a social networking sellout
I’ve sold out. I’ve subscribed to yet another social software phenomenon - last.fm. Yup, I’m only about two years behind the rest of the planet but never mind. It’s taken me that long to get over my internal cringing at the thought of sending my musical tastes over the wires to be recorded on a webpage. It took me a while to get used to publicly bookmarking pages, then someone invited me into Orkut and then a host of other social networks opened up. But still …
All I need now is to get into MySpace and my descent into the abyss of attention whoring will be complete. Wait, maybe I need to get into Facebook too. Perhaps I’ll actually answer persistent mails to get into Hi-5. Ugh.
In other news, it looks like more people are delving into the messy world of systems administration besides myself. Funny thing, running servers. Take for example, the simple lojack solution of changing every service (except the webserver) from the default port into something obscure. The moment I did this with the proxies, we dropped unauthorized traffic (that was being blocked anyway) by 20%. A whole fifth of traffic aimed at our proxies was stuff that shouldn’t be there. There were even clueless denizens from various parts of the planet who’d been trying to connect their Yahoo Messenger for weeks till I slapped a few iptables rules on their IPs. Change the ports and they all went away. Makes me think I should have done it when I set things up instead of waiting so long.
And look you, Slothy has landed in Cardiff. No news on his attempts to chat up the local sheep yet though, but I guess he’s still uh.. feeling his way around.
On 03-Oct-06 at 2:22 pm,
sage wrote:
let’s not forget your little excursion on Flickr.
the port switching thing- crazy stuff. so simple too. must beat all sysadmins to pulp.
On 03-Oct-06 at 2:25 pm,
sage wrote:
oh, and three hip-hip’s for the Sloth on getting there! we are so proud of him.
On 04-Oct-06 at 1:14 am,
rastiadu karaya wrote:
the only way i can justify the evilness that is known as facebook, is the fact that there’s unlimited uppage for photos. And my thin student’s purse can’t afford the luxury of a pro flickr account. Relative poverty makes people do crazy things.
On 04-Oct-06 at 6:02 am,
N wrote:
hi5’s the way to go man!! Yes I’m sad….but one has to have vices…rk surely $25 is not too much to pay for a little self respect ?;) (so says the hi5 addict)
On 04-Oct-06 at 10:23 am,
drac wrote:
Ah, yes. Flickr. I had just about blotted that out of memory and you had to go and remind me. Hey, wait.. I have two accounts.
Rastiadu: But … but … but … all the cool kids are using Facebook!
I can see it being cooler than Flickr, given the right circumstances.
Yes indeed. Relative poverty (or in my case, laziness) does make people do crazy things.
N: I still get email from various people asking me to join their little social network. It’s proving to be more persistent than Orkut ever was… Perhaps when I get really bored, I’ll join up instead of flaming someone on the internet.
On 04-Oct-06 at 5:19 pm,
rastiadu karaya wrote:
I am very ashamed to admit that it is indeed cooler than flickr, but i won’t go into details, because it took me enough courage to muster the above up. And N, 25 bucks US may seem like a paltry sum to you, but that’s about, what? $250 CND at the moment?
Word on the street is that the sheep have been rather unfriendly to dear Slothykins’ “advances,” and the Welsh birds are not pecking so to speak.
On 06-Oct-06 at 1:03 am,
N wrote:
Isnt Orkut where those pesky Brazilian peados hand out? damn RK, $250!! Thats almost third world exchange rates, thought Canada was pretty well up there?
On 06-Oct-06 at 9:02 am,
drac wrote:
Yes, Orkut is where the Brazilians (and Iranians, I think) hang out… I was in Orkut in a kinder, less Portuguese speaking era though
I think RK was indulging in some yanqui humour
28 CDN, a veritable fortune to a student 
On 22-Oct-06 at 11:33 pm,
sloth wrote:
Alive and in ‘diff. Oh! For the record: sheep kick.