I'm still mad that Lindsay wouldn't accept my friend request on Facebook.

Sure, maybe I sent it under my duck's Facebook account, & sure, maybe the message I sent asking her to be my friend was just a mangled unicode ( UTF-8 ) abherration congratulating her on finishing rehab, & sure, it's entirely possible my cat, Sir Kevin, stepped on the keyboard right when I was trying to click "Send", but still.

Either Lindsay Lohan doesn't have time to play with a plush duck in the Italian Facebook he inhabits, or, as I said, my cat deleted it before I could hit Send.

Oh, and, yeah. I hope she wins this frivolous lawsuit or whatever & makes some serious bank so she can maybe set me up with a Bitcoin wallet or send me some floor covers for a 2003 VW Passat.

I didn't have enough Facebook friends who wanted to get really, really good at MobWars, so in my initial excitement I forgot to read Facebook's TOS & accidentally found myself with a dozen Facebook accounts.

Business was kind of slow that summer so I ended up writing a set of Perl modules that took care of the tedious portion of logging in to Facebook, bypassing the HTTPS redirect, logging in to MobWars, logging each character's stats, checking 'stamina' to see if the character had enough points to complete a higher-level mission, & so forth.

One of the accounts was for a Sir Ping Merlot, & I used a picture of my stuffed plush duck as Ping's profile picture. ( That account is the only one still open. After I read Facebook's Terms of Service I discovered that what I was doing was expressly prohibited, so I closed all the other MobWars character accounts except for Ping. )

The Perl modules that automated MobWars ran for about two weeks though, before I de-activated them. At the time, somewhere in New York a stuffed duck was knocking over a liquor store every seventeen minutes, on average. My mob of twelve became wealthy this way & as a reward, after the first week I bought everybody a HumVee with the Turret Option & even had enough to mount a MiniGun in each Hummer.

I was sad to deactivate my Facebook mob, because they were super awesome gamers with absolutely relentless enthusiasm. I kept Ping Merlot's account on Facebook open though because he was the most entertaining of all the characters.

I didn't log in as Ping after that for almost two years. When I finally did log in to Ping's account, I was pleasantly surprised to see that he had over two-hundred & fifty friend requests pending, and lo & behold 99% of them were Italian Facebook users.

So that worked out well. When I log in as Ping I get to see the Italian Facebook, which is a payoff I guess I hadn't anticipated when I started that project. I suppose some people might criticize me for having a stuffed plush duck named Ping running the last vestiges of a once-promising organized crime ring in the Italian Facebook, because technically I shouldn't have two accounts.

But do you know what I would say to those people?

I would say, "Hello! Would you like to join Ping Merlot's mob in MobWars? Or perhaps a round of Bejewelled Blitz? Or, hey, buddy... did you know I have a private Minecraft server that only me & Zuckerberg have admin to?"

That was you?

I never did figure out who hit me on the back with a rock. I *suspected* it was you, JStyle, but then I was like, nah. He's too far away.

Gnome3 has far surpassed my expectations on OpenBSD 5.5.

It is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Microsoft Windows, in every way.

In fact, this is the last time I will even mention Gnome3 in the same paragraph as Windows. Promise.

>> Cue downmods and comments of "Slashdot has literally become reddit."

You mean, except for the interface. Right?

My optical drive crapped out on me a couple months ago so I have unfortunately not been able to install NetBSD on my toaster oven, which doesn't have a coreboot/openbios compatible EEPROM so I can't even do a PXE network install.

That's not NetBSD's fault obviously. But since I can't complete that project, that means I have to use my OpenBSD systems to make breakfast.

I'm sure if _The Linux Journal_ was a selector, that the OpenBSD package repositories & mirrors are likewise tripwired.

And even if they aren't, well. The NSA would hardly overlook the OpenBSD community for possible deviants, especially considering the time Theo de Raadt started a food fight in the company cafeteria with some of the fine representatives of DARPA. I'm *pretty* sure that the NSA heard about that.

So instead of monkeying around at monkey.org or whatever, I'm trying to come up with some catchy OpenBSD slogans or whatever. Hopefully that will make us seem a little bit less... "Linux Journal"-esque, & you know. More appealing to stay-at-home dads & soccer moms.

OpenBSD: Maybe not portable enough to install on your toaster oven, but portable enough.

OpenBSD: Paranoid by default: paranoid by choice.

OpenBSD: the choice of security-conscious systems administrators worldwide.

I must also be extremely extremist, unlike all o' these *amateur* milquetoast extremists you see around these days.

