After the IRC operators on Undernet had a singing competition the other night, I felt compelled to write a song myself based on a ever popular The Beatles song. So here goes.

On the network where I was born
Lived a man who surfed the net
And he told of us of his life,
In the land of networking

So we surfed up to the switch
Till we found a net of drones
And we lived beneath the packets
In our yellow patch cable

We all live in a yellow patch cable
Yellow patch cable, yellow patch cable
We all live in a yellow patch cable
Yellow patch cable, yellow patch cable

And our friends are all logged on
Many more of them live next door
And the servers starts to play

(Trumpets start to play)

We all live in a yellow patch cable
Yellow patch cable, yellow patch cable
We all live in a yellow patch cable
Yellow patch cable, yellow patch cable

(weird sounds)

As we live a life of binary (a life binary)
Every one of us (everyone of us) has all we need (has all we neeed)
Sky of TCP (sky of TCP) and a sea of packets (sea of packets)
In our yellow (in our yellow) patch cable (patch cable, ha ha)

[17:06:35] -!- knutin changed the topic of #info-crew to: | | *|
[17:06:43] -!- knutin changed the topic of #info-crew to: | | * |
[17:06:48] -!- knutin changed the topic of #info-crew to: | | * |
[17:06:55] -!- knutin changed the topic of #info-crew to: | | * |
[17:07:01] -!- knutin changed the topic of #info-crew to: | |* |
[17:07:16] -!- knutin changed the topic of #info-crew to: | *| |
[17:07:31] -!- knutin changed the topic of #info-crew to: | * | |
[17:07:45] -!- knutin changed the topic of #info-crew to: | * | |
[17:07:58] -!- knutin changed the topic of #info-crew to: | * | |
[17:08:05] -!- knutin changed the topic of #info-crew to: |* | |
[17:08:10] -!- knutin changed the topic of #info-crew to: *| | |
[17:08:13] <@knutin> ohnoes!
[17:08:35] < moridin> you lostz0rz!
[17:22:13] < tolecnal> lik3, 0mg 0mg! w00t!?
[17:22:56] < tolecnal> 0mg, d4t w4z lik3 r34lly b4d pl4y! l0lz0rz!
[17:24:38] <@knutin> up yours
[17:25:33] < tolecnal> lik3, c4lm t3h fuck d0wn m4n! it’5 n0t t3h 3nd 0f t3h w0rld!
[17:27:42] -!- knutin changed the topic of #info-crew to: | | | <– anywhere, anywhen, if j00 |_|p f0r t3h ch4ll3ngz0rz0rz, tolecnal

As some of you may know, I’m attending as crew at a large computer party in Norway this easter called The Gathering. I just arrived after a two hour train trip, which was spent on IRC and sending off a few e-mails using my cell phone over GPRS. The party has almost 5000 people attending, and a good 200 people responsible for making the party happen. In just under 24 hours, the Vikingship will start to fill up with enthusiastic computer nerds of all ages, to attend the party for five full days. It will be a party filled with all types of different elements, that make up the computer scene as we know it.

You will have professional gaming tournaments, music competitions and the genre I love the most; demo making. For those of you that don’t know what demo coding is, I can sum it up with this definition. Think of a music video, think of computers games and 3D environments, add those two together and you have yourself a demo. A demo is a program that displays lovely graphics, stretched to the extremes of what is possible with todays technology added with catch, groovy music tracks. It’s all meant to entertain, and to amaze you of what can be done with today’s 3D accelerator cards.

Of course, an event of this size does attract quite a few people with vast computer knowledge, so the whole hall sizzles with people with good know how. For those that are interested, it’s a great chance to get to learn new stuff and to expand your social network. And this is the greatest aspect of the event itself, the chance to meet up with likely spirited people that love the same stuff that you do. And of course, with the way the internet works, you actually get to meet those people you chat with online that live too far away from you to meet on a regular basis. An event like this erases the borders that you have on a day to day basis. It’s just great to be with people that love the same stuff as you do, namely computers! It’s gonna be a great five days and I can’t wait to keep you up to date. And here’s a sneak peek of how the hall looks, just to get a feel of how it is.

Woohoo!

Last month I set a new visitor record to my blog, which makes me very happy. It makes it all worthwhile to continue writing all these articles. And it also proves that you, yes you, the readers of this site actually like what is being written. I would like to extend a thanks to all of you that have endured beta testing with me, private comments on different aspects of the layout and feel of this site, as well as a huge thanks for being who you are! I will not start a list of names, cause that list would be far too long, but again I say;

Thank you very much. Very much appreciated.

Today, another one of my domains went live. It has just started up, and the key people behind the page has yet to do the final talks. But the site is Cservice Sucks Dot Net, and that site too is a blog where people who all hate the group of people that run services on the IRC network Undernet. Here we can do as I do here, just keep on ranting and throw dirt. In other words, just as we would on any other given day.

Yes, you’ve heard me. And it’s a phrase being used on the net more and more often, and with a good reason. Not only are we being spammed via e-mail, but spammers have found other ways to spam us as well. You’ve had spam on IRC for ages too, but it’s not that often you read about IRC in the press. But recently, you’ve been getting spam over the instant messaging service from Microsoft, MSN. The new trend for spam sent over instant messaging services is called SPIM. But the spam that is really getting on my nerves these days, is blog spam. Over the last years, blogging has become a wide spread phenomena all over the glob. The usage of blogs has become so widely used, that it has become an influence on politics and the media. You only need to look back to what happened last year, with Dan Rather from CBS who was fired after having been slightly trigger happy with announcing a piece of information that turned out to be false. The case was blown wide open by a blogger, that could prove with simple methods that the case documents Dan Rather had based the case on was falsified. But to get back on track, spam!

As I said, lately I’ve been getting an insane amount of so called comment spam to my blog. This means, it’s spam disguised as comments to articles posted on my blog. Of course, all these comments are bogus and contains nothing else than advertisements to online gambling sites. Ok, I gotta hand it to them. They’ve found an area where it is easy to spam, and exploited that weakness for all it’s worth. But for goodness sake, who really likes spam, other than those that gain revenue from them!? NO ONE! I’m getting fed up with deleting comment spam daily, so today I’ve implemented a solution in the form of a WordPress plug-in to rid my blog of this problem. The plug-in is called Spam-Karma, and is written by Dr. Dave. So far it seems to be working quite well, and I will have my eyes fixed on what it does and how well it works. I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

And to all you spammers:

May you all die a slow and painful death, and roast on an open fire for all eternity. (reference)

For quite a few years now, I’ve been a helper in the IRC channel #mIRC on the network Undernet. One of my privileges there, was the ability to help users on a daily basis and make a difference to users all over the world. Through my presence there, I’ve learned heaps about computers, administrated a bot network with services people have relied on daily but most importantly made friends that I care for very much.

Life has a nasty habit of changing, and so do the person living the life. Over the course of the last year my dedication towards the channel decreased drastically, and the passion slowly died out until I saw no other option than to leave. It’s been a great time, albeit at times a roller coaster ride. A great era comes to an end, and I find it’s time to go explore new grounds and broadened my horizon. I will most surely miss it from time to time, but it’s not like I’m quiting IRC. I would never dream of doing that, as I have many great friends.

I would also like to send out a thanks to all those that stood by me in this somewhat emotional decision. I won’t mention names, but I hope that you know if you read this.