Post #2010856

As a kid I was fascinated by the paranormal. I got those weekly magazines that you kept in a binder. Bigfoot, UFOs, and the holy grail: telekinesis. In 1994 I found myself on the network at the University of York. In those days you could `telnet` to any machine on campus – including the nice SGI workstations in the special CompSci room – and `reboot now`. Which we did, cruelly, because we were 18. (There was one girl who would lose her shit in the room when it happened to her. So of course we'd `finger` each box and figure out where she was. I know, I know.) I still find the power of a `sudo reboot now` – legitimately, today, as I update my VPS software – to be a kind of magic. Here I sit, wirelessly, in a hotel room in Vietnam. And I can reach across to a server in California and just by moving my fingers, cause it to restart.