Date: Sat Dec 9 12:44:49 2023 -0600 restored a few old articles diff --git a/article.css b/article.css new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c7a6c06 --- /dev/null +++ b/article.css @@ -0,0 +1,134 @@ +/* http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/ +v2.0 | 20110126 +License: none (public domain) */ + +html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe, +h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre, +a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code, +del, dfn, em, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp, +small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var, +b, u, i, center, +dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li, +fieldset, form, label, legend, +table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td, +article, aside, canvas, details, embed, +figure, figcaption, footer, header, hgroup, +menu, nav, output, ruby, section, summary, +time, mark, audio, video { + margin: 0; + padding: 0; + border: 0; + font-size: 100%; + font: inherit; + vertical-align: baseline; +} +/* HTML5 display-role reset for older browsers */ +article, aside, details, figcaption, figure, +footer, header, hgroup, menu, nav, section { + display: block; +} +body { + line-height: 1; +} +ol, ul { + list-style: none; +} +blockquote, q { + quotes: none; +} +blockquote:before, blockquote:after, +q:before, q:after { + content: ''; + content: none; +} +table { + border-collapse: collapse; + border-spacing: 0; +} + +body { + font-family: Charter, 'Bitstream Charter', 'Sitka Text', Cambria, serif; + background-color: #eff1f5; + color: #1e1e2e; +} + +header, article, footer { + margin: 1rem auto; + padding: 0.5rem 1rem; + max-width: 900px; + line-height: 1.75rem; +} + +article > * + *, blockquote > * + * { + margin-block-start: 1.5rem; +} + +h1 { + font-weight: bold; + font-size: 1.25rem; + color: #40a02b; +} + +h2 { + font-weight: bold; + color: #40a02b; +} + +a { + text-decoration: underline; + color: #04a5e5; +} + +a:hover { + color: #1e66f5; +} + +strong { + font-weight: bold; +} + +blockquote { + padding: 1rem 1.5rem; + background-color: #ccd0da; + border-radius: 1rem; +} + +img { + max-width: 100%; +} + +code { + font-family: ui-monospace, 'Cascadia Code', 'Source Code Pro', Menlo, Consolas, 'DejaVu Sans Mono', monospace; +} + +pre { + overflow: auto; + word-wrap: normal; + white-space: pre; +} + +footer { + border-top: 1px solid #1e1e2e; +} + +@media(prefers-color-scheme: dark) { + body { + background-color: #1e1e2e; + color: #cdd6f4; + } + a { + color: #89dceb; + } + a:hover { + color: #89b4fa; + } + h1, h2 { + color: #a6e3a1; + } + blockquote { + background-color: #313244; + } + footer { + border-color: #cdd6f4; + } +} diff --git a/assets/netauth.png b/assets/netauth.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3876142 Binary files /dev/null and b/assets/netauth.png differ diff --git a/assets/now-show-netauthority.mp3 b/assets/now-show-netauthority.mp3 new file mode 100755 index 0000000..c9fefbf Binary files /dev/null and b/assets/now-show-netauthority.mp3 differ diff --git a/avatar.webp b/avatar.webp new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c897241 Binary files /dev/null and b/avatar.webp differ diff --git a/index.html b/index.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..16dd4a5 --- /dev/null +++ b/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ + + + + Rudis Muiznieks + + + + + + +

Rudis Muiznieks...

...on Gitea.

...on Letterboxd.

...on Mastodon.

...by email.

Things I wrote that I'm somewhat fond of:

+ + + diff --git a/na.html b/na.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a666040 --- /dev/null +++ b/na.html @@ -0,0 +1,101 @@ + + + + That Time I Trolled the Entire Internet - Rudis Muiznieks + + + + + + +

← Return

+ +

That Time I Trolled the Entire Internet

I got my first taste of internet fame in the early 2000s, shortly after registering the domain NetAuthority.org. I had no idea what I was going to do with it at the time.

The turn of the millenium was an interesting period on the web. Google was around, but I knew just as many people who used AltaVista, WebCrawler, Yahoo, or even link directories that aspired and claimed to manualy curate and categorize every site on the web. There was no concept of a social network; Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and even MySpace were still years away. Word-of-mouth was still one of the most reliable ways to find good content on the web, which generally included sites like SlashDot, Something Awful, The Register, User Friendly, and (if you kept particularly perverse company) Rotten.com or Stile Project.

One of my favorite websites back then was The Landover Baptist Church. It’s a religious satire site that is still around today, but used to be a bit more subtle. I, in my irreverent youth, decided I would do something similar. I loved to push people’s buttons and evoke strong, irrational and emotional reactions, and I would use my newly acquired official-sounding domain to do just that.

