I am in serious doubt and not even Linux can help me.

Oh noes. Looks like it's that time of the week again!

Happy friday, fellas. Unfortunately, I could not allocate much time for blogging today and today's post is like an expensive restaurant's cupcake: short and sweet. The reasons are various, and this time I'll not punch you for citing lack of inspiration.

With the end of internship approaching, it's natural that you feel accomplished, thank-godding about it since a phase of life has passed by quite literally. It also means that you can go back to the standard wake-piss-eat-websurf-fap-nap routine that you missed during all these months. But how about later on?

I have been trying to think about how is this internship going to help me with my professional shit. For sure that is the one thing that matters! And I am yet to answer such question... my bright mind hasn't come with an explanation, neither has google's and now I'm starting to feel even more hopeless because not even the Linux Manual pages have an answer for me:

Oh man...

Tell you what, I'll go to the bar with a couple of chaps and make sure I discuss the above topic very thoroughly. With a couple of beers to follow. And a couple of shots too. Pretty sure that'll do it!

Peace out

Internships are some serious shit

I read somewhere last semester about the common disappointment and disheartenment of college students who venture themselves into their first Internships, just to find out that it's not what they thought, it's boring and if that's what real work looks like, that they might as well drop the major and do something else.

The article pointed out a couple of interns for whom the above happened not to be true and how much their "alternative" uber-hipster internships rocked. The first sentence was something like "So when you hear 'internship,' what do you think? A bunch of college students pretending to be busy going around making coffee for their bosses? Think again! [...]"

The sad thing about this thesis statement is that it's true. You know it too. Think about an intern in an office, his/her third day into the shift. I statistically know that 95% of you projected the following image in your mind:

The remaining 5% are what I call retarded daydreamers.

I have a rebuttal to the given statistic, though. After two months of thorough work in this tiny, yet cozy and delightful office, I've experienced enough to believe that my internship was beyond the standard model, and indeed I did more than just coffee to my supervisors. Don't take just my word for it, I'll let you see it for yourself. This is my desktop (the windows one, viewed from KNOPPIX). Outside the 'x' boundary are anything other than spreadsheet documents. Inside the 'x' boundary there is a 50-page excel file authored by me, containing all the budget of the company.

Quality over quantity, bitch!

Oooh yeeeah... all your budget are belong to me. Internship is serious shit and haters better step the fuck out. Of course, you may think that every single thing other than that single omnipotent spreadsheet is not exactly work-related. In my defense, I'll say that even in my impossibly busy internship one would require some passtime. Jeez, what's so bad about a binary file downloaded from a not so known source in the internet? Quit bitching already (talking to you, IT buddy!)
My download folder is not even that messy...

Seriously, what COULD be wrong?

Yea. Work's hard, and so is life. And an internship is between those two, slightly upshifted. Now let me post this entry already and flame some vegetarian forums.

Until further notice, I'm chilling in Linux

You may recall from last week that I drifted away from the corporate desktop and booted into the Knoppix GNU/Linux system during the lazy friday afternoon, deliberately hacking my way through the company's IT.

Well, pilgrim, today's post ain't much different - actually, it's more of an enhancement. Clocking in today precisely at 0855, it didn't take much to notice that the AM half of the shift would be not much other than spreadsheeting some stuff and then back to timewasting. As a co-worker wisely said (in portuguese) and I quote:

There was a man applying for a job who had a discrete disability: due to an accident, he had his testicles amputated. Nothing really that could affect work performance though, so the employer read through his CV and they promptly shook hands. When asked about the workshift, the employer then said:
'We start at 7AM, but I'll ask you to clock in by 9. Cause you know... from 7 to 9 nobody really does anything except scratch their balls.'

 Touche.

I looked no further, picked up my loyal KNOPPIX CD and didn't even bother to look for windows. Linux en masse! And guess what... I successfully spent a whole day without the need to reboot, or to boot into Windows to do work. Don't get me wrong though, I did do work. Just that the things I had to do were easily accessible from my mobile-portable-magnificent-free operating system.
In fact, I can do almost anything for my internship from KNOPPIX. Office work, internet consultation... so many things that it becomes easier to count how many things I can't do:

-Use task-specific nobody-knows (engineering) software designed for windows, and for which I wouldn't even bother to try WINE on it.

-Access two of fifteen directories within the office intranet because it requires windows authentication.

-Use Flash, because it's proprietary and optional in GNU/Linux

That's it. Everything else unlisted above is doable from my KNOPPIX CD. Got PWN? And my tipical work schedule consists of spreadsheets and budgeting, so I'm on grounds that are more than native to my system.

So, as stated above, until further notice I'll be chilling in my LXDE+Compiz desktop, going around all the firewall and accessing whatever site pleases me without fear of harming the company. Hell, I can even call the University of Miami and talk to a hot, procrastinating Calling Canes student employee girl for free through VoIP.

Go ahead and see for yourself the magic: www.knoppix.net

Linux PWNS and Friday is for Shitfacing (once more)

Hallo, I'm blogging this from KNOPPIX 6.4 since I got fed up with XP and there was no real work left to be done today. Or... I got bored and decided to try hacking a little within the office. You choose - or not, it's Friday anyway, who cares...

You may recall how last week I tried to explain my IT department coworker how open source programs can (when given the proper resources and popularity) outperform proprietary MS programs, but still failed to convince him. Well, today's post kind of builds on top of that.

