I spend the morning looking at the pixels on my monitor. I’m not a big fan of computers when I’m on mushrooms—they’re hard to understand. As in: it’s hard to understand why people use them. I’m at this desk all day, year after year, made of many months, and many many days..of just staring at this screen. Is there anything really going on in there? I mean think of a single letter on your screen: think of the pixels that make it up. That’s what you’re looking at. Why? I know I’m here to do something, I just don’t know what it is. And I don’t have much confidence that anything I find, to do, is gonna do much in the way of deep satisfaction. Even if I move. What am I gonna do? Get another job? Won’t it be the same? I paint, here, I have my warehouse. I like getting high and I like my friends. Maybe I’m never going to be Basquiat—maybe I’m just a computer programmer. Maybe I haven’t had it hard enough to be Basquiat. Maybe things have been too easy for me. Maybe the world only needs so many Basquiats, to kill, for fun, and maybe the rest of us get off average and easy.
I have one window up, over there—that’s my left screen. I ssh around a little, then switch to a test account, then attach to a disconnected session we use for monitoring. From there I log in to production and do a c; tail -f | grep -i gkhddwn acheron_log.1311157784.
That’s gonna look for all the instances of gkhddwn or GKHDDWN in the file called acheron_log that was created this morning at 1311157784 (which is a time—that’s like 5:29 this morning, and 44 seconds, once you convert it all out). That file is still being written to, which means that instance of the Mead Research application has been running for like five hours.
Now in my other window, screen right, I log in through my web browser and load the news research tool. I log in with the ghost account that Ashley gave me, months ago. I wanna make sure it’s still a ghost account, that no one’s reading over my shoulder while I type. I do a test search for "Basquiat". I get a bunch of articles. I check screen left: there’s nothing. The window is blank. I control-c. Restart my tail. Do some more test searches. In the right window I get data back, but in the left window, nothing. It’s really a ghost account. No one’s seeing what I’m looking for. The most they could know is that I used a ghost account from my desk. After that, there’s no record. I don’t have access to the accounts database, which is why I have to check it this way. But after verifying that this is still a ghost account, I do know that the system isn’t storing any information about what I’m doing—I know this because I wrote the system.
Most people when they use ghost accounts are using them to steal social security numbers or look at porn at work. I just want to read everything I can on Basquiat. But even though everyone can look right over my shoulder and see exactly what I’m doing, I prefer there not be any official record that I’m doing it.