+
“Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article.” —Poe’s Law
+

I still have the source code from the original incarnation of Net Authority, and it is not very pretty. The spaghetti mess of Perl scripts that do little more than dump raw HTML, server-side includes, and horrifying conditional CSS hacks to handle Internet Explorer, while somewhat nostalgic, make me appreciate even more just how far we have come since then.

I wrote up a set of “guidelines” to be followed by all internet users. My goal in later incarnations was to make the religious aspects less overt, but initially I didn’t try to hide the apparent motivation behind the “organization.”

+
What is Net Authority?
+
The Net Authority is a group of individuals who have taken it upon themselves to govern the Internet. We have waited patiently and in vain for the World’s governments to put their resources together and develop a standard set of guidelines for what material should be permitted on the Internet, and what should not. We have prayed without answer for a centralized agency with the power and the means to stop crimes against humanity on the Internet. The time for waiting has ended. Clearly we, the people, must take matters into our own hands. Net Authority writes those guidelines. Net Authority is that agency.
+

The stated purpose of the provided guidelines was “to simply organize and prioritize all that is blasphemous in the eyes of God.” The guidelines were essentially a listing of various different types of pornography, organized and grouped in a way to be as offensive as possible (in later incarnations, interracial relationships were lumped in with bestiality, for example), as well as broader categories such as “Hate Literature” and “General Blasphemy.”

Net Authority provided a simple web form through which visitors could “report” offenders. These offenders could be either publishers or consumers of the various types of forbidden material on the internet. Upon submitting the form, which asked a few simple questions such as the offender’s email address, web url (if applicable), and which specific guidelines had been violated. My devilish little Perl script would gather up the inputs and craft a personalized email to the offender.

+
To: “$name” <$email>
+ From: “Net Authority Investigations” <investigations@netauthority.org>
+ Subject: Notification of Internet Violations
+
Dear $name,
+
It has recently been brought to our attention that you are, or have been, in violation of the Net Authority Acceptable Internet Usage Guidelines. It has been reported that you $involvement offensive materials over the Internet.
+
Net Authority has investigated these claims and verified that they are true.
+
As a result, your personal information has been added to one or more Net Authority Internet offender databases. Your information will be stored in the databases until enough evidence has been gathered against you to warrant further actions. To help avoid such a situation, it is strongly recommended that you cease your immoral actions on the Internet at once.
+
You have been added to the following databases:
+ – Hate Literature Offenders
+ – Pornography Offenders
+ – General Blasphemy Offenders
+
If you would like more information about Net Authority or the Net Authority Acceptable Internet Usage Guidelines, you may read the details at http://www.netauthority.org/. It is imperative that you fully understand the guidelines if you wish to avoid further prosecution.
+
May God be with you as you struggle to overcome these evil impulses. You will be in our prayers at night.
+
God speed,
+ Net Authority Investigations Department
+ investigations@netauthority.org
+ http://www.netauthority.org/
+

I added a few other bells and whistles to the site, such as a hit counter and a database backend that kept track of and displayed how many submissions I received in each category. I also threw up a copy of WebBBS. My hope was that people would submit their friends and elicit a few salty comments on the forum to amuse me and my friends. If I had known at the time just how crazy things would get… well… who am I kidding? I still would have done it and probably would have been even more excited for what was about to come.

I imagine I completed the site well into the wee hours of the morning, as I was in the habit of working through the night in those days. I do remember that as soon as I had completed and tested all of my hastily hacked together Perl scripts, I submitted the first handful of internet “offenders” myself. I reported a few of my friends, of course, though they had already known about my plans for the domain so it was more of a way to notify them that it was done and live. I also reported a couple of “e/n” sites (which was what blogs were sometimes called before the term “blog” had gained wider adoption). In those days most sites still had a footer which proudly suggested that you “contact the webmaster” if you had any problems, so finding relevant email addresses was easy. I plugged the emails and urls for a few popular sites into my web form, checked off a few boxes, hit the submit button, and then probably went to bed and crashed until I had to go to work a few hours later.

Net Authority Version 1

The first thing that tipped me off that something interesting was going on was when Net Authority stopped loading in my web browser. I was running it from a server in my house, so I logged in at the console to see if a process had crashed or something, only to find that the whole system had slowed to a crawl. I had a summer job to get to, and didn’t leave myself a lot of time in the mornings, so I simply rebooted the machine and headed in to work.

Over the course of the day, through various ICQ messages from friends and excited coworkers who knew of my little side project, I learned that not only had the “offenders” posted blog entries about Net Authority, but my little prank had spread like wildfire through the entire “e/n” universe. It became both obvious that the site was failing due to the massive load of traffic it was now receiving, and also imperative that I get it back up and running as soon as possible. After a bit of investigative work over SSH, I figured out that WebBBS was the primary issue. After disabling it and replacing the forum with a simple “offline for maintenance” message, the server was happy once again.

