Space Reserved For Witty Trope

There's this feeling you get when you solve a really annoying technical problem - you may know the kind, the one where things just aren't working the way they should, and the documentation doesn't help, and you've bashed your head against it for a long time, then in a flash it comes to you and it works, and then all the accumulated crap related to that problem just.. *goes*.

A problem like that is like a growth in your brain. It starts out with a little grain of sand, and then you deposit the results of thinking about it around it until it's some massive calcified mass. all the potential lines of inquiry, all the anomalous results of investigation, all the half-formed and half-assed ideas about what you might try, all the possible solutions from the almost concrete to the entirely nebulous. All the mental notes you made yourself, all in a giant fucking lump in your head.

It gets in the way of other things, and sticks to them, and so when you think of completely unrelated things that were interrupted by thoughts of this problem, then you always go back to thinking of the problem Then it almost takes on a life of it's own, and yeah, it's just your subconscious fretting at it, but it's just so damned pervasive, and intrusive, and odd. It squats at the back of your brain like a malign homonculous, *staring* at you.

Then you solve it. Finally.

All in a rush all of those possible solutions collapse into *one* solution. The one you just came up with, and all of that crap that was accumulated around the problem just flushes out of your brain, and it leaves a sort of space, and you're kind of in mental shock, since everything else has way more room to breath, and all the stuff that happened while that problem was back there gets to stretch out and rattle around and run and skip and yell.

I've never not solved it. No matter how many times i've been in this boat. But i hate to think what it would be like if you didn't. It'd drive you nuts.

That's why, i think, i'm an engineer and not a theorist.

It's been an interesting couple of weeks.

So, i used to be an insomniac. Pretty much since college, really. I couldn't take sleeping meds, since they made me slightly crazy. Ok, really crazy, but in a harmless way. Even cute! But still, crazy. My coping strategy was therefore never get enough sleep. Even when I was sleepy, I would stay up until I passed out - that way, if I had a bout of insomnia the next night, at least I had my sleep debt on my side and could eventually scrounge a couple of hours.

At some point in the last few year I stopped suffering from insomnia I guess. I didn't notice, since my "cure" was working so well. I stopped doing it recently, and found out that I could get to sleep pretty easily and sleep 8 hours every night. I had way more energy, could even be described as "perky" (I know, the horror).

Yeah, I sort of miss the 5am teevee, and seeing the sun come up most mornings, and en

Anyway, blah blah blah set background set background you get the fucking picture skip to the end.

I had my first bout of insomnia for a while on Sunday night. Not for the same old reasons - this was because of a specific case - but I only got 4 hours sleep. Oh fuck am I tired. It's kicked my entire week's arse.

Now I wonder - was I this fucked for the last decade and a half? When it's your standard state you wouldn't notice - I only noticed in contrast to the week before it.

And what else about your life do you not notice because you have nothing to contrast it with?

Went to a smashing party. Met lots of lovely people. Good time tempered by what always happens when I do that, realising, the next day, how much I miss certain people. Joy. Cami. Sarah. Stephanie. Stew and Terri.

Ugh. Did someone shoot me with a fucking emo dart?

they hug! they eat invisibel bananas! they do not believes in evolutionz! they iz our prezidential candidates! o crap!

INVISIBLEBANANA

So, looking at the logs from my bebox today I get an odd skin crawly feeling
Someone's logged in via telnet, downloaded the user.ini file, and logged out

While I was out at the mall with Liz

Um.. ok then!

First off, I have fuckin *telnet* engaged on my router?

Second, I have TELNET ENGAGED ON MY ROUTER?

So, yeah. user.ini. turns out it has 3 hidden accounts in it that my provider puts there. don't show up on the web administration interface, and have the same password for all BE users, and are accessible via telnet.

Jesus. dumb mother FUCKERS

Deleted the jackassian backdoor accounts, turned off the telnet and ftp service, changed the password of the one account i left on there.

and sent my provider an email ripping them a new orifice.

christ on a fucking spacehopper these people are spectacularly retarded.

so, lesson learned. portscan any network hardware a potentially mentally deficient service provider delivers to me to ensure they haven't left me wide fucking open as a priority next time.

eesh

ABC journalist Michael Malone manages to get pretty much everything spectacularly wrong in this story about the Digg/AACS events of the last few days, wherein the AACS consortium used DMCA takedown notices to stop people publishing the leaked HD-DVD key. More on Spinfeed

WoT

From Bruce Sterling's Flickr

..just in case you didn't know.