% fortune -ae paul murphy

From stunned outrage to stunned laughter in two seconds

From an extended daily kos brag about forging press passes for presidential events:

Early this morning I found an unusual email from Medea Benjamin waiting for me in my inbox. It seems that last week when she was arrested in Florida, they confiscated her Global Exchange press pass, and could I make her another one?

...

Last summer, using photos of her own press pass and head shots of the various members [of codepink], I created a template in Avery Designpro's free edition, with a bit more assistance from a handy bit of freeware called Gadwin Printscreen.

There was a bit of a delay producing the 2008 versions of the passes when the primary system I had the templates stored on crashed.

[Gadwin only runs on Windows]

However, I had found a backup of the original template a few weeks ago and so this morning I was able to email her a copy within seconds.

Talk about the tools making the man - really, you just couldn't make this stuff up!


Paul Murphy wrote and published The Unix Guide to Defenestration. Murphy is a 25-year veteran of the I.T. consulting industry, specializing in Unix and Unix-related management issues.