The newly unburdened server also meant that my Net Authority email, which was hosted on the same machine, also suddenly became available. I was flooded with a deluge of hate mail the likes of which I could never have imagined. When I had initially crafted the site, I assumed that even a modicum of investigation on the part of the automated message recipients would reveal it all to be obvious satire. I did not account for the fact that nobody would bother to investigate. Many more emails than I would have guessed were clearly from people who were not in on the joke. That was my first sign that the whole thing may not have been the great idea I had originally thought it to be.

+
“Well, you know you’ve arrived when the God Squad starts waving bibles at you. This missive arrived this morning at Vulture Central. We haven’t got the faintest idea what it’s about, but ignorance is no excuse.” —Lester Haines, The Register
+

The next sign I got was when my cellphone started ringing from phone numbers I didn’t recognize. Apparently I hadn’t stopped to think about the consequences of supplying my real name and contact information in the whois records for the netauthority.org domain. Some aspiring young internet sleuth had clearly used his or her skills to “dox” me. My real name and phone number were now associated with this website that, it was becoming more and more clear, very few people found to be as humorous as I did.

+
“Get a fucking grip, you scared, lost little sheep. This isn’t the dark ages, and your pathetic little site is only inadvertently supplying the internet with humor, as is clearly evident by the posts on your messageboard.” —Joe Rogan
+

I quickly changed my phone number with the registrar to point to a free voicemail service. I wish I had saved some of the messages I received from people, but there was no good way to record them from my Nokia phone. In the back of my mind I was still a little worried about just how much trouble I could actually get into, but the endless entertainment and my massively inflated sense of self-importance from all of the blog posts, links, phone calls, and emails that continued to pour in clouded my judgement. My uncle, whose first initial is the same as mine and was listed in the Calgary phone book as “R. Muiznieks,” started receiving middle-of-the-night calls from irate people thinking he was me. Suffice it to say he was not happy about this. It was around then that my parents began to suspect that I was up to no good.

Eventually, the inevitable legal threat arrived.

Sadly, I can no longer find a copy of the original email, but the gist of it was that a pregnant woman in Texas had received the automated offender email and was so distraught by it that I had “endangered the life of her unborn child.” The email was purportedly from the woman’s lawyer, who demanded monetary compensation (I believe the amount was $5,000), and threatened legal action if I did not comply.

Being a naive kid barely out of his teens, I had no idea if the email was actually legit or not. I decided it was time to fess up and let “the adults” in on my ongoing prank to help assess just how badly I may have messed up. I’m not sure what went through my parents’ heads when I explained to them what was going on, but their suggestion upon seeing the legal threat was to take it to my boss who could have the company’s lawyers look it over.

+
“You punks try anything with me and I’ll make you famous.” —bartcop
+

I was nervous as hell when I asked my boss for a meeting. I remember the long walk to his office with a printout of the legal threat clutched in my sweaty hands. He took one look at my face after I closed the door of his office behind me and said “uh oh, what did you do Rudi?”

Fortunately my boss had a good sense of humor about the whole thing. He ran the email by the company lawyer who said it was so rife with spelling, grammatical, and legal errors that I needn’t be too concerned about it. “You should probably shut that site down, though,” he concluded. My boss nodded fervently in agreement.

In the end, my fifteen minutes of fame included recognition by The Register, several blogs including Stile Project, I Want a New Girlfriend, Joe Rogan, Something Awful, and a ton of other sites and forums that may not even exist anymore today. It was the first time in my life that I published something on the internet which was discovered independently by people who knew me in real life—a truly bizarre and exciting experience for me. Net Authority even earned its own Wikipedia entry.

While I did take the site down after that meeting with my boss, I couldn’t stay away forever. A few years later I spun Net Authority back up in a slightly watered down form. Instead of sending automated emails, I published a list of “offensive” websites submitted by users, each with their own comments section. Net Authority would never soar to the same heights of popularity in its new incarnation, but it still managed to snag a little taste of infamy from time to time.

