mahiwaga

So early this morning, in a semi-drunken haze as we wandered out of the 7/11, me and Y get held up at gunpoint. (Y still maintains that the gun wasn’t real, and while I do have a latent death wish, I didn’t really want to find out. Although I had a feeling that even if they did shoot us, they wouldn’t have been shooting to kill. Which means that we would’ve had to go to the trauma center, and would’ve had to be subjected to “the finger in the hole.” But this is wander far afield.)

They got my phone, my beloved camera, and $25. Unfortunately, they got Y’s wallet, and his watch.

And while it sucks, and a small, stupid part of me is incensed, wishing that I should’ve just said fuck-it-all and tried to take the dude down, bullet in the head or no, it is just stuff. (I suppose I can say this because I didn’t get my wallet stolen, and I don’t have to deal with calling every single dummy bank corporation in Delaware and tell them that my cards were stolen. Fuck. What a pain in the ass. I feel bad for Y.)

Whatever.

I find it ironic, though, that me and A had just been debating the merits of an urban environment, and how I really dig it, and, no, this incident hasn’t really changed how I feel. This shit is bound to happen. At least I didn’t get shot, I suppose.

It also does illustrate the false sense of security you get from living in a recently gentrified area. (Another example is R’s story of living in Echo Park/Silver Lake and having a dude on crack bash through her front door. Yes, there are artist galleries, eclectic clothing stores, quirky coffee shops. Yes, despite their extreme violation of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the Rampart Division cops did clean up the neighborhood by killing a lot of drug dealers and, ahem, suspected drug dealers. But, well, as I’ve been maintaining all along, security is an illusion at best. People, in the end, are animals.) But thems is the breaks. It’s not like you can’t get killed in an armed robbery of your house in the suburbs.

Oh well. Whatever.

It is interesting though. Maybe the waning effects of alcohol were making me portentious at the time, but, you know, when it’s not your time, it’s not your time. (Hence, the greater part of my fear was getting shot and surviving. For some foolish reason, I wasn’t really worried about the Big Sleep.)

Oh, and by the way, when you’re not a perp (or, ah, an alleged perp), the officers of the Chicago Police Department are pretty nice guys.

I have, for some reason, been getting pounded by the Radio Community Server, which has been generating tens of thousands of http requests for non-existent pages and RSS feeds on my site. Because I am employing mod_rewrite kludgery to hide blosxom.cgi from the URL, it is in fact causing Blosxom to spawn every time a bogus request comes through. (I’m trying to figure out a way to fix this, by having Blosxom die with a 404 error anytime someone tries to request a bogus path. Because right now, it instead just serves up an empty page. Which can lead to horrific recursion.) This has caused my webhost to disable Blosxom.

But in my search for some possible solutions, I stumbled upon these random links. You will notice that a lot of them have nothing to do with the situation at hand.

• How to write a robots.txt file to exclude bots
• XSL considered harmful, an article published in 1999. (Link from as days pass.)
• Norman Walsh’s rebuttal to the XSL criticism, also written in 1999. You might remember Norman Walsh from such markup specifications as DocBook and XML. (I only know about him because DocBook stylesheets are used extensively by GNOME, and when I was a mad and crazy Linux user, I always wanted to be on the cutting edge and had to get the latest specs right from the horse’s mouth. But that is neither here nor there.)
• File::Touch. I was trying to write a perl script wrapper that preserves the mtime of my blog files before calling emacs, because I wasn’t getting the entries_* plugins to work reliably in making the mtimes stick.
• How to generate a 404 with a CGI script. This is kind of what I want. Now I just have to figure out how to get Blosxom to recognize when a request comes up empty.
• Apache 1.3 URL Rewriting Guide.

i’ve grown rather fond of Blosxom, although i do still fantasize about using xsl stylesheets. (i don’t know why. maybe because i’ve been myself how to write xsl for 2½ years now.) but now, my blogs are locked down because of excessive hammering (thank you, Radio Community Server.) And i wonder if there are sysadmins at my web host this long weekend who will answer my plaintive cries.

but enough tech-talk. (to revert or not revert. that is the question….)

any case, what is new? well, i got mugged this morning. i had to buy a new phone to replace my stolen one. i have my apartment to myself for 2 weeks, and i am free to streak around completely naked. there is some bizarre synchronicity with the last simpson’s episode in which marge gets mugged. hopefully, i won’t develop agoraphobia. although i wouldn’t mind working out all day and getting ripped.

sucky, though. it would’ve been a really good, successful night if not for getting robbed at gun point.

heh. i suppose you just can’t have it all.