Justin Li

Border Crossings, Linux, and Roaches

2008-04-22

Stories of people's laptops being "searched" at border crossings amuse me. I particularly like the second comment on the post:

This happened to me once, but it was while entering the US. I have a > dual boot laptop. First thing the guy sees is grub. He didn't know > what to do and he asked me: "What is that Solaris?". So I boot up > Solaris. He looked very puzzled. He was looking for the same thing - > porno. He asked where my picture folder was. I opened a shell window > and used 'find -type f -name "*jpg"'. It totally freaked him out. :) >

I would dearly love to do my part in confusing border agents. This is what they will see if they manage to get as far as my desktop (after a GRUB menu, lines and lines of scrolling text, and a SLiM login screen):

Screenshot of my desktop.

Not much to look at, mainly because there's not much there at all. Fluxbox, people.

In case people are curious, my wallpaper is randomly selected everytime I log in (or when I press Ctrl-Alt-Enter). All backgrounds are images by Blatte. I really like the guy's site, because of his fractals, but also because of his URL. He has roach.org, which is fine, and he calls himself Blatte. The connection? "Cockroaches are insects of the order Blattaria."

And the reason I know this is I once used "blattodea" (largely interchangeable with the order name) as a username for an online dating site, after someone sent me a random link to "check out her profile". Yeah...