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Thread: Forget it! Nerds will never be cool!

  1. #21
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    Jon Stewart just worked the president's interview and his specific comments in as the climax of his lead story on "The Daily Show" about what happened over the weekend.

    At least he's paying attention.

    I knew he would!

    But then again, he didn't have anything about me getting hassled by the cops!

    James.
    Last edited by James Lehman; 08-11-2008 at 21:39.

  2. #22
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    I was at the barber's today and the news program that was on twice noted the President's visit to a volleyball practice at the Olympics. It was funny. Some volleyball player (female) turned around and bent over so he could smack her on her rear end as part of some sort of volleyball ritual and, after pausing a moment, he turned his hand over and lightly rapped her on her lower back instead. It was marvelously funny to me for some reason.

    I thought to myself how different it would be if he had complied with her request. Imagine the media coverage that would attract!

  3. #23
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    Pertaining to the subject matter... Observe the belt.


  4. #24
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    Quote Originally Posted by platinum View Post
    I was at the barber's today and the news program that was on twice noted the President's visit to a volleyball practice at the Olympics. It was funny. Some volleyball player (female) turned around and bent over so he could smack her on her rear end as part of some sort of volleyball ritual and, after pausing a moment, he turned his hand over and lightly rapped her on her lower back instead. It was marvelously funny to me for some reason.

    I thought to myself how different it would be if he had complied with her request. Imagine the media coverage that would attract!
    Jon Stewart said that touching her with the back of his hand in the small of her back was possibly the best decision of his presidency.

    Something that he and many other people need to be reminded of is that The Constitution of The United States of America, including The Bill of Rights, does not grant anyone any rights at all. It is a guarantee that those rights that are inalienable to us as humans can not be taken away by the government or else that government becomes counterfeit.

    James.
    Last edited by James Lehman; 08-12-2008 at 11:12.

  5. #25
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    DUDE -

    The run-in with the cops was what, 3 days ago?

    You need a hobby to redirect your frustrations!!
    RR

    Metrologic HeNe 3.3mw Modulated laser, 2 Radio Shack motors, and a broken mirror.
    1979.
    Sweet.....

  6. #26
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    Yeah, I know. I just have a lot of introspective crap on my mind because it was my 25 year reunion. So like, it was five years since the last one and it was something that I had been waiting for.... Sometimes I get really bummed out anyway. That was just a real "event" for me to frame this time in my life.

    James.

  7. #27
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    Quote Originally Posted by James Lehman View Post
    Yeah, I know. I just have a lot of introspective crap on my mind because it was my 25 year reunion. So like, it was five years since the last one and it was something that I had been waiting for.... Sometimes I get really bummed out anyway. That was just a real "event" for me to frame this time in my life.

    James.
    Well, look at it this way - now you'll be able to make up for the LAST event by spending the weekend hanging out with a bunch of like-minded laser geeks!!
    RR

    Metrologic HeNe 3.3mw Modulated laser, 2 Radio Shack motors, and a broken mirror.
    1979.
    Sweet.....

  8. #28
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    Quote Originally Posted by Laser Wizardry View Post
    I think this sticker sums it up......
    Well, if it's SO bad here, there are planty of European and former Soviet-bloc countries with plenty of laserist opportunities. I'm sure none of those countries ever tread on their citizens' rights...
    RR

    Metrologic HeNe 3.3mw Modulated laser, 2 Radio Shack motors, and a broken mirror.
    1979.
    Sweet.....

  9. #29
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    I hear your point and I understand what you're saying.

    It's just a very humiliating experience to be hassled like that by the authorities for the amusement of the jerks who called the prank on me in the first place. So what can I do about it? Nothing.

    On a completely unrelated note:

    For the first 4.5 months of his campaign for the Democratic candidate for The Presidency, I was Dennis Kucinich's systems administrator! I'm not saying that should get any special recognition (hardly! ). What I am saying is that I got an interesting, up-close look at the way some things work in and around our actual federal government.

    The reason I got the job is because I am a Linux expert and I have good experience in maintaining Internet servers. I was approached by a woman who needed to know some stuff about the services we provide because she was making a website for a friend of hers who was one of our long-time ISP customers. She wanted to meet me to find out what I knew about Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc...

    Then she starts calling me asking for a little help with this and that. I wrote some JavaScript stuff for her, and so on. One day I get a phone call and she says, you're hired! I'll pick you up in the morning. That's when I went up to Cleveland to meet DK's media director and then a few hours later, the man himself.

    I came into the job to find a very outdated Red Hat Enterprise v1 rented rack server in Texas, maintained by people in The Ukraine with a very busted installation of Drupal that would in no way allow anyone to upgrade it to the working system that they wanted. So I built a server in Akron and put all the latest stuff on it. Moved their MySQL data and added the CiviCRM environment on top of all of that. Soon we had it all, a live server, a test server, a mail server and a clone server in my basement that got an automatic copy of the live server every 2 hours, membership rosters organized by region, targeted emails with automated response tallies, coordination between the live server running PostFix for outbound and the mail server running Qmail for SMTP relaying, regional optimized fund raising, regional house party planning, Dennis or Elizabeth public events planning, the foundation of state and local campaign headquarters, volunteer video blogging of his public appearances, etc, etc, with a fully self optimized MySQL server configuration and accelerated, precompiled, cached PHP scripts. Whatever Drupal + CiviCRM didn't do, I wrote myself in C++! This all took me about ten hours a day, seven days a week, on a 24 hour on-call schedule. I might also add, that I was the only person in the group who knew how any of it worked and, while I was implementing all of this, the people who actually wrote Drupal, the modules we used, CiviCRM, etc, were updating their efforts on an almost daily basis.

