The Unholy alliance

‘Desperately in need...of some...strangers hand, in a...desperate land’ is line from one of my favorite songs. Never completely understood the meaning though. So I will go by the literal meaning of it. I will continue our journey from the place where we had Quake 3 Demo downloaded and ready to be played. I installed the demo waiting anxiously for the setup to complete. Then I double clicked the icon on the desktop holding my breath, finally I will be back to my natural habitat of slaying artificial life forms to sharpen my skills. The feeling could only be compared to a coke addict receiving a pinch of the magical powder after a century of abstinence. To my agony I saw this

...unloading OpenGL DLL...assuming '3dfxvgl' is a standalone driver...initializing QGL...WARNING: missing Glide installation, assuming no 3Dfx available...shutting down QGL----- CL_Shutdown -----RE_Shutdown( 1 )-----------------------GLW_StartOpenGL() - could not load OpenGL subsystem

I was mortified as this message flashed in front of me. And almost as an instinctive reaction I downloaded the latest drivers for the card. The Installation told me that you need ‘Administrative Rights’ to the computer. The ‘power user’ privileges were insufficient to do the job. I was wondering how I could, in my first week at college would be able to get these rights. Then I saw this really big guy doing something in DOS. The kind of things he appeared to be doing was of computer ‘pro’ and I thought may be his needs could be similar to mine. We started talking. At that moment of time I didn’t realize that this could be the start of an ‘Unholy Alliance’ that would allow us to leech on the University’s vast computer resources. We carefully devised a plan to lure someone to type their password unaware of our fiendish intentions. Someone who would be a ‘Network Administrator’. We carefully chose our candidates. The Chief Network Administrator was a lady. At that point of time she had 3 side-kicks. One a short plump one, who looked as if God while creating her accidentally zipped her before emailing her to earth. The other one was a tall fair girl(who tried teaching us Matlab on couple of occasions and failed miserably) and last but not the least the good looking of the lot, a girl with a hint of what we know as ‘Chinkiness’. Now here I would take some time to explain why we chose her as our scapegoat. Now the general theory of energy says that “Energy only changes form. It cannot be created or destroyed.” Now since beautiful girls always attract boys everywhere, we can say ‘beauty’ is a form of energy. Now this energy must have come from some where. Empirical analysis over several thousand years shows that this energy comes at cost of the ‘brain’. So we concluded that beautiful girls are generally dumb.

The Execution of Evil™ Plan.

One nice morning we are sitting in the lab waiting for our subject to arrive. The idea was to convince the dame that we were a bunch of dumb heads who knew jack about computers. The plan went something like this.

I (alpha) would lure the subject into the trap gates
The big Guy(Omega) would be ready with the trap switch
Once the subject was completely unaware of what was going on
We would trigger the trap and catch our subject totally unaware.

Now don’t think we were going to kidnap her. I put on a great show that I was very new to computers and I did not know how to transfer files across the network. She instead of showing me how do transfer files, gave me instructions. I told myself ‘Oh Shit!!! Plan A failed time to switch to contingency plan B. I always have a plan B. I typed my password incorrectly, and I told her that ‘see, still no authentication’. She was started mumbling that we were a bunch of “Computer Illiterates, who had no intentions of learning anything ourselves and always wanted to be spoon-fed.” Saying that she took control of the keyboard and I signaled Omega to spring the trap. She typed her user id “shal**i” and then the password. The theory of Conversion of energy proved successful. The subject was trapped. Mission Accomplished.

By the time she was finished teaching us how to access shared files, we had learned what we needed. A ‘key-capturing’ software running on the computer and notified Omega of the password. The password “hopeislife” was what we needed. After all hope is life J. I installed the needed driver with the domain admin login and password, played Quake 3 till my craving for Quake 3 was satisfied. Tomorrow more on the “Adventures of Alpha-Omega.”