Paranoid!

Morning weigh-in: 177.5#, 11.5% BF

So Tuesday night I went down to Which Brew, and the place was packed, a very unusual situation lately. I had dinner and talked to a few people, then when things thinned out I moved down the bar, sat closer to my usual Tuesday night homies, yo. Theresa was there too -- she's not a Tuesday regular -- and she seemed pretty bummed out so we got to talking. Next thing I know I'm giving her a big comforting hug -- strictly Platonic of course -- and there in my arms she tells me she'd been sick, and so she went to the doctor, and she has mono. Gaaaahhhh!!!

I played it cool, but when I got home I washed my mouth/nose/face/hands...

More paranoia: Got home yesterday, was thinking about encryption and security. I've been playing with ssh the last few weeks -- it's how I get a shell connection to the Super Dimensional Fortress from home anyway, but "secure shell" ain't the half of what it can do. I created another account (a separate, but very short sweet & painless, Linux voyage) on my machine, ssh'ed into it and displayed some photos via X-forwarding.

Digression: X is the window control system for unix, and it's "network transparent": there is no real difference between a program running on your CPU & displaying its windows on your screen, and running the program on some other machine while it displays on your screen. The problem with this (other than "what's the point?") is that the transmission isn't secure while traveling between machines, but ssh will "piggyback" the X connection over a secure channel. (It can also do the same with internet ports.)

Anyway, I got the X-forwarding to work between accounts on my single machine, but that's not the same as tunneling across a network... I have to find a unix machine where I can run an X-client program and forward it to my display (SDF will do this, but I have to upgrade my account, from a one-time payment of $36 for my current membership level to a $36/year level, just to try an experiment), or find a machine with ssh and an X server, and connect to my home machine from there...

I am also getting back into my exploration of encryption in general, playing with GPG.