Matt Ulman

Today’s story is called:
Spilling beer on a punk rock legend
—or—
How I tripped over Grant Hart

One of the things that I like most about living in NYC is that you can be sitting at the office @ 9 PM on a Sunday, and suddenly realize you were going to go see Grant tonight @ the Mercury Lounge.

So, I hop on a train … long, horrible train story omitted … So I get out of the cab & go inside. Walk in and there’s this really… interesting… guy w/ a guitar screaming & about 30 white, 20something men standing around. Luckily there’re only a few minutes before Grant’s going to come on, so I go get a beer.

Walking back to my spot (right in front of the sound booth) I’m looking around – watching all the people giggle, many more politely than he deserves, at this guy and thinking how far Grant’s fallen. The next thing I know, I’m standing on something where my spot used to be. I look down to see Grant gazing back up at me, having quietly yet firmly planted himself up against the sound booth.

Now this is where it gets really uncomfortable, because what do you say when you’re standing on the ankle of GRANT freaking HART? Oh… sorry… oh, it’s you… oh … sorry … wow, hey …

Someday, I’ll learn how to speak w/ people.

So I didn’t really spill any beer, but it looked good in the title – and I really could have. It was a brand new beer.

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Hey, I got ‘hacked’. I wonder how long ago this was – actually looks like 4/6/99.

Oh, and it’s just the number of seconds since 1/1/70. That’s when ‘unix time’ started. We just celebrated a very special event in the unix world.

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‘And I hope you will join me in expressing thanks to one American for the strength, and calm, and comfort she brings to our nation in crisis: our first lady, Laura Bush.’

Ugh.

Added at 1012441755 by Matt:
I suppose we should just be happy (?) that he didn’t make her give the SOTU for him.

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Don’t panic, it’ll be alright.

It could be worse, you could be misunderstood & lonely like this girl:

And if you haven’t, you should really check out this site

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Dammit, I didn’t mean to break the chain of “see previous.” I’m so clueless.

I think you can skip around the dead spot in the archive with the following link.

I had been trying to fix the old one where I had been ashamed that I left in an extra “see previous.”

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I hate color. Did I break it?.

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This is so 1998.

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This was a while ago, but I finally got it scanned, it’s been hanging taped on my door for months.

Our VP of sales comes into my office, this was November, so everyone’s still a little freaked – sales guys in particular – saying that the Secretary of Defense (no, really) was on the phone. Deep breath, I’ve gone through this with him before, it’s invariably some guy from the Ukraine or someone trying to 0wn a box. “Ok J*ck, get his number, I’ll call him back”. No, he’s really serious, it’s a problem involving national security, he says he’s we’re trying to ‘hack’ into the Secretary of Defense’s computers…

So a crowd’s gathered by now. Mostly geeks, but a few sales & marketing drones. What’s going on… yadda, yadda. Tell this guy to fuck off, J*ck… No Matt, I really think he’s serious.

Ok, transfer him. Still can’t guess the angle, but there has to be one. I’m 100% sure of our network, no way we’ve been 0wned w/o knowing.

He says he’s the director of something, manager of something else. Goes on to three more titles… way too many to be real. Says our “bay9 & bay10” nameservers have shown up on their network, and they need to know how that happened.

I’ve finally got the angle. He’s trying to r00t our nameservers. I’m sure he’ll ask for the pwds next – so he can make sure they haven’t been compromised. But he doesn’t. I tell him that there’s no way these servers (one of which hasn’t been online in three months) could be on his WINDOWS network, because they were both *nix boxen. Of course, he says. They’re lYnix (mispronunciation his) servers running semba (sic).

I laughed, told him he was the worst social hacker I’d ever known and way too stupid to be in the position he claimed. If he really wanted me to play along, he should send me something to my fax number – (212) 244.5662. Hung up. Yes, the crowed gasped – I’m the best CTO in the world.

Told J*ck how to identify a loser scr1pt k1dd1e.

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Risky, but hmmmm, Dave this was a good idea.

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