Punkie

Yes. Most of them were east-to-find solutions on the web, or someone else giving me access. “Can you reset my password on Blah?” “Try TempP@ass123.” “I’m in, changed password. Thanks.”

A few times when I am really acting like a Senior Linux Administrator is figuring out a kludge or back door nobody had thought of. Recently, a client told me that the former admin had left and didn’t leave the password to over 300 systems (it turns out he did, the client was clueless, but I didn’t know that in the moment). I found every system the admin had access to, and looked for a dev box where he had access but I could take down during production hours. I took it down, booted into init with /bin/bash, changed root password, brought it back up. Then I checked his home directory to see what public keys he had. Based on that, I checked to see if there were any private keys on the bastion systems that matched as a pair (using ssh-keygen -l -f on each pair to see if the signatures matched). They checked which pair had no password. That was pretty quick because I quickly discovered a majority of these cloud systems also had an ec2-user that could escalate to root via private/public key pairs (it is supposed to be removed for security reasons, but wasn’t). Within a few hours, I had full access back to all their systems. Without taking down production.

“Another option” meaning what? Drive thru coffee? We do have Dunkin’s here, but none of them are drive-through. This may be different the further north you go, however.

Going to Starbucks doesn’t mean I have to look down on people. Life’s too short for that. I judge people on the complexity of content of character, not “Oh look, a ‘basic bitch’ with Starbucks and Ugg boots. How droll.” Having “no taste” and “too lazy” are classist statements anyway, “no taste” according to what standard? Lazy compared to what? What standard are you adhering to to “be proud of not being a tool?” Anyway, independent of your personal judgement of people just trying to get through their day, they are going to keep doing it and not caring about any of the complexities.

Starbucks is a service. You don’t have to like the service. I don’t get my legs waxed, but I don’t look down on those who do. Same thing. People are more than just their personal choices of our selective judgement. I recognize that Starbucks is popular, even if I don’t care for it. My reasons are basically I am cheap, and have to watch my sugar intake, so most of those milkshakes-posing-as-coffee are off limits. But if I am on a Starbucks run with someone, I am not going to patronize them like somehow I am some intellectual balloon rising above the mists of their complacency. Life is too short for that nonsense.

I, too, have shitty wireless. In fact, for my work laptop, that’s exactly what I do. So much more reliable. Way too many wireless connections on too many channels close by.

My wife was an insurance adjuster for a major company, and that’s EXACTLY how it goes.

So many people on the Internet say “Ugh, Starbucks is shit,” like they are proud about it. Truth is, a LOT of people drink at Starbucks. The one near my house had a drive through line so long, they redid part of the shopping center parking lot to accommodate it. It’s been renovated twice in ten years. Starbucks sells more than just “coffee that is shit,” they sell a service that few can compensate without having to set up something in your own house. Frankl;y, half of the stuff out of there is caffeinated milkshakes of varying consistency. Starbucks is a service that sells coffee, and that convenience is what draw so many people.

The average person doesn’t care about unions, good coffee, or any of that. They want to get a nummy candy treat packed with caffeine to drive to work. That’s it. It’s really just that simple. And until it gives people instant massive diarrhea or some other personally-affecting scandal, they will just keep doing it out of habit. habit is a strong motivator, especially when you’re fucking tired and just want to get to work that you hate anyway.

There’s also an “acceptable risk” that companies will take. Not sure about food service, but I have been in meetings where 5% of customers fucked over is considered acceptable, with the dollar figures that follow. They probably take into account the total number of lawsuits they get for poisoning people, and the cost of the impact to the bottom line via lawsuits and bad marketing versus actually fixing the issue.

For example, if 10,000 people get food poisoning a year from iced tea, probably only a small percentage of those people will trace it back to McDonald’s iced tea WITH tangible proof. It might be easier to pay for those lawsuits than actually fixing the issue. They’ll pass some kind of memo out, showing they addressed the issue, and then blame the store management. Nothing really changes.

I was 38? Not sure. I was a teetotaller. I didn’t drink because alcoholism ruined both sides of my family, and I didn’t want to even be tempted. Drinking and being drunk had no appeal. When I drank ANY alcohol, my face would swell up: lips, tongue, sinuses, and throat. And that was stuff like Nyquil, or my wife at the time always wanted me to “just sip this foo-foo drink, and tell me it’s not great!” My wife drank (responsibly) and liked big, fruity drinks, and she always wanted me to taste what she was having. My lips would swell up, but I always figured that was because I never drank and was a lightweight.

