varx @varx@infosec.exchange

(I will, of course, miss you all greatly. You're wonderful people. But that's combining in an awful way with my terrible time management!)

Oh, and if you want to keep tabs on what I'm up to, my site is linked from my profile and I have an Atom feed on my blog. :-)

I think I'm going to take a hiatus from Mastodon. It's very distracting, and I find I'm not getting as much blogging and coding done at home in the evenings.

I'll still check notifications, but I've unpinned the other columns. :-)

This is fun: http://robertheaton.com/2018/06/12/programming-projects-for-advanced-beginners-ascii-art/

Robert has put together a guided project around making your own ascii art renderer in your language of choice.

People are always looking for projects to do to try out a new language. Nice to have something like this to work from.

Oh, also I got a letter from the producer of Judge Judy last week asking if I wanted to go on the show. And then a phone call, when I didn't respond.

No thanks, that's nowhere near enough money to be made a spectacle of on television.

Looks like Mastodon instance i.write.codethat.sucks isn't even resolving to an IP address anymore. That's a new one...
It feels weird to not have any way of contacting people I knew from that server. Have they moved elsewhere? No way to know. (And if someone contacts me and says "this is my new account", how do I know it's them?) We really do need a better way of managing identity, separate from asking the server.

Well, the guy didn't show up, so I won by default. The whole experience was very educational, and I feel better equipped to handle court stuff in the future.

Because the next step is a payment hearing or something (which I don't have to attend) and if he doesn't pay by that date, there's a civil arrest warrant against him. Who knows if he'll actually pay.

I really would rather have had the guy show up so we could have *talked* about it.

Two complicating factors:

- I can't tell if he's just being a weasel, or really doesn't have the funds.

- There's a bike/car power asymmetry overlaid on this; drivers literally get away with murder (OK, manslaughter), and it's hard for me to just let a driver go for hitting me.

But maybe it's not right to use the court system to extract the $300 (+ $40 filing fee he could have avoided by *talking* to me) from someone who maybe is just scraping by, when I'm sitting on a bunch of money.

Well, it's too late not to go to court now, but maybe I still have time to figure out how to make this right for both of us. :-/

I had originally thought that if he couldn't pay, fine, maybe he can compensate me some other way. (He's a contractor. Teach me some skills? Repair something? I dunno, could be creative.)

So on the one hand, he's avoidant and won't stick to his word, and I'm not sure what he thinks is going to happen when he ignores my multiple warnings about filing suit. I gave him a ton of chances. I want even *acknowledgement* from him, maybe an apology.

I'm about to head off to a small claims suit I filed against a guy who right-hooked me on my bike and caused $300 in damage. And I'm having sudden misgivings.

Like, this guy is a dick, right? He said he would pay, then stood me up at our arranged time and place and blocked my number. So, small claims court it is.

But also I'm way wealthier than he is. His car was uninsured, he let slip that he'd not be able to pay before he agreed to.