The past few days according to LJ (approximately)

[Edited to add: The Alliance of Readers' Keyboards, Monitors, Housemates & Pets have advised that food and/or beverages be put to the side before reading.

Перевод на русский mcmartyn ]


Malicious Security Crackers: "We used to take an account and try out about 40,000 passwords on it in about 5 seconds to see if it would unlock. LJ doesn't let us do that anymore. Damn that LJ! We'll show them! Here, have a malicious script!"
Malicious script: *takes 5 most commonly used passwords, tries them on 40,000 different accounts*
4000 LJ accounts: *unlock*
Malicious Security Crackers: "Score!"
LJ Geeks: "O RLY."
LJ: *stops allowing even remotely easy passwords*
4000 LJ users: "Hey! That was a perfectly good password! Why'd you make me change it?"
LJ Support: *facepalm*

LJ Geeks: *write more code*
LJ Admin: "Release the code!" *pokes server*
LJ Server: *falls over* "Error 500! Ow!" *can't get up*
LJ Admin: *blush*
LJ Addicts: "OMG ERROR 500!!"
LJ Support: "We know."

Bantown Crackers: "Hey, cool security flaws in Javascript, IE, and Firefox!"
Security Flaws: "How are you gentlemen?!"
LJ: "What happen?"
Bantown Crackers: "All your base are belong to us."
LJ Admin: "Subdomains for everybody! Fuck off, craxx0rbitches."
Free Users: "Yaaaay!"
Paid Users: "...no fair. Like we ever use voice post."
Permanent Users: "STFU, n00bs."
LJ Admin: "What they said. Suck it. Security reasons. Plenty of other sites out there."
Early Adopters: "Where's the LOVE?"
brad: "STFU, n00bs."
_____xo_so_em0_x_xx_____: "MY UNDERSCORES! WTF!"
LJ Support: "You got a rename token, so suck it."
so__________gratuitous_x_x_x: "WTF? They got a free rename token and I didn't?"
LJ Support: "It's called restrictions on what subdomains can be named. Your username still works. Deal."
so__________gratuitous_x_x_x: "OMG THE HYPHENS!"
note_to_cat maintainer volunteering in Support: "Suck it."

Bantown Crackers: "We still got cookies, yo."
LJ Admins: "Oh no you don't."
All login cookies: *expire*
Bantown Crackers: "Well, fuck. Eh, more suckers to hack out there."
All previously logged-in users: "WTF? We're logged out!"
LJ Support: "Big frickin' deal. Log in again. Duh."

The half of LJ that wasn't paying attention: "...Dude. What did they do with the passwords and URLs and shit? How come I got logged out? Somebody? Anybody? Bueller?"
LJ Support: "OMG HEADACHE."

A very sweet conspiracy

Today's moment of OMGWTF at work was brought to us by none other than the intrepid One-Man Bald Nudity Crusade. He somehow managed to induce malfunction in the really damn nifty ice cream vending machine, which is possibly the most reliable vending machine in the building.

This caused a hissy-fit to develop, and the security guard had to deal with it. The security guard is someone, who really ought to have been mentioned before because he's just a regular background character in the fabric of the workplace. He knows pretty much everyone by sight and gets along with pretty much everyone. (He knows who I am because I am usually getting out of the building very late at night. This causes some bogglement in him, especially when I reveal that I have actually spent upwards of ten hours at work. )

I overheard the security guard telling one of the people with an actual office about the hissy-fit. Alas, I didn't stick around for the complete story, but the beginning sounded promising.

It started as being a conspiracy on the part of the vending machine company to get people's money and not give them the goods that were paid for. Knowing the guy, it probably developed further along those lines, because the people who give refunds over the vending machine are the front office. The front office is -- surprise! -- closed after 5 in the evening, and the front office also won't be back until Monday. So this means that the welcome desk won't give him a refund, and the Shift Ops Supervisor won't give him a refund. Clearly conspiracy time.

"You might as well buy from drug dealers! At least there you get what you pay for!"

Indeed.
Indeed.

The security guard asked if we could please give him some warning on these people, so he knows what to expect.

Can't sleep; grues will eat me.

Killing time by hitting the spr0t boards (a little) and answering questions on the news post (a lot).