+ +
—Clip from The Now Show, BBC, 13 July 2007 +

Thinking back on those times and browsing through my old Perl code surfaces feelings of amusement, but also a bit of horror at just how audacious I was. Net Authority was essentially a bulk quasi-legal-threat spamming machine that I was responsible for, but had basically no control over. My mind is put slightly at ease, however, by this little snippet of code that I wrote to validate the email addresses. Clearly I had at least a little prescience. Who knows what would have happened had I not thrown that first elsif clause in there?

sub valid_email {
+  my $str = shift;
+  if($str =~ /^[\w-\.]{1,}\@([\da-zA-Z-]{1,}\.){1,}[\da-zA-Z-]{2,3}$/){
+    if(lc($str) =~ /netauthority\.org$/){
+      return 0;
+    } elsif(lc($str) =~ /\@.*\.gov$/){ # <--- PHEW!
+      return 0;
+    } else {
+      return 1;
+    }
+  } else {
+    return 0;
+  }
+}

+ + + + diff --git a/style.css b/style.css new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c4d568a --- /dev/null +++ b/style.css @@ -0,0 +1,139 @@ +/* http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/ +v2.0 | 20110126 +License: none (public domain) */ + +html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe, +h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre, +a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code, +del, dfn, em, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp, +small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var, +b, u, i, center, +dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li, +fieldset, form, label, legend, +table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td, +article, aside, canvas, details, embed, +figure, figcaption, footer, header, hgroup, +menu, nav, output, ruby, section, summary, +time, mark, audio, video { + margin: 0; + padding: 0; + border: 0; + font-size: 100%; + font: inherit; + vertical-align: baseline; +} +/* HTML5 display-role reset for older browsers */ +article, aside, details, figcaption, figure, +footer, header, hgroup, menu, nav, section { + display: block; +} +body { + line-height: 1; +} +ol, ul { + list-style: none; +} +blockquote, q { + quotes: none; +} +blockquote:before, blockquote:after, +q:before, q:after { + content: ''; + content: none; +} +table { + border-collapse: collapse; + border-spacing: 0; +} + +body { + font-family: Superclarendon, 'Bookman Old Style', 'URW Bookman', 'URW Bookman L', 'Georgia Pro', Georgia, serif; + background-color: #181825; + color: #cdd6f4; + margin: 1rem 2rem; +} + +header { + display: flex; + flex-wrap: nowrap; + align-items: center; + justify-content: center; +} + +h1 { + font-weight: bold; + font-size: 3rem; + color: #a6e3a1; + text-shadow: #000 0.2rem 0.2rem 0.2rem; +} + +h2 { + font-weight: bold; + font-size: 1.25rem; + color: #89b4fa; +} + +@media screen and (max-width: 600px) { + h1 { + font-size: 1.5rem; + } + h2 { + font-size: 1rem; + } + li { + font-size: 1rem; + } +} + +header img { + width: 5rem; + height: 5rem; + border-radius: 2.5rem; + border: solid 2px #313244; + margin-right: 1.5rem; +} + +main div, footer { + max-width: 600px; + margin: 2rem auto; + padding: 2rem; +} + +main div { + background-color: #1e1e2e; + border: 2px solid #585b70; + font-size: 1.2rem; + line-height: 2rem; +} + +main div ul { + list-style-type: circle; + list-style-position: outside; + margin-left: 1rem; +} + +footer { + font-family: Seravek, 'Gill Sans Nova', Ubuntu, Calibri, 'DejaVu Sans', source-sans-pro, sans-serif; + background-color: #11111b; + border: 2px solid #313244; + font-size: 0.75rem; + line-height: 1.25rem; + color: #a6adc8; + padding: 2rem; +} + +main p { + text-align: center; +} + +a, a:active, a:visited { + color: #f5e0dc; + text-decoration: none; + transition: color 0.25s; + transition: text-shadow 0.25s; +} + +a:hover { + color: #cba6f7; + text-shadow: #cba6f7 0 0 0.5rem; +} diff --git a/tcue.html b/tcue.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..97f17c0 --- /dev/null +++ b/tcue.html @@ -0,0 +1,120 @@ + + + + The Website That Got Me Expelled - Rudis Muiznieks + + + + + + +

← Return

+ +

The Website That Got Me Expelled

I was in grade eleven, and it was already late in the school year when I returned to the principal’s office after my five day suspension. My dad was sitting next to me while the principal—a tall, stocky woman with short black hair—calmly informed us that the administration had decided I could no longer attend Sir Winston Churchill High School. Of the three friends who had been suspended with me, Paul and Kevin would be allowed back in, but Philip would also no longer be welcome.

My heart plunged into my stomach. The stress I had gone through up to that point with the suspension and everything leading up to it had been bad enough, but now this?

I heard dad speaking through my shock-induced haze. “You’re kicking him out now?” he said. “With only two months until finals? Do you realize how this will affect his grades? How can you do this to one of your students?”

The principal was unwaivering. What I had done was completely unforgivable. They wanted me out. She gave us the contact information for the superintendent with whom we would have to meet in order to finalize the expulsion and transfer to my new school.

“We will be appealing this decision,” my dad told the principal as we were ushered out of her office.

