21
Condor
5y

26 or so hours up now. And I've got a few stories to tell :) feel free to refresh your cup of coffee and take a seat.

Last few days I've been going into this odd place called intown.irl to get in touch with its inhabitants. An odd place I have to say. But in some cases quite rewarding, even got a MILF home with me and into bed at some point. Anyway...

3 days ago I think it is now? Thursday evening I took my laptop to this local bar where I had this issue about dihydrogen monoxide with one of the bartenders earlier (you'll find that rant on those keywords). Still wanted to visit it regardless though, as I met that first woman there earlier that approached me. Unfortunately I didn't see her there that day.

Some bald guy who was clearly drunk approached me. Many people were already giving curious looks at this laptop I brought to the bar. I finally tuned it up with the stickers from FOSDEM.. I'll put a picture of it in the comments. My theme was one of privacy (central), distributions and Google's open source initiative (which aligns with the keychain token I got from them as well). But of course.. that guy.. he thought that a pimped/riced laptop obviously meant that I was a hacker.

Guy went to the toilet.. went back.. and suddenly grabbed my laptop and turned it towards him. Boy was I never more smugly satisfied that those rubber pads on the bottom are quite resilient. Could've almost damaged my screen by trying to grab it like that. But it's a CCFL display.. so high voltage. If it were to become broken.. worth it. 😈

On it at the time was a terminal, pinging Google (had network issues at that bar, to the point where one of the - I think - staff members got up to me and offered the WiFi password and got to talk with me.. more on that later), and my usual Linux desktop along with the Arch anime wallpaper with the quote of Da Vinci.. simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Of course the guy saw the terminal.. and probably reaffirmed.. yep, that's a hacker. At least he wasn't too wrong about the general term.. but the hat.. most likely he was wrong on that one.

Guy left with this question.. "you are a hacker, aren't you."
I replied to him: "No sir. I'm not a hacker. I've got no idea what you're talking about."
Guy kept looking at me weirdly for the whole night to come.

Back to that companion guy though. Mac user, yada yada.. but he told me about his backup solution. Apparently - I shit you not - he has not only the photos on his local device, he's also frequently backing them up in Time Machine (which I was really curious about whether it uses mirroring or snapshots.. he couldn't tell, lmk if you do) but not only that.. he was storing another offsite backup in that very bar, in case his house went on fire.

Now that is a proper backup scheme!!! If only more people were like that.

Seriously though.. that bald guy who took my laptop just like that... I just let it slide for that one time, but I tend to treat my machines as an extension of my very self. I think that was a very uncalled for move. Asshole...

How would you have reacted to such a thing? And.. maybe that's why we technologists don't get outside too often? Fucking everything is hacking these days if it's not Knopkes and Blinkenlights… Not every shell is a h4xx0ring console for h3kk1ng de fasbuk…

Comments
  • 7
    Here's the picture of the laptop by the way 🙂
  • 4
    Dude, Tf, So many feels :')
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  • 8
    You're definitely more patient than I would have been, I would have punched that dude who grabbed your laptop to look at it in the face.
    Just on principle: you don't touch my shit and don't try to spy what I'm doing, unless I give you my permission. And since I agree with you on the 'laptop as an extension of self' matter, I would take that very personally too: who the hell grabs another person like that, out of nowhere?
  • 3
    @Condor, technically, from your perspective, she became a MIF. I don't think I would have been really happy if someone grabbed my laptop, but I'm not a violent person, so there wouldn't have been a violent response. I might had him sit down, and then ssh into a dev server and run some DDL creating tables and then a rollback for a screen full of text rolling by. And then maybe if I was drunk myself, say something dumb about just having deleted some politicians porn collection or something equally dumb. A muggel would never know the diff. If I took my laptop to a bar; that's a really big if.
  • 2
    @iAmNaN given that I disguised an apt upgrade as evil hacking earlier (and they fell for it!) I can't say that that trick wouldn't work :3

    In all honesty, I really wanted to tell him that I'm a hacker (because let's face it.. he was right) and play around with him a bit. But I didn't want to risk getting in a fight or getting kicked out of that bar :')
  • 2
    its astonishing, i read the first paragraph and think "sounds like condor" i click aaaand

    its you!

    Congratulations sir, your have an unique style i can recognize
  • 1
    I have no idea of how I'd have reacted in that situation. However just wanted to tell you, that I'm proud of you for going to intown.irl
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