I was at a friend’s wedding in Salem. Her side had maybe 5 people. The groom’s side had over 100. The groom’s side was Greek, and despite my multiple attempts to rebuff their stuffing wine down my mouth, it ended up happening because of stupid peer pressure. I probably had 2/3rds of a bottle. I felt like I had the biggest ENT infection ever; I saw amber, and then blacked out. Only I didn’t. I was later told that “your face was red, but it was hard to see in all the dim lighting (it was an outdoor event). You seemed a little out of it, but I was drunk, soooo…” I woke up at the groom’s brother’s house in their guest bed. No memory of how I got there. I wasn’t sick, as apparently I drank a lot of water, but I was pretty fucking terrified.

Everyone said I was nice, chatty, and I know I was awake because I texted sexy things to my wife. “Oh my god, you’re drunk, and I am not there to see it!” was one of her replies. Shit. My nose was runny, I could barely swallow, and when I looked in the mirror, it looked like I had rosacea. When I went down to the kitchen, the bride and groom were there, and my friend said “you don’t look so good.” I told her what had happened, and she got REALLY angry, since it was her father in law who had made me drink (he claimed if i didn’t drink his imported wine, he would be insulted, and it was bad luck). I drank lots of water, and eventually, the swelling went down and I could breathe normally. No sir, I didn’t like it. I didn’t see the appeal of being drunk.

Later, I decided that I wasn’t mad about it. I had decided to just deal with the effects of alcohol instead of making a scene at a Greek wedding. “I can now say I was drunk once, I didn’t die or make a fool of myself, and I still didn’t like it.” It kind of cemented “I will never drink,” and I still haven’t at 56.

A few years later, they were doing an allergy test, and it turns out I am allergic to alcohol. Not like anaphylaxis, but something called “flush” which is common with Asians, apparently (I am not Asian). That’s why my body reacts that way, only I didn’t know it because I never drank.

I look at it like, he kept us safe! Couldn’t hurt, right?

Give them time to write it up! They police are having problems with the shared Google Doc permissions.

The DC Metro system has no public bathrooms. This causes problems, if you can imagine. I was starting my first week of work in Silver Spring, and as I was exiting the station, there was a woman in leather spandex stirrup pants yelling at the station manager she needed to use the bathroom. The station manager told her “we don’t have bathrooms, lady.” Back and forth as I passed them. Then the woman just said, “A-IIGHT!” backed up, pulled down the spandex, pulled aside her thong, squatted, and dropped a huge, coiling log right in front of the turnstiles.

We had a homeless (?) guy named “Gandalf.” he was named that because he wore a stadium jacket with a broken zipper, tied at the waist with a rope, big floppy hat, and a cane. Used to rant in tongues. Near where I worked was the (now former) Discovery Building, and during “Shark Week,” they put a HUGE inflatable shark “through” the building (head on one side, tail on the other. This thing was stories high). Gandalf used to spend time across the street, shouting biblical phrases at it like he was banishing some demon. Thanks for keeping us safe, Gandalf.

Before they build the STSS, there were “gangster types” that would hang around, gun handles poking from their waistbands. That stopped the DAY after football player Plaxico Burress nearly shot his dick off in a nightclub by having his gun stored in a similar way. Never saw guys flashing their gun like that since.

I would argue that as god’s creation, sentences like that made by mortals are the true test of faith: what you know to be true versus what some angry person tells you. I’d like to think if this mythos is real, that those that stayed openly gay, for example, and didn’t hurt anyone were given the gold star upon arrival to heaven like, “You passed! You passed the test of faith! I knew you could do it, I believed in you!” And those that hid their gayness or condemned others, “Aw… sorry buddy. better luck next time, okay?”

Also, I keep seeing people quoting stuff outside of the bible like biblical truth, like The Rapture, and stuff from Dante’s Inferno which is, at best, Bible fan-fic.

I know this is a joke meme and all, but I get a pang about the “I keep having to feed it Benadryl” part because, while funny, some people are like that with kids and pets and that makes me sad.

I have been using Kubuntu as a daily driver for almost 10 year now, and never regretted it. I had one Windows box for things like special cases (like dumb website forms that won’t let me use Linux), Pearson Vue exams, and edge cases related to work, but it’s on standby as a secondary system I RDP into. I am not a gamer, so I didn’t need it for that. I saved so much money not having to buy hardware in the last decade or so.

Sadly, Windows 11 won’t work on anything I have (TPM issues, too old), so I recently got a cheap Windows 11 laptop before the tariffs hit and I pay more for dumb Windows-only reasons.

Linux all the way, man. Gave me a career, a life, and my hardware back.

