Five of the world's useless, yet successful things

Ok, so Apple came out with the brand-new iPad2, and not surprisingly was greeted and hurrah-ed by waves of blind pilgrims that mindlessly embraced the gadget as a descendent of the gods itself. Talk about crowd manipulation!


Then each and every one of these puppets naturally unboxed their devices, activated, agreed in the iTunes EULA to sell their souls to Steve the Savior and rushed to their neighbors to show off what they got. Only to be met by a cold and resounding "So what?"

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