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authorgit <git@mjf.mjfer.net>2021-08-26 00:21:46 +0000
committergit <git@mjf.mjfer.net>2021-08-26 00:21:46 +0000
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+Who runs this place anyway?
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+<h2>Frequently Anticipated Questions</h2>
+<li><i>A question?</i></li>
+<p>Yes, that is a question. Nice one</p>
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+<p>
+Since you are on this page, you're presumably lost. That's ok. I don't really
+get all this stuff either. Let's start with some easy stuff.
+</p>
+<p>
+<i>You're on the Internet</i>. Known to some as a
+<a
+ href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes">series of tubes</a>,
+but in reality much more complicated than it has to be.
+The way you get here is through a device you have at home called a router,
+which literally does what the name implies--it routes signals to where they
+need to go to make things go beep. In the 60s and
+70s, routers tended to be people-based and would spend their time plugging
+cables into and out of ports so calls could connect.</p>
+<img src="/static/human_router.jpg" />
+<center>
+ <i>Image of a switchboard courtesy of
+ <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jersey_Telecom_switchboard_and_operator.jpg">
+ Wikipedia contributors</a>
+ </i>
+</center>
+<p>
+Fortunately, we figured out that was dumb and made robots do the job for us.
+Internet companies, governments, and anyone else with enough money and
+influence bought huge routers and hooked them all up to talk to each other.
+Then they convinced us all to go out and buy a router from our ISP of "choice"
+so we could all send cat pictures to each other seemlessly. We got rid of
+phones, replaced our phone with our IP address and email, just to ironically
+end up back at phones again. All of our devices serve, or at least can serve,
+as a router in some way, and all these little robots talking to each other
+makes it so you can get lost on some person's home page.
+</p>
+<p>
+In a way, you could say you've made it to my router. Not my home router of
+course--that one sucks. I'm mooching of someone else's, also known as a Virtual
+Private Server. These companies run whole bunch of servers, hook them up on a
+bulk connection and rent them out for people to run blogs about cats and porn
+sites.
+</p>
+<p>
+Precisely speaking, you are in a chrooted web server running on rented virtual
+machine in a server farm located roughly in New Jersey browsing the "about"
+directory on the "whereami.html" page.
+</p>
+<p>
+Less precisely, all that means is you're looking at some files I left in a directory
+at this address, and paid some people to host for me since local ISPs tend to
+be ridiculously expensive if you want to do anything besides host some private
+servers for you and your friends and family.
+</p>
+<p>
+A helpful tip, CRTL+W will close any webpage you don't like. Not that you
+wouldn't like this page... you did read all the way here through all that
+pedantry didn't you?
+</p>
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+<p>Last I checked:</p>
+<code>
+$ whoami
+mjf
+</code>
+<p>There's a lot of ways to go about this question, honestly.</p>
+<p>I could start with my name, but that doesn't really tell you much and it's
+on the site anyway. A lot of people answer "who they are" with what they do.
+I'm working in an IT department right now trying my best to wrap my head around
+securing their network. I suppose that tells you something, even if I haven't
+been at this long. I got here after I fell down the rabbit hole of
+understanding how the hell this whole Internet thing works, and I've been
+trapped ever since. Cybersecurity people seem to touch a lot of things in this
+area so I naturally sort of stumbled in this direction.
+</p>
+<p>At this point, though, I still don't think I've really answered the
+question. I'm not my job title to probably most people I know. And I think it's
+a little unwise to base my identity on something that could taken away by a
+financial crisis or an EMP blast.
+</p>
+<p>I could get more vague and go for a meme-y tribal identifier like "nerd,"
+"metalhead," "hacker," "warlock," or whatever classes people are running these
+days.
+</p>
+<p>
+None these are really true though either. I was never really smart enough to
+hang out with nerds and I never much liked keeping up with them anyway. I
+certainly have enough of a music snob streak to fit in with metalheads, but
+I've gotten over that illness for the most part, where most of my peers have
+not. If we're going with Richard Stallman's notion of
+<a href="https://archive.is/epjm4">hacking</a>, then maybe I share some of the
+same spirit. But I didn't grow up in that culture. I knew of a computer mostly
+as Windows--and even that I didn't understand well. My parents were luddites so
+these were all magic boxes to me growing up and I was far to afraid to try to
+look inside and risk breaking it. I had a vague notion that I wanted to design
+games, but I spent my time playing Runescape and Elder Scrolls instead of
+botting and modding them. Maybe I'm gatekeeping myself, but fitting into any
+sort of tribe has never really been on my mind.
+</p>
+<p>
+A lucky few will have biographers write their final word, but most of us
+will have to settle for the obituary. Either way though, I think it's important
+to remember in the long term, all we really have is our history. Hopefully,
+that won't include web history...
+</p>
+<p>
+So I think it's probably better to start with who I am, with where I've been.
+I was born in the US in 1993 about two weeks after the World Wide Web was
+released to the public domain. Our family didn't get online until I was around
+five or six when people started handing out free Windows and America Online CDs
+around public places. Pokemon was also released around that time so that
+computer was primarily used for Pokemon-themed version of Print Artist and
+reading fake articles on how to get Mew in Blue version. As I grew up, my
+school assignments went from stacks of notebooks to folders full of .doc files.
+It became expected by around middle school/high school that you had a Windows
+PC or at least had access to one to write essays. Runescape was a thing, so
+that same computer still saw it's fair share of play, but study crept in when
+it could.
+</p>
+<p>
+I never bothered studying the computer itself though. Any tutorial I could find
+on messing with Windows (like getting a stupid cursor or soemthing) started in
+big bold letters with "DON'T TRY THIS IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING."
+Well I didn't know, so I didn't try. I did fall in love with Wikipedia though
+and just hopping through history and philosophy articles. I couldn't always use
+the PC downstairs so I learned to use the PSP and eventually the PS3 browser
+instead so I could read up until late. God knows how much crap was on there
+back then...
+</p>
+<p>
+I got into guitar around eighth grade since Guitar Hero was popular and I
+wanted girls to like me. I was also into band and chorus at school and somehow
+got the idea that I was pretty good at all that. The idea of playing music or
+composing started to really look like a serious thing after two years at it,
+but when I first started to write music, I had so much trouble drawing the
+freaking clefs and fancy stuff that I would waste too much time to write half
+of a score. I need like Microsoft Word for music, but I didn't know if such a
+thing was even real
+</p>