“You’re welcome to try,” she said. “The decision is final, though. The meeting with the superintendent is just a formality.”

Then she smirked and looked right at me. “No student has ever successfully appealed an expulsion.”

My Crime

I was a pretty stereotypical “nerd” in high school. A debilitatingly shy and socially awkward computer club member who spent the vast majority of his time on the internet and listened exclusively to music by “Weird Al” Yankovic.

Like a lot of sixteen year old boys, I thought I was hilarious. My friends and I all thought we were funny. We quoted The Simpsons to each other religiously (and this was 1997, when The Simpsons was still considered edgy—many kids our age weren’t even allowed to watch it), and we reveled in anti-authoritarian rhetoric, raging against the incompetent school system and our bumbling teachers at every unsupervised opportunity.

It was during one of these unsupervised gatherings—the four of us surrounding a table in the back corner of the school library—that I conceived of and pitched my idea. We had just finished mocking and laughing at the latest edition of the school newsletter, a student-produced bimonthly collection of recent happenings, upcoming events, and general information called “The Churchillian.” Each issue was prominently prefaced with Winston’s Way, a collection of principles and guidelines aimed at fostering a safe, friendly environment in the school community. Being hilarious teenage boys, of course we thought the whole thing was ludicrous.

“We should make our own newsletter,” I said. “I can put it up on the web, and we could write whatever we want. Nobody would even know it was us.” The idea was an instant hit, and was quickly followed by a brainstorming session of all the hilarious and epic things we could do if we had our own newsletter.

That night I went home, signed up for a free email address, created a new account on a free hosting site (probably Tripod or Geocities, I don’t remember specifically) and wrote my own version of Winston’s Way.

+
EQUALITY
All teachers and students are equal. But teachers are more equal than students.
+
FREEDOM
Each of us is entitled to freedom of expression, as long as the expression has been approved in advance by the administration.
+

The article spoofed every category in the original Winston’s Way. I no longer have it, so I’ve paraphrased the above examples from memory, but I’m sure you get the general idea.

The other thing I did was create and print some forms that would facilitate the feature of my newsletter that I expected to be its crowning glory: Teacher Report Cards. We spit-balled a lot of silly ideas around the library table on that fateful afternoon, but the one that struck a chord with all of us—the one we all agreed would be the defining feature—was the teacher report cards. Our plan was to surreptitiously allow our fellow students to grade and leave anonymous comments about their teachers, which we would collect and publish. The teachers graded us, after all, wasn’t it only fair for us to return the favor?

Over the next few days, Philip quietly handed out my report card forms to his friends, who would then covertly pass them around their classrooms. At the end of each day Philip would return to me a handful of completed report cards, which I would take home and painstakingly transcribe into ASCII tables. Under the protection of anonymity, I had no qualms about including everything uncensored under the teachers’ real names.

+
Grade: C
Comment: He’s OK I guess, makes funny jokes.
+
Grade: A+
Comment: Comes to class drunk. Wears sunglasses because he’s hung over all the time.
+
Grade: F
Comment: Total bitch, gave me a D on my final essay.
+

Less than a week after its inception, it was with incredible pride and anticipation of glory to come that I, under the alias “Harry Schlong,” published the debut issue of The Churchillian: Underground Edition.

Our Pursual

The first issue was met by tons of positive feedback from my friends. I published a second issue with more satirical articles by Harry Schlong and more teacher report cards within a couple weeks. I obsessed over the visitor counter on the website, celebrating each increment. I read my own articles over and over, so proud of what I had written; so deliriously gleeful in my oh-so-clever rebelliousness.

Then, one day, the website disappeared.

I opened a support ticket with the host, and they responded to tell me that they had received complaints about the website and determined that it violated their terms of service. The unsatisfactorily vague answer and my inability to do anything about it angered me, so I did what I always did when I got angry—I logged on to IRC and vented about it to strangers on the internet.

It turns out that one of those strangers happened to have his own web server and domain name. He was only a little older than me and, like me, thought that what I was doing was hilarious. He offered to host my website and newsletter for free, and further guaranteed that he would personally laugh in the face of anyone who dared complain to him.

“Dude, I’m in the USA. I’m not scared of some rinky-dink Canadian high school,” he assured me.

Of course I jumped at the offer, and was back up and running at a new URL the following day.

The only real problem I faced as a result of the shut-down was that now I had to get the new URL out to the students. Besides word of mouth, I also printed and cut out little slips of paper with the URL on them which I placed in various conspicuous locations throughout the school—on keyboards in the computer lab, chairs in the library, on top of urinals. It wasn’t long before my hit counter was slowly climbing on its own once again.

The school library was where my friends and I had first breathed life into my brainchild, and the library would be where I caught my first glimpse of its (and our own) impending demise.

