On Saturday, May 7th, 2005 I purchased all of the hardware and software that made up the long closed down Chicago BBS Principal of Obscurity BBS. I am sure most of my local fellow sysops remember the BBS. For those of you that are outside Illinois, or for that matter in another country. Principal of Obscurity BBS would ring a bell with sysops that owned CNet 4 and 5 as the telnet client menu by default had their telnet address in it. The rest of you... (Shorts--t I am looking at you) might have called to play hack n' slash.

I have managed to salvage PoO from the damaged hard drives and like a fish caught from the river and dropped in a bucket of water. I have the BBS running for the most part in WinUAE. I have talked to several people about what they would think about reopening PoO to the public. I could pass control to another person to sysop it and only have to make sure it keeps running. The other thought I had was to pass the working system over to someone interested in opening a BBS.

I have had mixed thoughts from people on the idea of opening this BBS up. I am still waiting to see what Dave himself thinks. With the recent issue with Grapevine Magazine I have become a little more aware that some people really think that things like this should not ever be brought back.

The way I feel about it is that these files are like a time capsule, in that it was meant to be reopened. So much of our life is lived with the knowledge that what is now will never be again. BBSes that are salvaged, or in WoI's case were properly archived defy the unidirectional nature of our time line. In sci-fi stories it's a common theme that robotic people don't die. Well, I offer to you that this is that kind of situation. This is an old friend we can bring back to life... Should we, what do you think?

Drew

In the city of Chicago you can’t buy spray paint. This is probably a good thing since graffiti is a common problem. In the suburbs though you can buy spray paint. However, you need to have an ID and be at least 17 years old.

I went to my local Wal-Mart purchased some white spray paint, JB Weld (a powerful epoxy), and a bag of chips. When I got up to the register the old bitty asked to see my id as if I was buying beer or cigarettes. I refused to show my id, and a manager came over (who I might add looked as though she was 15) also asked for my id. I refused again, so the manager said, “Well then you can’t buy it.” I said, “Fine I don’t care.” Then the old bitty rang up the JB Weld and even that required an ID. I made a big stink now since I was really getting kind of mad about this. I yelled, “What you going to card me for the chips too cus I might eat the whole bag and add to the teen obesity?” The store manager came out and told me I couldn’t buy the items if I wouldn’t show my ID. So I said, “FINE!” I then took a hand full of magazines off the register stands, a few TV guides, bunch of packs of gum, and 7 bottles of coke. The old bitty started to ring them up and when she was done. I just walked out of the store. I got outside and drank a little water since I was on my bicycle ride at this time. Went in thru the garden entrance in the back of the store. Got the same items when into a line with a young women at the register, and she didn’t even bother to ask me. The next day I went back to get primer and again same register different cashier, and the girl let me thru and never even asked.

Now this is the not the first time I have had a problem with this. First off I don’t know if it’s a store policy or a town ordinance that they have to ask for this info. If it is a town ordinance then the penalty for not asking for an id when selling paint or glue could be as high as selling cigarettes or beer to someone under age. I have had this problem 1 time before at an AMC theater when I went to go see the Southpark movie and have never had this problem since at a theater. The movie was rated “R”, and theaters aren’t bound by any laws to card you. They wouldn’t let my girlfriend in cus she forgot her ID. She was more then old enough as was I, and I had to go pretty much off the deep end in the theater foyer to get into the movie. There is no way that the guy selling the ticket to us could have been old enough to see the movie himself. So this is why I have a problem with this.

In Illinois you have to be 18 to purchase tobacco products and 21 for alcohol. When you walk into the store you can expect to get carded for these things, as there is a method to how they card you. If you look 30 or younger they have to card you and the person carding you has to be the age of the product they are selling. Also signs every where in the store tell you what year you need to have been born to make a purchase in big yellow letters saying, “WE CARD.”

The problem with the carding for glue, spray paint, and movies is that there is no standard policy to the id process. If the cashier has a bug up their ass it’s no skin off their nose to give you a hard time about it. If someone younger or older holds the power to determine if you can see a movie or not… you can count on a hard time there if you just rub them the wrong way. I also have a problem with it since I thought when I woke up that morning I was in a free country where I could purchase goods and services without having to show my papers. These are the freedoms, again… it’s time for a revolution.

Ok, I guess this will be my first journal entry for 2005. I have gotten some emails asking what happened to my old 2004 journal entries. Well … that is a long story, which I am going to explain now.

On New Year's Eve I was in joinlink chat with all of the other BBSes and a bunch of users. I made a challenge to everyone that wasn’t already on my BBS and also not already in the BBSmates user list for Window of Illusion. If they were the first user of the year on both the BBS and in the user list at BBSmates, they would win an official 2004 user list hoodie, which I had yet to create, as well as any other item from the Window of Illusion store that they wanted. Well, out of the handful of people who could have done both only 1 person did. Valmira was account 301 and the first caller to the BBS in 2005 - also later that day she was the first in the BBSmates user list for 2005.

