit IM for the most part. I'm getting to the conclusion that it's costing more time than it's getting me in good cheer and productivity, so no ICQ, gTalk & Skype for me. I'll still be available on those protocols by appointment ;) and I've got cron jobs that start 'em at 20:00 CET (that's CEST right now) and shut 'em down again at 21:30, but other than that I'll try without for a while.

Multiple Listeners With Apple's SSH Distribution

This almost works. I managed to get it to work after also removing the section in the second plist-file as it complained about a socket already being bound.

Also, the shell commands are:

launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ssh2222.plist
launchctl start com.openssh.sshd2222

, at least if you also called the new file /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ssh2222.plist and the service com.openssh.sshd2222. Depending on your configuration you don't even need the second command.

Bonus points if you can guess which port I bound this SSHD to. Real bonus points if you can guess what port the guy who wrote the linked-to article bound his second instance to. That's why I do it the way I do it.

(A Little More) Secure Surfing in Open Hotspots

You need: A system with a reasonably recent openssh client and access to a shell; a browser that can use SOCKS 4/5 proxies; SSH access to a machine that allows "dynamic" forwards via its server (and which can make HTTP(S)/FTP connections to the desired sites).
You do: Assuming your username on the remote machine is bubba and the machine is called trailer-park, and port 9999 is free on your local machine:

ssh -NfD 9999 bubba@trailer-park

Then point your browser to use a SOCKS proxy on localhost:9999. If pages load, you're all set.
You get: Connections from you to the remote machine are encrypted via the SSH-channel. That secures you against honeypots on the hotspot you're on. SSH is exceptionally secure against man-in-the-middle type attacks; just heed the errors/warnings about changed host keys instead of just replacing the keys. Beware: Unencrypted HTTP connections between the remote host and the desired website can still be captured on that leg of their journey! The same is true about HTTPS connections if you click accept on just about any certificate with mismatching data thrown your way, but that would hardly be the computer's fault... ;)
Bonus points for: SwitchProxy makes changing between (lots of) proxies exceptionally simple if you happen to use Firefox. I could not reproduce the HTTPS problems mentioned on SwitchProxy's homepage.

HOWTO: Customer Service

Joel Spolsky, he of recruiting tool blog and well-known ego, recently had an article on customer service. Normally, these "we're so cool" things are corporate boilerplate that don't hold up, so I wasn't expecting too much.

When I tried the copilot service around the time when the linked post came out, I had some problem with a too high reconnection rate (I was showing the service to friends on the rest of my 24h pass), and I contacted support. The reaction was (exact quote):

I'm so sorry for the trouble! I'm sending a stern note to the Copilot development team, and I've extended your Day Pass till 5AM on Feb 22nd. [ed: that was three more days or so] Thanks for using Fog Creek Copilot. If you have any compliments, concerns, questions, complaints, or suggestions about it, please let us
know.

If there's any way we can be of further assistance please don't hesitate to contact us.

All the best,

Sumana Harihareswara
Fog Creek Software
US 1-866-FOG-CREEK (1-866-364-2733)

Wow. Someone actually took their own advice seriously. I had no need for the extension, but I wouldn't have thought of asking for a charge back after that response even though I'd have gotten it, no doubt. When I had some more problems (the Mac version was pretty new), I got this:

Thank you for the bug report, and my apologies on the error! I believe we have fixed the website error you saw, and I alerted the developers to the "too many emails" error you originally reported. Thanks again!

Not only was my request read by a person, it was the same person who obviously cared enough about their job to remember the first problem, or at least has a good case history tool.

Their response time is less than perfect on email, but when I can get the same kind of response out of the corporations that fire back an automated notice within five minutes — ever — I'll start complaining about that.

This was just so amazingly well done.

Apart from the minor problems (which should be fixed now that the Mac version had a month to get up to speed), the copilot service itself was a joy to use and I'd recommend it highly, by the way; but that wasn't the point of the post.

So Open-Minded It's Dripping Out

I just saw this at The Onion, and had to check if it's real. Turns out it not only is, but it's also topping the Amazon.com bestseller list right now, and seems to be pretty much exactly what The Onion describes. Wow. Is it just me or is mankind now becoming stupider at a rate where you can actually see the bell curve slither south with the plain eye?

Anyway, if you're such an abysmal moron that you might actually believe this crap, please buy this book before you do anything that's more dangerously stupid (note that I didn't say stupider, that would just plain be impossible) with the money. Also, buy it via the link behind the pic on this post, because when a fool and his money are parted, I want to be the middleman. Seriously, I don't want to go back to stealing babies' candy for subsistence. That got me kinda fat.

Now, what I'm gonna do is pretend that this whole clusterfuck is just a guerilla marketing campaign for this. In the immortal words of the chairman of the board, "I'm for anything that gets you through the night".

My False God Is Cheaper Than Your False God

My Subgenius ordination arrived in the mail today, so you're hereby notified of my somewhat holier status and I fully expect you to call me "reverend" in the future. That's "Hochwürden" in German, just so we're clear.

Egad! I'm contemplating a schism right now because I had to fill out my own name in the documents and that's interfering with my lazy, but on the other hand the ones that needed signing by the church weirdos were signed alright, so meh.

The 30 eurobucks were pretty cheap for an hour-long maniacal cackle and ETERNAL SALVATION AND ENLIGHTENMENT anyway, so whatever. Now excuse me while I pull the wool over my own eyes.

My Lazyweb Works!

Request/Response

Truly a Day to SMI2LE

Via the Bad Astronomer, this. So close. So fucking close. It's basically a fingers breadth away from normal folk now.

The accompanying video in all its crappily animated glory literally made me cry with joy a little bit. This is the stuff pants-creamings are made of.