I was sitting at the back near the librarian’s office, working on some homework during one of my spare periods, when I overheard one of the teachers speaking in hushed tones with the librarian.

“Do we know who it is yet?” the librarian asked.

“Not yet, but we’re close,” said the teacher.

“Well I hope you get him soon.”

It was immediately apparent to me that they were talking about me. I started to sweat. I shoved my face a little closer to my books and listened intently to every word of the conversation taking place behind me. I recognized the teacher’s voice—he was one of the ones who got particularly nasty comments in the report cards.

“When we find him, he’s going down,” said the teacher.

The teacher walked out of the office, right past the table I was sitting at. He gave me a glance as he passed. I was probably as white as a sheet.

That same night, I decided to take some preventative and protective measures on the website. I added a large notice to the main page stating that while I unquestionably felt that The Churchillian: Underground Edition was a protected form of free-speech, I was more than willing to personally field any complaints, and even work with interested or concerned parties to modify the content into something that everyone found acceptable. I displayed my Harry Schlong email address prominently as a method of contact.

I went about my business as usual the next day, but couldn’t shake the feeling that something bad was about to happen. I had the looming impression that I was already doomed, and it was too late to do anything about it. Until yesterday, the newsletter had been a harmless joke shared between me and my friends. Now it was something more. It had attracted the wrong kind of attention.

My anxiety levels were higher than usual all day, so I was already feeling shaky as I walked down the crowded staircase to my last class of the day. Then I saw him—the same teacher from the day before who had been talking to the librarian—making his way up through the throng of students towards me. He spotted me too. Our eyes met for a moment, and I quickly looked away, doing my best to slip meekly past him.

“I know what you did,” I heard him say behind me.

Oh God, I thought. What is happening?

I slowly looked behind me. He had stopped half way up the stairs and turned around to glare directly at me with the angriest and scariest expression I had ever seen on a grown man in person. I couldn’t speak. All the blood drained from my face. Several of the other students who had been making their way up and down the stairs with us had stopped to watch the spectacle with confused looks.

“I know it was you,” said the teacher. “You’re going to pay for what you’ve done.”

And then he continued on his way up the stairs.

Our Capture

That night, the internet stranger-turned-hero who was now hosting my website contacted me over ICQ.

“I got a call from your school today, man,” he typed. “They are really pissed off.”

“What happened?” I asked, fearing the worst.

“I’m sorry dude. They laid down some serious threats. I can’t protect you anymore.”

I never heard from him again.

The next morning during my first period social studies class, the teacher received a call from the office and told me I had to go see the vice principals. I tried to act surprised and confused, but it didn’t fool my teacher. His expression seemed to say “I know what this is about, and I know that you know what this is about, and you’re about to get exactly what you deserve.”

The VPs sat together behind the desk in one of their offices and grilled me for about thirty minutes. They had print-outs of the website and the newsletters. They made me read comments from the report cards and asked me if I thought that was something appropriate to write about teachers at the school.

“These teachers have families,” they told me. “They have lives outside of here. What if one of them tried to get a job at another school, and their potential employer saw this about them on the internet?”

“Well, maybe they should treat their students with a little more respect and, oh, I don’t know, not come to class hung over,” I wanted to say, but didn’t.

“We know you didn’t do this alone,” they said. “We know that Paul, Kevin, and Philip all had a part in this.”

That’s when I found my voice. “They didn’t help me, I did this by myself,” I told them.

They looked at each other and frowned, shaking their heads.

“We already know they helped you. We talked to all of them already this morning and they admitted it. We just want you to confirm what they already told us.”

I shook my head at them, getting angry. All that was missing was the ridiculously bright lamp shining in my face. Philip had helped pass around the teacher report cards, but Paul and Kevin literally had nothing to do with it other than the initial brainstorming session before even a single word had been written. “I don’t know what they could have told you,” I said. “If they claimed any responsibility they’re lying to protect me or something. I’m the only one who did this.”

The VPs were obviously disappointed with my refusal to snitch, but eventually gave up and told me that all four of us were being suspended pending further notice. I was instructed to take my things and leave school property immediately.

I think I took the bus straight home after that. I was a little overwhelmed by what I had just gone through, and still processing the gravity of the situation. When I got home mom was there (dad was probably at work), and obviously surprised to see me show up so early in the day.

“Mom,” I said, “I’m in really big trouble.”