Meanwhile in the news group alt.bbs.amiga.cnet a flame war had been going on that I was about to step into with both feet - a conflict between the current owner of CNet BBS Pro source code, Todd Knight, and former programmer Ray Akey, stirred to a boil with lawsuits and injunctions as a result of a story posted on this site back in early 2004. Yes, my own site, and I never noticed that Ray had responded to the story in a comment to a serious accusation of embezzlement of funds during their partnership on the software. In the process of legal attacks on Todd all of which were well founded, Ray posted the cnetbbs.net web site up for sale, which he still ran, for the total of $250.00. When I saw that I went off the deep end and attacked him for trying to make one last money grab. In a move that shocked everyone, Ray gave the web site to me.

Weeks later in the process of trying to configure my web server to create a slashcode style home for the cnetbbs.net domain… I overlooked one setting in a text file and erased my whole site database. So I lost everything that was in the database. You will notice all of the same old stories here, but that is because I could salvage them since they write out to the hard drive in HTML files. Things like the journals, and web site templates do not. So all of my journal entries from last year are gone… I spent weeks searching thru files and backups looking for some scrap of my rants and tirades. I even went as far as to look thru browser cache files that were in whole drive backups of my systems here. I couldn’t find so much as a crumb of my writings. All the time it was online all I had to do was copy and paste it to a document of some sort and save it to the hard drive. I just never did that. Those of you, MySQL gurus out there, might wonder why I didn’t just do a rollback and recovery on the database files, or perhaps why didn’t I have the database backed up. I had no clue nor had I ever looked for the database files before this problem started. Rollback and recovery works great… so long as your database didn’t just get outright overwritten.

Ok so I got the site back up and realized that I hadn’t made the graphics for the new hoodie I wanted to put in the WoI store at the beginning of this year. Leaving the BBS web site and the CNet site at the slashcode default for a few days I whipped up those hoodie graphics in no time flat. Then I purchased them and the other item she wanted which was the before & after coffee mug. While I waited 2 weeks for them to come I started throwing the web site back together while at the same time trying to create new graphics for the cnetbbs.net site.

After 2 weeks I emailed café press and asked them where the package was. This is the most stupid thing I have had to deal with this year so far. In the tracking number info on the DHL site the package said it was delivered to the US post office a few miles away. The email I got in return from café press was a lesson from them on how the mail works… as they explained, “We box up the item and DHL picks up the box and it goes by plane and truck to the local DHL sort site near you where it is placed on a yellow truck and taken to the US Post office for delivery, and then the US Post office brings it to your house.” This blew my mind and I emailed them back telling them, “It does no good to give me a tracking number that I can only track as far as a US Post office 10 miles away.” So they sent me another package 2 day shipping UPS, which did track right to my door. What is with this; sender to DHL to US Post Office to receiver crap? I have gotten a few more things for myself since that package and if you ask me DHL is letting the US Post Office give them a bad name.

Anyhow that bullshit aside… as I am putting the address label on the box to send the package to Valmira, I get a phone call from my friend Mike (Doctor Who on the BBS) and he tells me he is walking down Michigan Ave. here in Chicago with a box of crap from his office cus just that afternoon he got let go. I talked to him shortly and went off to mail the package to Valmira, which she got, and SHE LOVED THE HOODIE! Then 3 days later Nullvalue is in IRC telling me that he just got let go from his company. Both these guys are brilliant IT people, and I thought our economy was supposed to be doing so well that we could all start being fat, dumb, and stupid again. While all this is going on with people losing jobs around me, I spend 1 Monday a week dropping off applications to places that, despite the help wanted signs and the constant tripping over applications for you to fill out as you walk into the stores, will not even so much as give me an interview. I have faxed resumes, handed in applications, and called several companies’ human resource people. They just ignore me and I am already 3 months into 2005 seeing the same bullshit with jobs as I have in 2004. Ya know what… I have come to a conclusion.. All companies are criminal, they don’t care cus nobody is watching them. Thank Bush and all those assholes that voted for him for this job loss.

On that note I also have to tell you about my New Year's resolution. If I go to a store for anything… and anything pisses me off in that store, such as cashiers holding detailed conversations about their love life while they ring up my stuff, I am just going to walk out of the store. I am done with the shit service everyplace… just done with it. I have walked out of Wal-Mart several times… I just got what I wanted at Kmart. I threw a 20 OZ Coke and chips behind the counter of a 7-11 when the employee was pissed that me and the other person asked him to come to the register so we could pay for our stuff and leave. He started bitching at us cus he wanted to finish sweeping and didn't have time to ring us up… I am just DONE with it people… I want a job and these people take theirs for granted.

So now as everything settles down… I can post this journal about it all. The CNet site is live; I am done with the battles in the news group and now I just have to finish getting sections of the WoI site back up like the gallery and software sections. Yes… software… I really want to get back to programming stuff again… Augh!