As of now I'd have maybe 2.5 hours of sleep before work.

So. Um.

Coffee time?

... or not. Yikes, where did the exhaustion sneak up from?

Setting the alarm for 6; have to be to work by 8:30. Looks like a good plan. Am so walking to work. I don't care if I've got wheels now, I am so not driving on 2 hours sleep and anyway I want to walk because I can't afford to get lazy even though I have wheels at the moment. 1/2 mile does not mean time to drive.

Tomorrow at work is sit and work on disks at any rate. Quiet, peaceful, a minimum of interaction-with-people and a minimum of crazy jarring noises. Sounds like a good thing. I'll set up the espresso machine.

That flighty temptress, sleep.

Sleep count: zero to none. Well then. I guess I'll just have to face a day at work without it! Hoping it will be a short one because of this. Goodness.

I only have, what, 200-odd more disks to copy. Right? Heh.

Pandora is my friend.

I am getting five jillion comments from my shower-sarcasm-script thing. I am a lot flattered and a little concerned, because I head off to work soon, and, well, five jillion comments!

Random things that people stumbling in might be interested in knowing --

I'm a Lunatic. That, and I post a lot.
I don't mind it if people read me, though I may boggle.
I probably won't have time to answer a zillion comments today because I will be at the dread Work, though actually I like it decently well when I'm in a good mood, and work + LJ != OTP.

Explained the happenings of the last few days to chorus_of_chaos in comments. Took shower. Idea took on life of its own. Emerged from shower. Wrote up idea. Re-wrote to suit demands of picky Thalia, muse of Comedy. Posted. Thought that a few friends who volunteer in Support might get a giggle. Belatedly realized that there probably weren't all that many explanations other than news of what's been going down.

Caffeine is my shepherd; I walk through the valley of sleep dep, and I feel noooooo pain...

I'm a little fuzzy, a little foggy, a little woozy
around the edges, but I'm at work and awake. It's a
lucky thing that I'm in back today, though I was out
front. Operating at about 3/4 speed in general here.

One-Man Bald Nudity Crusade was out in partial force.
There was general bogglement left over from yesterday.
Rev. Not-So-Nice Supervisor confirmed that the rehash
the security guard did about the relative business
ethics of vending machine operators vs. drug dealers
was in fact a reasonably accurate representation of
what the dude in question actually was ranting.

This morning featured errors on spreadsheets that I
don't have to deal with. I am determined to brush up
on my Excel so I can do these things too. Part of the
trouble seems to be that Management is an Excel guru,
and breathes the sort of spreadsheet magic that makes
mere mortals hide their eyes in abject terror.

All in all, though, it's a nice, calm morning so far.
I've been back here an hour. I get to sort through my
e-mail at work, but I've been trying to avoid the LJ
website proper on the very rational grounds that I
really ought not to be there at work anyway, and IT
does not need to know my username. I get to update
through e-mail, yay, so I do that while waiting for
the disks to copy.

And if IT has keyloggers about, they know far more
than they need to already. Including the fact that I
have what amounts to a geekboy fetish.

I was watching the spread of my "LJ in the past few
days" summary-thing through the informational aether
with some bemusement before I left for work. In most
of my watching the spread of LJ information, I'd
discounted the /friendsfriends as a tool for the
catching and spreading of memetic content, but redaxe saw this there, and redistributed, so I
went and poked through my /friendsfriends to see
what-all was there. The contents of /friendsfriends
are as much surprising as they are familiar, because
it's the interests of the people and communities that
your friends are interested in, but they're the things
about them that you haven't discovered yet, or that
you know about but don't watch regularly. Hi, random
people. It'll be a considerable stretch of time before
I get all the comments sorted, because, again, work
time! Whee!

I had been planning on calling my bondmate to see if
today would be a good day for me to drive out to Mesa
and drop by with belated Christmas. But given the
state of the sleep deprivation, I rather fear it'll be
too late to do that by the time I get sleep to make
that safe, and there wouldn't be much time should he
decide that today was a good day for actual time spent
together. So I'll go home, call like a good best
friend, and then get some sleep. Maybe tomorrow.