By that point my parents had grown somewhat accustomed to my shenanigans—I had gotten in trouble a few times before. In grade four they caught me with a full set of shoplifted Marvel trading cards; they marched me down to the convenience store where I had taken them from and the owner gave me a stern lecture about how, if he wanted, he could report the theft to the police and it would go on my permanent record (I later learned that my parents had called ahead to let him know they were bringing me in, and asked him to be as scary as possible). In junior high I invented my own currency—I printed an initial run of “Daddio-Dollars” on my computer which I handed out to kids at school, then sold candy and some of my brothers toys to them. Once I had fostered enough confidence in the purchasing power of my homemade money, I printed up a ton of it and used it to buy all kinds of sweet stuff from the other kids. Some of their parents ended up complaining to the school, and I was made to stop. I wasn’t really punished for that one—my parents later told me they were actually really impressed.

This time it was different, though. This time I had actually been suspended. I didn’t know what kind of reaction to expect.

Fortunately, both my parents and everyone I talked to during my suspension (the length of which the school refused to define, but ended up being five days) were largely supportive of my cause. They argued (and I agreed) that what I had done was careless, and I could have avoided the whole mess in the first place by just using common sense, but at the same time the school was grossly overreacting.

One friend of mine put me in touch with a reporter from the Calgary Herald who had written a story about a student who had drawn raunchy comics and sold them (entirely off school property) to other kids. A teacher found and confiscated one of the comics from someone who had bought it, and then they suspended the artist! The newspaper article caused a very embarrassing situation for the school, and the artist was promptly reinstated. The reporter said it was a very similar case to mine, and he would definitely be interested in pursuing the story. I told him I’d let him know after I knew what was happening with my suspension.

After five gut-wrenching days they finally called me back into the school, which is where my dad and I learned that I was to be expelled.

My Appeal

The principal’s smug assertion that the expulsion was a done-deal meant I had to prepare for the worst. We set up the appointment with the superintendent, and spent the few days leading up to it looking into the school I would be transferred to. When we visited for a brief tour, it seemed so alien and frightening to me. I tried to picture myself taking my final exams, surrounded by complete strangers in the unfamiliar gymnasium. It all felt so surreal.

The night before the meeting, my dad asked if I planned on saying anything or if I wanted him to do all the talking. “You can talk if you want,” I told him, “but I will definitely be making my own appeal.” My dad nodded and told me he would look over my speech if I wanted him to. I stayed up most of the night working on it, making sure it said everything I wanted to as clearly and concisely as possible. I wanted to keep it polite and civil, while at the same time expressing how deeply and infuriatingly wrong I believed it was for them to punish me this severely. I didn’t take my dad up on his offer to help—I wanted the words to be mine and mine alone.

The superintendent was another tall, stocky woman with short-cropped hair. My dad later joked that she was probably the principal’s older sister. It was just her, my dad, and me in the room when she sat us down and asked if I had anything I’d like to say before we begin.

I nodded, pulled out the cue cards I had created, and gave her my speech.

I told her I knew that what I had done had offended a lot of people at the school, and I told her that I was truly sorry for that. It was all done in the name of humor, and I never meant for or expected it to be taken so seriously. I also told her I felt that the school had handled the situation extremely poorly.

The superintendent was silent for most of my speech, save for one moment when I said “I know that the teachers have to look like they’re protecting the students’ best interests…”

As soon as I said that, she stopped me and said “would you care to rephrase that?”

“I know that the teachers have to protect the students’ best interests…” I said. She nodded, and I continued.

I told her how I had written, published, and hosted the newsletter entirely in my own time, never using school resources. She nodded, unflinching. I told her how I had reached out to the school on the website, stating that I would be willing to work with them to improve the newsletter into something they could accept. She nodded again, unflinching. I told her how if the school had just contacted me with their concerns and let me know how serious they were taking this, I probably would have taken everything down. More nodding, still no flinching. I told her how I had talked to a reporter at the Calgary Herald who had previously written an article about a situation very similar to this, and that he had expressed a keen interest in the outcome of my situation.

Wait a second… Was that a flinch?

At the end of the meeting, she thanked us, and told us she would be contacting us with next steps shortly. The next day I was reinstated at Sir Winston Churchill High School and told to resume my normal class schedule immediately.

I did it! I won!

The Aftermath

Philip had his meeting with the superintendent right before mine, and it hadn’t gone quite as well, so he was shocked when they told him to go back to school the next day. Paul, Kevin, and Philip all forgave me for what I put them through, but I think it was a little longer before their parents fully trusted me again.

Philip and I met with the vice principals again on our first day back, and they told us that we now had a lot of work to do to regain the trust of the teachers and administrators at the school. The English department needed a new website, so as part of our penance we had to go offer our services to the head English teacher. We went straight to the English department office after leaving the meeting.

The head English teacher greeted us after we knocked. “What do you two want?”

“We’d like to help you with your website,” I said.

“I don’t want your help,” he said. “I read what you wrote. Your Winston’s Way. I was very offended.”

