This image showed up while I was searching for completely different junk on Wikipedia the other day. For years, I could see this disused shafthouse from the attic window.

Monday was OK. However, for some reason, they didn’t plug the network cable into the new machine we got. This makes doing things with it somewhat difficult. A machine that shouldn’t have been running Apache was running Apache, which caused all sorts of consternation. That was easy to fix, at least.

Still reading The Big Con. The number of people, the acting and improvisational talent required, and the amount of effort that went into the old-school con games were all huge. Nigerian 419 scams and selling heroin are comparatively easy and require much less talent, so it’s not surprising modern criminals have mostly abandoned the big con. Part of the middle of the book still rings true, though. “Once the mark has convinced himself that the con is for real, he can probably be played for another score given enough time and the right set-up. Some con men have actually found it difficult to get rid of marks.” Well, there are a lot of people who aren’t very bright out there, and more of them than you might think have enough money to interest con men.