Beverage of the day: mocha

I've been back in Sampling since 11. Stressy College
Chick was doubling as herself and me today, so I
helped get some of the stuff set up and started.

Blood Pressure Cuff Manager is in today, as promised.
I helped her copy some photos from some attachments to
her hard drive.

Comic Pirate Super has been in and out of Sampling. We
discussed how future generations may have a lot easier
of a time dealing with the technology of the future
(since an important tech barrier was crossed in the
past century) and how this is a very important
technical resurgance and that restriction on political
freedom of thought leads to restriction on technical
freedom of thought. Technical and political freedom of
thought seem to go in the same people together, often
enough, so that when political free thought gets
squashed, the technical thoughts that go along with
the political big mouth don't get spread out by that
same big mouth.

Exhaustion is keeping me dizzy. I've been drinking
down coffee and tea, but it is not doing the requested
duty. Never mind that sheer willpower is keeping me
upright. All I have to do is change the disk when
prompted, right? Right? At least I'm here.

Work, and more of the good drugs!

Within a very close distance of actually being done
with copying this last lot of disks. That's seriously
a lot of disks there. Seriously. I didn't bother to
count them this time, but ... wow. I feel
technologically liberated in that Comic Pirate Super
(sitting at the workstation opposite this one) has a
jump drive big enough to fit everything I've copied,
probably twice over.

And this is one of those paper boxes full of disks,
the sort that holds about ten reams of 8 1/2" x 11"
printer paper.

I'm trying to finish this up tonight so I can get on
with the burning tomorrow. There's not a backup
check-in tomorrow, and Pink Shirt Guy is out.
Cinderella Supervisor is going to need all the help I
can give her.

I feel almost awake, in part due to all the caffeine
I've had today, but I know this is an illusion. I'll
be lucky to get all the way walked home before the
exhaustion taps me on the shoulder and tells me I'm
going to be taking a little time-out in the next
half-hour or so. (The walk home is twenty minutes
allowing for traffic. Not to worry.)

OMFG INBOX. *waves* Hi, people.

Migod. I started out the morning looking happily at my inbox, which was down to below 50 items, most of which were triaged at low importance.

When I got home from work, despite having the sort of day where I could watch my e-mail and reply to stuff every so often instead of being 110% focused on the task at hand (mostly because the task at hand was sitting and waiting for floppy disks to copy themselves), I had over 150 messages in the inbox and more arriving.

*grin* I'm not really used to this.

- People are welcome to add me & read me, though I'm not always this interesting.
- I do not add back automatically, because I only have so many hours in my day. There isn't much in the way of actual locked content, though there is a lot of private non-content.
- I write a lot in here. This is yet another iteration of a very long, long trend of me writing a lot in my journals, except previous journals were always paper.
- There is often Backstory. If lost, give a shout, and someone will probably provide context of some sort or another.

I'm working my way through answering the comments that look like they need answering. That is seriously a lot of comments. I think I'll probably be tripping on that aspect of it all for days.

This really gives me hope for some future involving a writing-related career, though I suspect this is just because I happened to write something accessible and insightful on a common and obfuscated issue. At the right time of day.

Bed soon, because work tomorrow, and goodness only knows how much of a stack of comments I'll come back to! I'm hoping that I'll get to go see Darkside tomorrow afternoon. I called today and got his mom, Lady Malfoy. He was going "to see a friend" (how very informative he is, eh?) and his time of return was uncertain.

Laundry-geeking turned into fashion discussion. Lady Malfoy is evidently a Winter just like me. That turned into a discussion of Darkside's clothing habits, and where I should shop for gift cards for him in the future. ;) And that turned into career-discussion, from where I learned that Darkside, in his uniquely closed fashion of communications, thought something had been communicated that hadn't. *sigh* I'll have to coax him into deobfuscation. Soon.

Meanwhile, I have followed his mother's clarifications, and Darkside has been introduced to my buddy at EA via the modern magic of e-mail. I did not resist the temptation to give voice to my diabolical laugh in the body of the introductory e-mail itself. They're young geek men of an age with each other and they both know me, and they both have that sense of humor. Either things will go distantly, very well indeed, or not well at all, and blasted if I can predict which it'll be. I know which I want it to be.

Now. Mornings come early, and I still need to find the huggy rock.