Random knowledge XIII.

Mar 17 2016

Whenever you put your headphones on at work, someone will want to talk to you within thirty seconds, necessitating removal of said headphones.

Never try the Jedi Mind Trick on police officers. Their will is too strong.

When your account officer at the bank looks at the interest rate on your checking account and remarks "That's pitiful," you know something's wrong.

Enabling the WebCollage module of Xscreensaver at work can be dangerous when you have words like 'bukkake', 'sodomy', 'beastility', and 'necrophilia' in your systems' dictionary file. Disable all instances of this screensaver module on all machines that you take to work.

Rule #1 of network troubleshooting: Always turn off your airwall.
(Make sure all of your network cables are plugged in!)

When they start slandering you on daytime talk radio, you know you're having an effect on someone.

To connect to MySQL through a proxy of some kind, like Stunnel, which is running on your machine (though the server is elsewhere), don't request a connection to 'localhost' or '', request a connection to your current IP address. For example, if my workstation's IP is, and Stunnel is running on 3306 but MySQL isn't, the command mysql -h localhost -P 3306 -u foobar -v -p will cause the mysql utility to not use the network but try a direct connection, which won't work if you don't have the MySQL server running. What I need to do is use the command mysql -h -P 3306 -u foobar -v -p, which causes the mysql utility to hit the Stunnel proxy, which funnels it through the Net to the real MySQL server.

Generally speaking, the shortest sequence of command line arguments that will do the job you need are what you want to use. If you pick through the manpage like a salad bar and assemble an incantation that reads like Dr. John Dee's notes, there's a good chance that it'll get screwed up, which leads to debugging time. Debugging is nice, but if you need to get a job done right now, it's the last thing you want to spend your energy on. Short, sweet, and to the point are your goal.

If you're going to write a bad novel, don't hire ghost writers to do it for you, take responsibility for it sucking. I'm lookin' at you, Shatner.