As stated last week, friday is for shitfacing. This is not my own conclusion, everything during this day explicitly points out towards getting shitfaced. All you need to do is observe a little more. For example, today no more than four people sat down and spent more than 5 minutes in my office. These four people include a department supervisor and two Interns - who have to fill the workload in order to attain the credit. Productivity en masse, huh?

On the light of the above, and having finished all the spreadsheets by 11:30AM - that including offering to help a brother to download youtube videos and converting mp4 files - I had no other choice rather than these:

1.Grab a coffee. No, two. No, three and a cookie.

2.Blog

3.Look through files in my bag, reach out for some CDs, find out an old KNOPPIX GNU/Linux disk and without hesitation put it on the drive to boot.

Flawless Victory. KNOPPIX boots up and detects all my hardware. Not only I'm in full control of my computer, I'm also in control of his, hers, and their computers because they're all linked together in the office through a shitty windows server. You read it right, new operating system comes in completely out of the blue and the corporate server embraces it like his wife. Be thankful, people, that I'm a whitehat!

So as I'm writing this, I'm also chatting through Pidgin, looking for torrents and Facebooking at will. Proxies? To hell with them! KNOPPIX pwns everyone, your Mother included. Also, Compiz-Fusion has been enabled by default and now everyone knows that my desktop rocks. I guess even IT guy wouldn't have expected that. And guess what, he can't do SHIT about it. He can't because I'm doing ALL of these from two temporary storage things, namely CD and RAM. Yeah, babe, no hard disk storage needed, I could hack all the afternoon and still when I went home all my traces would be vanished...

So bottom line is... Happy Shit-Faced Friday once more! And if you're interested in fighting the corporates and becoming more secure (computer-wise) today, use LINUX. Yeap, if you don't believe me, see what people at www.distrowatch.com have to say...

Get drunk, happy and have a nice weekend folks.

If you wanna find more about KNOPPIX, here's a screenshot:

 simply beautiful. Get it here: http://www.knoppix.org/

Also mentioned in the post were:
Pidgin (Internet Messenger): http://www.pidgin.im/
Compiz-Fusion (window manager for X11 system) http://www.compiz.org/

K. Zimmermann

Happy Shit-face Friday!

It's holy-day today, and so you get another post.
Fridays are good for two things:

1.Bitching about the work
2.Practicing math by calculating the time till getting out.
3.(EXTRA, BITCHES!) Getting shitfaced and earning the accomplishment of interesting things in spite of your lame ass week

Nuff said. So, in the light of the above you can guess what I'll be doing!

Have a crazy great weekend!

Your IT guy is shit, and so is mine.

One of the greatest aspects of the information age and technological innovation today is the concept of the  'cloud.' The cloud allows you, me and everyone else to change work into network so we all can work as one big mind in the office. If you cannot access or work in the cloud, then I can only presume that you don't belong in the very room you are working right now. - IT guy next door

These more-or-less verbatim words were spoken to me by the IT guy at my job yesterday. He was probably trying to instruct me on how to cooperate with the guidelines of office Internet usage, or failing to. And I was feeling lucky as hell that he doesn't happen to be my boss (actually he's his own, as no one else takes on the IT department since they actually have a life) and I can blame him for the work not done due to technical incapacitation.
Now, the above quotation might startle you to ask me to what proportions was the shit that I did in order to receive such lecture, and I will save you your stinking precious time. The lecture quoted above came after I called said IT guy because I could not open some documents stored in a shared folder of my department. He came in, proceeded to try to open said files exactly like I did and then stopped, thinking for a second or two.
Then, very cleverly, he switched to the desktop and thoroughly analyzed every single icon there shown, gathering information to formulate his frustrated and incredibly intelligent rant on me:

"There. See? Look how much stuff you've installed here. Don't you know how dangerous blindly downloading things can be? No wonder every other computer here is able to open files when yours can't!"

Ok, so I ain't no Pope, Samaritan or deity, as though no one knew. I download things, obviously! I download things when and where I'm allowed to, thats the beauty of the world wide web! But let one thing be clear:

I download, but I don't screw things up.

You heard it right, Mr My-wife-is-my-PC, even people under 21 are aware and follow a certain ethics code.  That is especially true when it involves money, health, sex or getting a day's pay for free because your work is crippled by the incompetence of the tech department. You may be asking now what was there in the desktop to raise such anger in the poor geeky nerdy man's heart. I'll let you see for yourself*:

 *Missing in the picture are: Mozilla Thunderbird and a couple of spreadsheets

So what's so horrible and threatening in this desktop, besides the menacingly boring blue wallpaper? Did I happen to get hacked through one of the pictures or spreadsheets? Oh noes! Bad, bad intern!

IT guy then says that the shit I threw in the fan was the couple of non-microsoft programs I installed, seen in the right side. WHAT.

Non-Microsoft is meant to be read "Non-retarded" and "superior" simultaneously. For example, when you have a new computer just hooked up to the internet, what do you do? Download firefox! The only reason why OpenSource is still unpopular is because the average computer using monkey is too lazy to find it.

But no, IT guy - emphasis on IT - will not understand such fact - he's a robot! And so the opening lecture is stated, followed by me forced to uninstall all the freedom good programs. Facepalm. Reminds me of the "wrong password" screen that linux shows when you supposedly failed to probe into your boss's account;

I have, however, just to piss him off reinstalled Opera and put a dummy Firefox Icon since then. What... I know for a fact that I can't bear using IE7.