I say "Debian GNU/Linux" out loud even.

I would ask somebody "Greetings & Salutations, friend. How is that MIPS/ARM cross-compilation of the GNU/hurd kernel & toolchain coming along?"

This is of course to appease Her Majesty "savannah", which is either extremely gnu or extremely non-gnu of me.

Basically, I guess I'm just a hipster. Perhaps a radical, extremist hipster who deserves to be on all these watch lists, but pretty much just a hipster.

( Also, to pre-emptively appease RMS, I make a pan flute burnt offering, hopefully before he can play it. )

Do they really have Linux for your iPod? ( serious )

*ahem*

_I_ have an iPod.

I use OpenBSD & Debian GNU/Linux primarily, which I'm *positive* triggers some kind of NSA monitoring trope whenever I use apt-get to install GPG or OpenBSD's pkg_add to install, well; *any* OpenBSD package is probably viewed as "suspicious".

Since I use Debian sometimes, I also *sigh* hereby admit that I've occasionally frequented _The Linux Journal_, & I enjoy their content immensely.

I don't *always* go there to learn how to enable full-disk encryption or how to create "burner" phones by running SIP/VoIP software in a _qemu_ virtual machine, but I'm sure I've bumped into black-flagged projects & probably, in some kind of desperate, bumbling attempt at following an article about $PRIVACY::$ANONYMITY Perl modules, well, you can probably guess.

I admit it. I've accessed cryptographic software directly from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, on more than one occasion.

I've succombed to kitten huffing.

I keep a three-ring binder filled with barrettes from females I've encountered over the years as a kind of "keepsake" album.

And once I shot some racy digital photographs with a woman I was dating, & I couldn't decide whether or not 2048-bit, 4096-bit, or 8192-bit encryption was strong enough to protect the images from being leaked into the internet. So I deleted them.

So, I admit it. I'm a Linux & OpenBSD user that has rummaged through countless software repositories on all seven continents over the course of several decades. I read _The Linux Journal_ & I like it.

The way I figure it, that probably puts me into some kind of watch-list bonus round, or some kind of keyword-trigger-list Hot 100 chart on the NSA's giant wall of pulsating 256" plasma displays.

I don't usually talk about it, & hell, I haven't even been over here to SlashDot for quite some time, but I figure, if TrollHax0r, Sarcasta, CmdrTaco, Bruce Perens & friends are still around, they can vouch for the fact that I am guilty as charged on all counts.

Sincerely,

dragonfly_blue

In other news, Netcraft confirms: Steven King is dying.

According to the Netcraft March 15, 2013 report, Steven Kings _The_Tommyknockers_ only accounts for 0.1.0.-1.0.7.5. square root of negative blue downloads from the Pirate Bay.

Therefore, it is apparent that Steven King is dying.

Source: Netcraft Survey March 15, 2013

I miss my friend LASER_CANNON. He was cool, kinda like LASER_GRENADE used to be before he got married.

I also miss my Reddit accounts somebody hacked out from under me from a public terminal, including my LASER_PEN account.

So if you see LASER_PEN on reddit from now on, that's not me any more.

*sniff*

Happened to me last month or two ago. I just wrote an article for Slashdot about my experience, but after trying to submit it now, I think I'm gonna publish it on Reddit. No offense, it's just Really Long & has a Great Deal of Unicode, which is necessary when you get surrounded by 12 cops on Nicollet Mall & are approached by the Forensics Lady putting on some Rubber Gloves for the next part of attempting to hassle me for not being a criminal but still having the nerve to have long hair & Bluetooth.

Also, Bollywood-style musicals don't seem to move letterpress paper products the way they did when I was a kid.

Dubstep music also seems to have tapered off of late; perhaps another casualty of Adult Onset Short Attention Span Shadow Puppet Theater Disorder.

Fibre-channel remote booting off a hard drive in a data center you don't know about using Diamond Multimedia Power Line communications devices hidden in a desktop's actual Power Supply Unit still seems to be a fairly solid bet for technology that will stick around for a while.

...Terminal Adapter to have Macros available to me, me & my carpal tunnel & tendonitis & shooting pains will probably be satisfied. No matter *what* kind of bastardized remnant of w3c's weird RFC-cluttered Obfuscatathon is currently Remajiggering the Decombobulators, I'm actually pretty happy with them overall.

Still, ECMAscript->JavaScript->Weird_Asynchronous_Wormhole_Allowing_Full_Duplex_Suddenly does not a particular robust, str_cpy resistant, MitM-attack resistant language. Strongly typed, dynamically typed, wat.evar.