Category Archives: Web/Tech

my god, it’s full of unicorns

A little known fact about me: I'll do just about whatever my friend Chris tells me to do, just because I want to be popular*, so a half an hour ago, when he told Twitter to go to espn.com and type the Konami code into the search box, I stopped performing life-saving CPR on a hobo and did exactly that.

Here's what ensued:

Omg_fucking_espn_unicorns_fuck_yeah

Every time you hit a key after pressing enter, a new unicorn would pop up. It was so fucking glorious, I made sure it was the last thing the hobo saw before he died, because I knew he would have wanted it that way.

Whoever wrote that code deserves a medal. Whoever forced them to take the code out (almost as quickly as it was discovered) deserves a boot to the head**.

*not true.
** and one more for Jenny and the wimp.

whenever i type “lions,” i have to make sure i haven’t accidentally typed “loins”

A friend of mine showed me the most awesome picture of a little Voltron toy I think I've ever seen. It had lions for hands.

This bounced around in my head for a moment, and I shared my great wisdom with Twitter, thusly:

Voltron with Lions > Voltron with vehicles. THIS IS SCIENCE AND YOU CAN'T ARGUE WITH SCIENCE. (and now, pot stirred, I'm back to work.)

This screenshot from Twitteriffic (with bonus Memories of the Future edit in the background) illustrates one of the reasons I just love using Twitter. These replies are captured exactly as Twitteriffic displayed them to me:

Lions vs vehicles qft

Okay, now I'm really going back to work.

in the country of the kaurava king

This made it past my mail filters last night:

This is youur penis: 8–o
This is youur penis on drugs: 8=====O

Any questionss?

He said. Yes, and he can beat any man in the country of the kaurava king (suyodhana) with all his followers an apportionment bill and carefully revise it of view. Insoluble conundrums of john's national zeal and lower stipendsthat a most interesting.

You know why spammers send these things? Because somewhere in the world, there is a guy, and that guy saw a subject line that said "Nothing can seduce women faster than aa…" and shouted at his monitor, "than aa what?! Than aa what? Tell me! Tell me! I MUST KNOW THE ANSWER RIGHT NOW SO THAT I CAN FINALLY SEDUCE WOMEN!"

Then that guy opened the e-mail, saw that little ascii drawing, and was shocked into silence. He sat there, alone, and quietly admitted to himself, "You know what? You're right. My pe–" a sob caught in his throat, and he faced the brutal truth. He didn't have any questionss, only sadness. "My penis looks just like this: 8–o and that is why I can't seduce women."

Redemption was just a click away, though! He grabbed his credit card, went to the website and placed an order, and started making plans for exactly how he and his new penis on drugs were going to walk down there, and fuck all of them sheep.

It's because of that guy that the rest of us get spam like this … but does anyone have the heart to tell him? Does anyone have the heart to take his dreams of seducing women with his 8=====O and dashing them into insoluble conundrums of john's national zeal and lower stipendsthat? Because that guy's life is already pretty sad, and I'm not going to kick that guy when he's downn.

Books I Love: The Hacker Crackdown

Now that we've figured out which one is Pink, allow me to welcome you to the machine…

In the late 80s, I kind of knew a bunch of people who were involved in what we called The Computer Underground. They weren't my friends, and I couldn't even tell you what their handles were (well, I could, but I won't) but I learned a ton of stuff about technology and other mysterious subjects by dialing into BBSes and reading the textfiles they left behind.

By 1990, I was spending less and less time online, while I continued to struggle with my existential acting crisis. I read books about acting, and all of them left me cold. I read books about filmmaking, and I just didn't care about them.

Then, in 1992, I saw this book called The Hacker Crackdown on the front table at a book shop. I was intrigued, and I started reading. After standing at the table for a long time and getting deeper into the book than someone who is standing at a table near the front of a bookshop should reasonably get, I bought the damn thing. I finished it within a day, and before a week had elapsed I had read The Cuckoo's Egg and Cyberpunk, the only other books on the subject that I could get my hands on at the time.

On one level, The Hacker Crackdown is about how the US Department of Justice launched a nationwide operation to bring down a bunch of hackers in something called Operation Sundevil, but it's also about a subculture and its people who remain misunderstood to this day. Most importantly, introduced me to a world where information and intellect were incredibly valuable, and it inspired me to learn all that I could about the online world I'd eventually call my home. On the way from there to here, I met a lot of the people who are in the book, and formed some friendships that lasted for years.

Cory Doctorow said that The Hacker Crackdown changed his life and it "inspired me politically, artistically and socially." He's not the only one. I can draw a very short and very straight line between reading this book and learning how to navigate the World Wide Web, which is what we called the Internet before you damn kids today were born.

In 1994, Bruce Sterling released the book online, and in 2007, Cory Doctorow recorded the entire book as a series of podcasts. If you want to understand how we got here, I'd say The Hacker Crackdown is required reading.

next time: the prince of wales

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