Naich's crappy blog

Following a repossession and a long vacancy, the house next door has a new owner, who is doing it up. We share a drive and I bumped into him as he was unloading decorating stuff from his car. I’m not good at chit chat. “Hello” I said. “Hello” he said. “You own the house now?” I said. “Yes” he said. That was the point I realised I had completely run out of conversation. He stared with increasing panic at me while I frowned furiously, trying to think of something else to say. This continued for a while. My brain had seized up completely, locked at 100% CPU, trying to think of anything to say that wasn’t just fucking insane. Meanwhile, my facial muscles stayed the same in the absence of any further direction from further up the head. In the end he dived inside the house to escape the steady but vicious frowning that was being pointed in his direction.

The next day I was brewing up some beer in the garage with the door open. I was at the stage where you boil it with the hops, and I had a nice rolling boil going in my large stainless boiling pot. My boiler has various wires coming out for heaters, thermometers and the like, along with taps and attachments for chilling the liquid once the boil is done. I had my head immersed in the aromatic steam when I spied my neighbour walking from his house to his car. He spotted me and looked puzzled, so I thought I’d try to be friendly again. I was trying out a large friendly grin when it occurred to me that it might look a little odd that I was grinning at him with my head immersed in steam coming from some weird contraption with wires and pipes coming out of it. I couldn’t help it when my grin turned into a bit of a giggle, which must have added to whatever effect my steamy grinning was having on him because his quizzical expression turned to one of alarm and he almost ran to his car.

The day after that wasn’t any better for neighbourly relations. I was leaving for work in the car, just as his car appeared at the end of the drive, turning in from the main road. I stopped and started waving my arms about a bit, mouthing words to convey the message that it was perfectly OK for him to continue down the drive and I would reverse back into my parking space so he could get off the main road safely because I’m nice like that and not a dangerous maniac. I’m guessing that from his point of view, the dangerous maniac with the weird laboratory in his garage was annoyed that he was coming down the drive, getting shouty and angry. He reversed back on to the road at high speed in what was, quite frankly, a shockingly dangerous manoeuvre. I tried to catch his eye as we passed but he seemed to be hiding behind the steering wheel.

I haven’t seen him since and I’m not quite sure how to convince him that I am almost normal and really not that dangerous.

"We must invite Naich. He's so fucking sophisiticated."

Gosh, where do I start.  There are so many people want me to join their exclusive circles.  I had a letter from the Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University (or “Vicey”, as I call him), asking me – actually more like begging me to join him for a swanky reception with canapes and vino.  He used the excuse that it was for my 25 years service working at the uni, but come off it – who wouldn’t want the company of a badly dressed, slightly brain damaged electronics technician, staggering around guzzling wine and belching pastry fumes?

But even more exciting was my email invitation to join the Freemason Illuminati.  I didn’t even realise there was one until I got their mail!  They obviously like the cut of my gib and I was just thinking it was about time I heard from the shadowy evil secret rulers of the world.  If anyone would like any favours once I’ve joined the select elite, let me know.  This is what they sent.  It all seems totally legit.

Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2012 09:30:03 +1200
From: freemason illuminati <noreply@freemason.org>
Reply-To: order@illuminati.umail.net
To: yourorder@fi.org
Subject: we call

You are receiving this mail in regards of the freemason confraternity  of the
whole wide world (FCWWW).

You are moving well in what you are doing but in order to make it easier for
you, we have concluded for you to be a part of us as a member to sign your
life to us and have any thing you need.

Be it any thing in the whole wide world.

You can’t refuse us now for it’s too late.

Get back to us now for your Illuminati membership Order and also for you to
know more about the ancient ILLUMINATI FORUM and also the Orientation and
goals that we pursue.

Get back to acquire your goal now.

I can’t wait to set up some sort of super-villain style base on a Caribbean island.  I’ll need some sidekicks if anyone is interested.  You’ll have to improvise with the sinister weapons until I get set up properly.  I’ll see if I can get some sort of poisoned dart cigarette holder made up, or maybe a miniature gun in a mobile phone, but in the meantime you could use a brick in a sock to bludgeon people to death.

I went to do some stuff on my PC the other day to find that the cat had been sleeping with her paw on the “Print Screen” button. This button starts up a program that takes a screenshot and brings up a window asking where you want to save it.

Holding down a key keeps repeating the keypress, so as long as the key is held down it’ll keep starting up new copies of the program, again and again and again, as fast as it can.   It is the PC equivalent of sitting stationary in your car with your foot firmly pressed down on the accelerator. The cat had been sitting like that for quite a long time.  Everything had ground to a halt and the status bar was just 1 pixel wide grey stripes. There was a black box on the screen where the last “take a screenshot” window had popped up but the poor PC didn’t have enough CPU left to actually fill it with anything.

The mouse was barely moving so there was no hope of actually using it to close the windows. It was time to use Geek powers and drop to the command line. I hit CTRL-ALT-F2 and waited for a while. Several seconds later the terminal came up and although it took a few seconds for each keypress to register, after a couple of minutes I was actually able to log in. An incantation of “ps -ef |wc -l” showed there were 3,600 processes running. Each screenshot capture takes 3 processes, so there were 1,200 screenshot programs running simultaneously. I gave it some Linux magic – “killall gnome-screenshot” and everything instantly sped up. I did some more killing and everything went back to normal – in fact there were no ill effects whatsoever and the computer worked fine for the rest of the day, with no need for a reboot or anything.

Jimbo once started up 140 text editors which barely slowed the PC down and Luna couldn’t kill it with 1,200 screenshot programs. Linux – impervious to cats and kids.

Update: It’s been pointed out that I should have used “pkill” rather than “killall”.  Killalling, while relatively harmless on a Linux box – a bit like trimming a dog’s claws, is the Unix equivalent of taking it out back and shooting it in the head with a rocket propelled grenade.

Jimbo will have turned into some sort of terrifying super villain:

Yay!  Go Jimbo!

I feel I should write something but I lack inspiration. The first person to reply with a suggestion gets a blog entry written about it.