Packing up my "Second Life" store.

Yes, the moment has finally arrived.  I started experimenting with the "Second Life" platform in 2005, become moderately in successful in 2006 but since then, after the 2007 boom, interest and traffic has kept decreasing at a steady rate.

When my latest hosting bill came in, the profit number finally fell below zero and turned red.

It's been a good run, but I have a first life to deal with. If anybody of the SL crowd is interested in any of the systems I have built in the past, drop me a line.

Pretty Good Ponderings?

Yesterday, I finally got around to generate a new PGP/GPG key pair, and obsoleted 2 old ones.   They were created in 1994 and 1998.   I couldn't even generate a revocation for the oldest one, since the "IDEA" cipher is  no longer supported.

Let me rephrase that in context:

I can mathematically prove that I was active in computer security before many of the attackers that I defend against, were born.

In other news:
Djee, I'm old.  But in this industry, we call that "well-tested and peer-reviewed".

P.S: For those wanted the shiny new bits on their keyring, the magic incantation is:


gpg --recv-keys 0x788a1200b221877e

My email address was: 2:293/608.23

Yes, really.

While looking for some older post I once made, I discovered one of the first I made.
Ever. At least on the internet. It was 1995. Thats roughly a decade and a half worth of live on the tubes that google searched through, in the blink of an eye.

Impressive, but people forget that life did not start with this "internet" stuff.

Before that, I used "FidoNet". It's logo was this:

                 __
                /  \
               /|oo \
              (_|  /_)
               _`@/_ \    _
              |     | \   \\
              | (*) |  \   ))
 ______       |__U__| /  \//
/ FIDO \       _//|| _\   /
(________)     (_/(_|(____/

Yes, younglings, that's a logo, from the days when a "GIF image" was a state of the art extravagance (which required switching to another application). And just in case you are wondering, that's a dog holding what we use to call a "floppy". Not the fancy-smancy 3.5 inch hard-plastic kind, but the good old "five and a quarter" slab of floppyness.

Those were the days of booting up an XT, firing up a "fancy" editor to type in your email, "packing" it, "tossing it", firing up the modem, listening patiently for it to connect (you could diagnose many connection problems by listening to the "handshake sounds"). Then off your mail went, and if you were really lucky, there was a zipped email waiting for you at your providers location. Mail was routed organically, and could take several days to travel across continents. "Discussion group" post could take a couple of days to reach everybody in the country. And attachments, although technically possible, would get you flogged by every "sysop" down its route.

The good old days... men were men, women didn't exist. Modems were big enough to stop a bullet for you (maybe even a runaway bull). And had blinking lights!

What it did not have were things like "the wayback machine", or "archive.org" to act as a historian of all these years of content. There is no way to ever find the text again of my first shy post. Or the "really funny joke" about the carrot and the nurse. Or the discussion that founded some companies are architecture setups that are in use still today.

"All the moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain."

Now get off my lawn!