“I understand, and I’m sorry,” I said.

He closed the door on us, and that was the end of our penance.

Ironically (or maybe not, I can never tell anymore thanks to Allanis Morissette), the next year I ended up in the classes of both the head English teacher and the teacher who had stopped me in the stairway. I got highest achiever awards in both those classes by the end of the year, and I am immensely grateful to both of those teachers for their influence in my life and for encouraging my love of reading, writing, and science.

Philip and I entered a computer programming contest on behalf of the school that next year, and ended up winning in the “most creative” category for our chess game that incorporated RPG elements. I vividly remember bringing the trophy we won to the office the next day, because everyone who saw me carrying it through the hallway stopped and stared—it was almost half as big as I was. The principal was near the back of the office when I brought it in, but she didn’t even acknowledge me. She just went into her own office and closed the door. In fact, I never spoke to her again after that meeting where she told my dad and I that my expulsion could never be appealed.

It was an interesting time in my life, to say the least, but I’m glad to have had the experience. It taught me a lot about myself, authority figures, family and friendship, and the importance of standing up for what you believe is right. That being said, I heartily do not recommend expulsion as a rite of passage for high school students. I’m fairly certain the extreme levels of stress and anxiety I experienced shaved a few years off my life.

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Vim Creep

It all started out innocently enough. You experimented with it once or twice in your first year of college, but Nano and Pico were easier—closer to what you had already been using during high school on the Windows machines and Macs. But as time went on and you got more experience under your belt in the college-level computer science courses, you started to notice something: All of the really great programmers—the kind who churned out 4 line solutions for an assignment that took you 10 pages of code to complete; the kind who produced ridiculously over-featured class projects in a day while you struggled with just the basics for weeks—none of them used Nano or Pico.

Staying late one night to finish an assignment that was due at midnight, you happened to catch a glimpse over one of the quiet uber-programmer’s shoulders. Your eyes twinkled from the glow of rows upon rows of monitors in the darkened computer lab as you witnessed in awe the impossible patterns of code and text manipulation that flashed across the screen.

“How did you do that?” you asked, incredulous.

The pithy, monosyllabic answer uttered in response changed your life forever: “Vim.”

At first you were frustrated a lot, and far less productive. Your browser history was essentially a full index to the online Vim documentation; your Nano and Pico-using friends thought you were insane; your Emacs using friends begged you to change your mind; you paid actual money for a laminated copy of a Vim cheat sheet for easy reference. Even after weeks of training, you still kept reaching for your mouse out of habit, then stopped with the realization that you’ll have to hit the web yet again to learn the proper way to perform some mundane task that you never even had to think about before.

But as time went on, you struggled less and less. You aren’t sure when it happened, but Vim stopped being a hindrance. Instead, it become something greater than you had anticipated. It wasn’t a mere text editor with keyboard shortcuts anymore—it had become an extension of your body. Nay, an extension of your very essence as a programmer.

Editing source code alone now seemed an insufficient usage of Vim. You installed it on all of your machines at home and used it to write everything from emails to English papers. You installed a portable version along with a fine-tuned personalized .vimrc file onto a flash drive so that you could have Vim with you everywhere you went, keeping you company, comforting you, making you feel like you had a little piece of home in your pocket no matter where you were.

Vim entered every part of your online life. Unhappy with the meager offerings of ViewSourceWith, you quickly graduated to Vimperator, and then again to Pentadactyl. You used to just surf the web. Now you are the web. When you decided to write an iPhone application, the first thing you did was change XCode’s default editor to MacVim. When you got a job working with .NET code, you immediately purchased a copy of ViEmu for Visual Studio (not satisfied with the offerings of its free cousin, VsVim).

Late one night, as you slaved away over your keyboard at your cubicle, working diligently to complete a project that was due the next morning, you laughed to yourself because you knew no ordinary programmer could complete the task at hand before the deadline. You recorded macros, you moved entire blocks of code with the flick of a finger, you filled dozens of registers, and you rewrote and refactored entire components without even glancing at your mouse. That’s when you noticed the reflection in your monitor. A wide-eyed coworker looking over your shoulder. You paused briefly, to let him know that you were aware of his presence.

“How did you do that?” he asked, his voice filled with awe.

You smile, and prepare to utter the single word that changed your life. The word that, should your colleague choose to pursue it, will lead him down the same rabbit hole to a universe filled with infinite combinations of infinite possibilities to produce a form of hyper-efficiency previously attainable only in his wildest of dreams. He reminds you of yourself, standing in that darkened computer lab all those years ago, and you feel a tinge of excitement for him as you form the word.

“Vim.”

:wq

This story was discussed on Hacker News.

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