Hey there,
Today, since the holidays are bringing me so much joy (heavy, heavy sarcasm ;), I thought it would be fun to write a post that makes use of some of the principles we've posted on this blog over the past year and combine them to create a treasure hunt of sorts. Actually, a lot of my holiday posts are going to be a little experimental. Since readership goes way down during the holiday season, it's a great time to write less conservative posts. Who knows what I'll be able to get away with? Not me; but I can't wait to find out :)
This isn't an ordinary treasure hunt, of course. No buried treasure or, really, anything of value at the end (Sometimes, I think I missed my calling in life when I passed on being a motivational speaker ;). Not much more than the pride in the knowledge that you figured it out and/or the passive-aggressive loathing you'll feel as you obsess over how I'm not so clever as I think, after all (although, hate me in moderation. You don't want to forget to stick another pin in my effigy before you burn it). This is quickly turning into a very dark post ;)
Of course, I, like most people I know who are around my age and have families of their own, dread the holidays. I love the fact that my kids are having fun, but the women (no offense, ladies...) in my family take this whole shebang way too seriously and the long hard journey to the day after the day after Christmas almost always includes at least one emotional breakdown, semi-psychotic episode or in-fighting about who did what better than whom and enlightening conversations that begin with "can you believe what he/she ...blah, blah, blah." I think if we all just got back to the commercialism that the holidays are really all about, everything would be perfectly fine and we'd all be happy again.
Here's a good tip, that I've found always serves the user well: Whenever I start to feel like I'm going to kill a relative during the peak of the festivities, I think to myself: What would Jesus do? I pause, reflect and then just figure "screw it" and try to get on with my life ;)
Anyway, before I lift your spirits up too high, here's what I've got for you today (hint: the next few lines are laden with clues. All that stuff above was crazy talk. And, if you're a family member of mine, of course I didn't mean a word of it ;) The jumble of numbers that looks like an octal dump was encrypted using a perl script that we posted to this blog some time ago. Of course the encrypted bash script has had it's name and attribution removed so those of you who can read octal won't get off easy ;) The script itself is all mashed together using a security method we've practiced in a few posts on this blog which makes scripts less likely to be mucked with by compressing them and, essentially, making them really long one-liners.
If you figure out what the script is and can email me the name (which is listed in the post that the obfuscated and lame-encrypted script originally came from; in the script headers - plain as day), I'll rewrite cabletv.sh for you, since zap2it changed their output format a month after our reader base (and this is impressive, I think) began apparently kicking the cr## out of them 24x7 (on top of the massive count of regular folk who used it through a web browser, as it was intended to be viewed). My apologies to zap2it, of course. Hopefully, they're not too upset. Really, I'd be ecstatic if I could get a Google PR of 7 and an Alexa Rank of 2,977 with 253,590 backlinks (I'm just guesstimating ;).
My time and effort is about the only thing I can afford to give this Christmas. All the money's going toward buying the kids' presents, because I want them to remember their childhood fondly (which gives me panic attacks ;) and not as a time of recession, conservation and perceived punishment for some huge corporation's massive screw-ups. Hopefully, my sheltering doesn't end up producing intolerable adults who'll scorn my existence later in life and/or try to have me declared incompetent so they can take control over my pocket change ;)
Happy Holidays to you all and enjoy the hunt :)
P.S. Check this post for a halfway decent way to download this code without having to manually convert it back from a single line! Look for the step-by-step method I use, when I can't get to the admin interface of this blog, in section 2.
Cheers,
This work is licensed under a
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, Mike
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