Open Diary Entries


Pirate joke

7/3/03

I was telling this joke at work last week:

A pirate walks into a bar with a steering wheel sticking out the front of his pants. The bartender looks at him and says, "Hey, man, you know you've got a steering wheel sticking out of your pants!"

The pirate replies, in typical pirate fashion, "Arrr, I know, it's drivin' me nuts!"

My co-worker Beth was making me tell it over and over because she preferred my pirate impression to her own.

My new novel is 165 pages long, dammit. I started writing it on June 8. I thought I was writing it pretty fast but that's kind of slow. I wrote the first Ivy book in 2 weeks and it's over 500 pages long. Then again I didn't have a job or school at that time either. Ehh screw it.

Most of you probably know I got hacked last week. If you didn't know, short version: Some bitch (unknown who, but from the tone, sounds like a chick to me) decided she didn't like me and went around trying to find passwords to various accounts that belong to me. Through a security hole in my Dreambook (my Web page's guestbook), she got a hold of a password and went into the book to mess with it--first she just filled it with obscene comments and made it look like others wrote them while adding filthy categories, and then after I deleted that and fixed what she did, she just deleted my guestbook. The security hole was Dreambook's fault. That password she then attempted to plug into every other account she knew I had, only succeeding with Webring.org (where I belong to some Webrings for my site). She deleted those too.

I wrote up the whole deal on my jerks page.

What I didn't go into on there is the other side: Me dealing with Dreambook for fucking me over there. Their security hole operated as such: If you try to log in with the correct username but the wrong password, you get taken to a screen where you can click a button to send the password to your e-mail address on file . . . OR . . . if you happen to have a new e-mail address, you can type in your old one and then your new one, and have the info sent to the new one instead. All without being logged in.

So basically, the hacker only has to know your account name (mine is swankivy everywhere) and your e-mail address (easy enough to find, since guestbooks are only used on Web sites, and Web sites generally have contact addresses). That's what my hacker did . . . and when I tried to complain to Dreambook, THEY DIDN'T BELIEVE ME.

One freakin' guy actually out and out said he didn't believe that my information had indeed been changed, and that my hacker must have just GUESSED my password. Oh fat chance! That accusation was followed by an insulting list of tips on how to create an effective password. Yeah.

I sent the guy a response consisting mainly of a four-item step-by-step process detailing how exactly he or anyone else could change my e-mail address on file to whatever they wanted without being logged in.

Guess what the response was? "OH. Well we didn't know that was there. I assure you that hole isn't there for our PAYING accounts." And more b.s. about how on a FREE guestbook server they just probably figured having that extra option would cut down on the troubleshooting the techs had to do for people who couldn't be bothered to remember their login information.

Too bad it also created a security hole that I fell through big time.

The guy was all urging me to change my password and whatnot, which was stupid. Because first of all, both the old and new password WORK for a period of hours between changing it, which completely defeats the purpose of having a password, right? And beyond that, what the hell did I have left to protect? The bitch deleted all my stuff. So why the hell should I care? I had already set up a guestbook at Bravenet, which doesn't happen to have security holes so big they remind one of the www.goatse.cx guy.

Anyway.

Guess what, I've discovered somewhat recently that when it suits me I have perfect pitch.

When I was in high school I knew a guy with perfect pitch, and in college some asshole professor always bragged that he had it. I've always had fantastic relative pitch but didn't at any point think it was perfect; just didn't seem like it. But one day I was messing around and looking at song titles on my mp3 player, and started singing one before the sound file opened, and realized I was in exactly the same key.

I tried that with a bunch of other files on my computer, and it seems if I remember a song exactly, I can sing it right on the correct note without any starting pitch. Depends on if my brain has remembered what key it's in. I also have issues with songs that change key somewhere in them, because occasionally my brain will have imprinted the song after the key change instead of at its beginning. I can demonstrate it anytime, and it is weird.

Huh huh me awesome!!!!

Someone special is going to be seven pretty soon. Can you guess who it is?


Notes:

haha it took me a second, I was like "where's the rest of the joke??" lol


I thought we all knew it was Ivy. if I didn't know I'm sure I'd get held against the wall by air, or just thumped really hard.........


Pirate jokes, are like, so cool, like omigod.

Is that Dreambook bastard rant up on your rant page? If not, GET IT THERE. Hehe, excuse me.

So you're Little Miss Perfect Bitch, I mean, Pitch!

Back to the drawing board. [katqueen]

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