Comments for 24 July 1996

The feedback has been of the varietal sort this month. How to order them? Length, date received, tone of voice? Nothing seems appropriate, so I'll start with the most unusual and go from there.

Date: Friday, 26-Jul-96 10:12 AM
From: Jeffrey L. Wiegand
Subject: accolades

Killer site.
Very biting insight.
No Haiku.
Thank You.

... which made me think I should write this entire page in haiku, except that getting the syllables right would be a major pain in the ass. I'll just stick to my plain ol' style.

Now, if you think I'm a little excitable, check out this one:

Date: Friday, 26-Jul-96 09:20 PM
From: joe positive
Subject: thank you

Thank you.  Thank you.  I'm really glad you're back.  Thank you.  Sorry
for gushing.  And thank you.

j0+

I'm not really sure what's being said here -- ambiguity was never my strong suit.

Wired as all hell evoked some interesting reaction -- maybe it was the flourescent yellow background or the subliminal messages I hid in the graphics. Maybe I wasn't slamming HotWired hard enough:

Date: Sunday, 28-Jul-96 10:17 AM
From: bbeamish@spectra.net
Subject: Hot Wired

]-}  Some time ago I concluded that it was not a productive use of time
to try to "fathom" what of value might be concealed within, beneath,
behind all that font/graphic/color confusion ..

My guess is that they have few regular readers/subscribers, but have
succeeded magnificently in duping their advertisers into believing that
how they do what they do is just Too Kewl!

Only wish your assault had been more brutal - hit'em again!

Regards, etc.,

j. m. hayes

I can't agree more -- you know that ad space on HotWired costs an arm and a leg and then some. If the advertisers were smart, they'd just spam their ads on HotWired's Threads section. There'd be a lot of thrashing, but a lot of people would read the spew:

Date: Wednesday, 31-Jul-96 08:59 PM
From: Mark Dimor
Subject: Wired as all hell

Thank you

Finally someone is seeing the reality in virtual. 

Interactivity is made up of people communicating. To say it plainly,
out of any 1,000 people there are fewer then 3 who I would judge worthy
to buy a Bud Lite for if that. Therefore why would i want to interact
with assholes via T1 when i cant stand them in bars, subways, planes,
trains, and in my office.

Mark Dimor

Sure, but over a T1 you can say to their virtual face how fucked up they are without them going postal on you. Well, if they do you're not in the same room, so your Pentium investment is safe.

Date: Sunday, 28-Jul-96 08:12 AM
From: Rod Copeland
Subject: praise

"Stopped Making Sense" is right up there with "Breakfast at Frys"; both
are classics-to-be. Made me think about my rotten ex-boss--an associate
technical writer and I were talking about the boss' incompetence, I said
she was good only for creating political situations and my associate
countered that she is hung-up on 'image management'. The more I though
about it, the more I agreed, and the more I noticed it in the rest of the
'business' world. Vaporware has evolved into an industry of image
management--substance is irrelevant as long as it looks good.

I stole a copy of "Stopped Making Sense" to go with my stolen copy of
"Breakfast at Frys"; I like the writing style as much as the subject
matter.

In case you care, Ad Nauseum is in my list of links. (That and my resume
and perquisite bio are all that are up at my site right now.)

BTW: The phrase was 'dazzle them with brilliance', not '...with  dexterity'.
-- 
Rod Copeland  http://www.citilink.com/~rodsmine/

Ah -- but in this industry, "brillance" and "dexterity" are sometimes synonymous, and always mistaken for each other.

Date: Wednesday, 31-Jul-96 06:34 PM
From: Robin Thomas
Subject: Re: Overheard at beer festival

A bandwidth provider in Southern Arizona makes a t-shirt:

"The Internet is Full. Go Away!"

www.aces.com. T-shirt was a limited run by the owner, guy named Ehud
Gavron.

Cool-ass site, BTW. I especially liked the Netscape OS conversation with your buddy.
My two cents: I've set up a CGI-based system so that three
Macs/PCs with Netscape can make minor changes over a T1 to a Web
server's contents, and it takes all my patience to keep all three
Netscapes from crashing for more than an hour at a stretch. I'd hate to
see the OS.

In the meantime, the Mac-spoiled users here who want sexy features like
input slider bars, multiple-undos, and other application-based niceties.
One guy here refuses to believe me when I tell him that CGI/HTML can't
do these things, and implies that I am stonewalling against code
changes. And show me any Java applet that doesn't increase Netscape's
crash probability by a factor of 10, on any platform.

