Too Far Afield

On some occassion you may have watched the – at that time quite popular – movie
You’ve got mail from 1998, which was not bad – although largely an AOL commercial. If you ever watched that movie you know the “dree-draaee-druh-kneng-doo-deeh”, the typical sound of a PC or a random other type of modem establishing a connection with a remote server.

Just a few minutes ago I heard that sound. And I remeber having it heard days before. And both times – now and a few days ago – I thought: Oh shit, what’s that? I’ve got a dailer?! Both times I was happyly calling myself a broadband user and laughed at those stupid dailer folks, who made me install their software on my computer although I’ve got Alice and am therefore not vulnerable to those kind of malware. But hey, something is not right anyways. Wasn’t Linux immune against those type of security problems Windows faces all the time? Wasn’t I a (some-)long-time* Linux user? And then it came to me in an instant: I was getting a fax. Doh!

*) O.K., you got me. Unlike Bill I’m not an early adopter…

Between Wednesday, April 13, 4 p.m. to Thursday, April 14, noon, my bike was stolen from the Altona station, where it was parked waiting for me to fetch it. That means I need a new bike asap, because I need a bike to get to work and back home each day. If you know of any good places to buy used bikes on Fridays or Saturdays please drop me a line. Thank you.

In not so related news I enjoyed a good and very original Sushi lunch today, sponsored and home made by a Chinese collegue. Thanks for the invitation, Mrs. K., it was by far the best Sushi I ever had so far.

Update: Got a “new” one. Happy again!

I’m currently sitting in front of a Debian system installed on a remote server. What the hell has a printer system to do on an internet server? And why are there so many useless packages installed in gerneal? I wonder if the person, who set up the image for this system, ever heard of the Less is more! philosophy. Over 200 Debian packages on an empty box are really too much. I don’t want to talk about fingerd and other useless services, that ran on this box, when I took over root rights for it. It makes me somehow feel … well … inscure. Argh.