One of the buildings around here had a piece of art commissioned (?) for their lobby, and it was “Georgia O’Keeffe” -esque. Not really an orchid, but an “abstract” of that style. Well, over the years, it sun-faded, and the colors that stood out it was pretty obvious what it looked like. Most common joke was “is this where my gynecologist’s office is?” Eventually, the building owner had it removed and replaced with sailboats.

I usually do if the feeling is mutual. Like, if I am always the one reaching out, I’ll eventually stop, and usually they don’t even notice.

Probably see the dinosaurs in the late Cretaceous. Just before the KT extinction. I want to know how accurate we are about what dinosaurs looked like. All we know are from the bones and some fossilized skin and feathers here and there. I bet there are a TON of animals we don’t even know about because they were never fossilized. What did the T-Rex use their little arms for? Were dinosaurs covered with waddles, weird skin flaps, some hairy stuff, and what color were they? For comparison, if we drew modern animals like we draw dinosaurs from just their skeletons:

Stuffing and mashed potatoes. I make the mashed potatoes, and I am really good at it. I am not sure why, since it’s just ordinary yellow (or russet, depends on what they have) potatoes, milk, salt, and butter. I don’t even peel them, but it gets all the rave reviews.

I think the longest was 4 days when I was 12/13 as kind of a “I wonder if I can?” I was pretty much neglected as a kid, so I was left up to my own creative paths, and there was a time when I was trying out all kinds of new age stuff of the late 1970s and early 1980s. I think one of the things I read about was something experimental called “Delta sleep,” where you could get a night’s worth of sleep for just 2 hours only. I am sure it was new age bullshit, but “the army is experimenting with this” and so I decided to give it a try, using a biofeedback machine home kit that I had. This led to, among other things, parasomnias, but my record was 4 days with no sleep (roughly 80 hours, so less than 4 days technically).

For lack of a better term, things became “crispy.” Like too in-focus, too real, too stark. Colors were too bright, sounds were too loud, edges of thing were too defined. We all have a mask that we present to the world where there is a buffer of self versus your environment, and that was gone. My short term memory became horribly degraded, and I started seeing moving shadows where there were none, and certain things had “vibrations” and others did not. I can’t tell you which had what, because I couldn’t figure it out, and I suspected towards the end I was hallucinating, anyway. So what I am saying in all this was that’s what I remember, and I am not sure if my memories are 100% accurate. I wrote stuff down, but toward the third 24 hour period, it was indecipherable afterwards.

“Okay, the trees are like lungs of the earth… how exactly? And why is the letter X written everywhere?”

So my end opinion after all those experiments was “if you don’t sleep on the regular, your brain starts to malfunction, and not in a fun way.”

Since that time, the longest as an adult was 46 hours, when I worked a 12 hour swing shift at a vastly understaffed International; help desk, and my second called in sick for two days. So I did my 12, she called in sick so I did her 12, and then I did my 12, and after another 10 hours my boss found someone to let me go home. I was in poor shape. I never want to do that again. The desk record was 54 hours, when a snowstorm prevented anyone from getting to or leaving the building, but that was someone else, and I believe the company set up cots for everyone trapped.

One of my best friends lost her place of living when her boyfriend of 4 years said the relationship had actually ended in his head 2 years previously, but he needed the rent. But then he found a new girlfriend to grift from, “opened the relationship,” and they edged my friend out. I am still mad they did that to her; she was so heartbroken and damaged from that.

Okay, say this was true. I’m not saying it is, but let’s carry this argument to the next step.

IQ is a score that shows how well someone can solve problems and think compared to other people their age. It doesn’t measure how smart you are in every way, but it can help show how strong your brain is in certain kinds of thinking. So let’s say, okay, they aren’t born smart, but we’ll train them to BE smart, and this screening will make it easier because we won’t be working upstream against “the dumbness,” or whatever. Kid has the capacity to be smart, now all we have to do is train them, right?

Next, you have to assume that their parents and environment allows for this. These services will be available for rich parents only, which historically have been a better environment for teaching. But it also will give these “high IQ kids” access to parents of conservative, “Christian values” as well as liberal rich kids. So now we have a problem. What if having a high IQ also leads to insanity? We haven’t even defined what “smart” is, really, and so a lot of conservatives, “smart” means “stronger than your enemy.” Intelligence without compassion breeds psychosis, and leadership qualities that are sociopathic and ruthless. And that INCLUDES turning on their own kind. But that’s what they want, right? “Survival of the fittest,” a kind of social Darwinism.

“Sorry dad. I know you raised me to be the head of the company, but I gutted it instead, and will be funding my super-race and frankly…? You’re genetically inferior. Goodbye.”