I'm ranting to a stranger, so forgive my impertinence. Just seems like
people should write their own dektop apps as HTTP clients; then they can
do anything they want.

Keep crankin' the verbage -- it made my day today.

Robin Thomas
Web Architect           "Customer service is the Net's killer app."
Zedcor / ArtToday 
http://www.arttoday.com/ -- Net's hugest graphics site!

Don't tell Spencer Katt about Netscape crashing after running Java applets -- I'm sure he'll attribute it to some secret pact between Microsoft and Sun. And don't worry about ranting to strangers, that's what interactivity is all about, right?

And Robin, if you think you're ranting to a strange, check this out:

Date: Tuesday, 13-Aug-96 08:38 PM
From: Barry Cronin
Subject: Comments

Hi Jim,
How in the name of bejaysus are ye? Good fuckin` site it has to be said,
I`m sick to the darkest end of my arse watching nerds who take the slightest
bit of offence when people poke a little bit of fun at their Internet, if you
can`t laugh at yourself, get a fuckin` job. I happen to like the X-Files but
detest Star Trek with every nerve in my body but try and take the piss with a
Trekkie and the next thing you know there are five hundred of the bastards
screaming outside your door protesting in their silver fuckin` suits and crap
laser beam emitting whatever, grow up, get a girlfriend, play with that little
thing between your legs and discover that there is more to life than
downloading erotica and swapping URLs with your mates. Well done Jim on
displaying that humour encapsulates more than just blonde jokes, may the force
be with you or whatever the crap relevant Space term is.

cheers,
Barrabbas

I trust you will withhold my e-mail address because I`m not in the mood for
dealing with sad spotty trekkies, who will think it`s great fun to send me
viruses etc.

I guess I shouldn't mention that "The Netcom Incident" is named after one of my favorite Star Trek episodes, "The Enterprise Incident". The emails about Netcom have been trickling in, and their tone has convinced me I should have named it "The ISP Conspiracy" instead:

Date: Thursday, 08-Aug-96 10:55 AM
From: Dan Wang

>Netcom vs. the World (at least, Netcom vs. a couple of hacker's world), 
>as transcribed in The Netcom Incident,
>ended on a bit of a conspiratorial tone. You think I'm trivializing the
>situation? I point you to
>alt.conspiracy.netcom and this chilling (fnord) email from Freemason
>Central: 

Funny that you mentioned alt.conspiracy.netcom. I know Jim Small, the guy who
created that newsgroup as a joke. He had his netcom account cancelled when he
uhh... exposed a security flaw, and posted that one of their internal servers
had a .wav of Beavis & Butthead saying "Uhhh, customers suck".

BTW, he also registered the domain nethole.com, if that tells you something
about him.

I'm beginning to think that Netcom's security model is a little too lax. Between Kevin Mitnik's shopping spree, Jim Small's casual stroll through their customer support database, and the following email, I wonder if they're even paying attention to their users at all:

Date: Tuesday, 30-Jul-96 04:13 PM
From: Leo Broukhis
Subject: Re: Netcom incident

Hi!

I used to be a Netcom customer, an old one, with a shell account.  It worked
fine, I was using term (socket extender, kinda TIA) happily until they screwed
my account twice (charged me $95 instead of $17.50; then issued a refund
incorrectly) and until I felt the urge to switch to something more
Internet-, WWW- and UNIX-friendly (I knew that I  don't want to know what
NetCruiser is). I've switched to Best Internet.

Anyhow, the story is not about Netcom, it's about Best. For quite some time,
still at Netcom, I had a "pwcrack" symlink in my binary directory pointing to
the nn newsreader, and an "nn" alias pointing to the "pwcrack", so that I don't
feel any difference, but "ps" shows "pwcrack" being run under my name, just for
fun. Never any problem with Netcom.

In about a week after I'd switched to Best, I had a "talk" conversation with a
sysadmin. Apparently, a "concerned fellow customer" notified them of this thing
running under my name, and they have not ran "ps c" to find out what is
actually being run, but asked me what's going on. The guy had managed to
convince me to rename the thing, so here it went: not_a_pwcrack. And they do
believe me, as I don't get any talk requests anymore. :-)

Since this all started off with a haiku, let's end it with something similarly poetic:

Date: Wednesday, 31-Jul-96 11:13 PM
From: MIKE MILLER
Subject: webpage

I enjoyed your articles. I read several of them before my but fell asleep,
and I began trying to turn over my keyboard to see the next page. I will
come back later when I am more awake to explore more of your pages. Thanks

How fitting.