    It did not take too long for me to realize that the woman who got me into all of this was doing nothing more than sitting on her butt, taking credit for my work and blaming all of her inabilities to do anything on me! All the while, she was extracting at least as much or more money and her younger brother was making almost three times my hourly figure playing "good guy hacker" trying to find vulnerabilities in the system. Which, resulted in totally bogus piles of paper work and CD-ROMS of meaningless information. But it looked good anyway. After a few telephone conferences, complete with screaming obscenities at me, I explained to her that I really didn't care what she did or did not do as long as she staid out of my way. It was her job to come up with a whole new look and feel for the website. Which for you Drupal fans out there, consists of two, plain ASCII text files. One is a PHP template that describes the layout of the elements of the page and the other is a cascading style sheet. We had been using a very badly hacked up copy of the example files that came with Drupal. This, by the way had been her only real project since before I even got into the mess, as asked of her by Elizabeth Kucinich. When it became painfully obvious that she wasn't getting anywhere with it, I started suggesting ways to fix up the site that we already had. She accused me a destroying all of her hours of work! Mind you we had a live server and a test server. I was told by... I think it was the third campaign manager by that time, that I was to stay off of the test server and let her do her work. FANTASTIC! I thought. Now everyone can see her fall flat on her face all by herself.

    It was just after this that I noticed that I wasn't getting many calls every day. As a matter of fact, things were running pretty well on the live server, but it wasn't moving forward. Her deadline for the new look had come and gone. I asked about it and they said, well, we're in kind-of a holding pattern right now while [she] puts the finishing touches on the new website. Then I got a call that the live server had crashed. So I started it up again. Then another crash and another. When I started looking into the reason why this might be happening, I found that someone had logged in with her account (not root) and tried to copy the data from a running MySQL server using MySQL Dump! This will do two things: 1. produce garbage for a copy and 2. crash the server. This was done several times as non-root; meaning, that the person who did it did so knowing that it could not be recovered from without calling me! When I brought this to the attention of the campaign manager to explain why the server was crashing, he sounded very concerned and said he'd look into it right away!

    I got a call about an unrelated email matter from one of the more insider volunteers. When I started talking to her about the stuff that had been messing up the server she seemed incredulous. What? You don't know, she said. They're moving the servers to Cleveland! She wondered why I had not been a part of that transition team and been on the many conference calls that were all about it. She was told that I was on another important project! She could not understand why all of this was taking so much time and kept failing when I had done it all by myself just a few months earlier. The woman who hired me had gone out and found some bozo in Cleveland to try to take my place. In the weeks leading up to this revelation, I had been called by this guy several times asking about how do you do this and how do you do that? I was told that all of this was about creating an off-site backup of the critical data that was accumulating in Akron. So, in other words, he couldn't do it even with my unwitted technical support! Mind you, this is all in the same reality as all of the phone calls that came in from the Cleveland office from people I had met and though well of. They all knew, including the campaign manger and Dennis and Elizabeth. When I called the campaign manger to tell him that I knew the whole story, he said fine. We're cutting over to Cleveland tonight. I said OK. I will open a shell into all three machines that are running in downtown Akron right now. I will change the root password on all of them to "wellgoodluckwiththat", a quote from SpongeBob Squarepants. Your "new" systems administrator will log into these machines, change the root passwords, terminate my open shells and remove my accounts. When I see my shells have been terminated, I am done.

    After almost no time at all I was asked not to do anything with the email server that I had built for them, as that was the only part of the system that still worked and the only way the campaign could communicate other than by phone. So I left it there and our company continued to bill the campaign for its service, 'till the very end. I still had no access to it. They couldn't even figure out how to add or remove users or change their account settings. I watched the server in Cleveland for several weeks while it said "coming soon". After a while they managed to get a totally stripped out version of a website going that had none of the features that they had in Akron. They outsourced everything.

    A while after all that, I got a knock on the front door of my house. It was three men in suits from the FBI. They wanted to know if I knew anything about malicious denial of service attacks against the Kucinich server in Cleveland. I had them come in. We talked for several hours. They looked at all of my computer stuff and I let them go with the hard drives that were in the original, live server that I had built for use in Akron. I am sure they already knew what was going on. They knew I had nothing to do with it. They knew I was still hosting and billing for the mail server! They also knew that there were no malicious attacks and that it was all just another creative diversion to try to buy more time and stay in the position of drawing a pay check.

    That's pretty neat huh? Get paid for taking credit for someone else's efforts of building the system; get paid to destroy the system and build a sham in Cleveland and get paid to accuse the guy who made it work and "help" investigate what happened!

    [She] is truly a genius. She is the best at what she does of anyone I've ever met and the last thing I heard, she's still at it, working for Ralph Nader.

    This is how The United States of America works!

    Back to the point of this thread... It is not terrorists that make me worry. I have a much better chance of being hit by an asteroid.

    James.
    Last edited by James Lehman; 08-12-2008 at 20:56.

  10. #30
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    Quote Originally Posted by James Lehman View Post

    Back to the point of this thread... It is not terrorists that make me worry. I have a much better chance of being hit by an asteroid.

    James.
    Thanks -

    That means we're accomplishing our jobs as intended

    More to follow during the cocktail hours at SELEM, if you're interested!
    RR

    Metrologic HeNe 3.3mw Modulated laser, 2 Radio Shack motors, and a broken mirror.
    1979.
    Sweet.....

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