Fluffy had a home here,

and she still does:

Visitation by appointment please.

There’s one more story about Fluffy that needs to be told.

Many years ago now, at work we were putting our first web site up on the wild Internet. There were two groups of people involved with this.

There were the web site developers, sort of like the playwrights and scenery designers. They do all the stuff that you see when you visit a web site: the graphics, text, forms, etc…

The other group, mine, was the system administrators. We were charged with all the stuff you don’t see: making sure the sound and lighting work, the stage doesn’t creak, and making sure everyone comes in through the front entrance and no riff-raff slips in through the stage door.

Normally, for a web server, that stage door is blocked off from the street: you have to go in through the parking garage and through multiple security checkpoints to reach the stage door. You can’t just walk up to the door from the street.

Well, the developers wanted to be able to get in quickly and correct any problems with their web site, and so wanted to have access to that stage door from the street (Internet). The system administrators said that was a Really Bad Idea, because everyone would be trying to get in that door, trying all sorts of user IDs and passwords. A compromise was reached and we left that door accessible for just a few days, in case there were some early problems with the web site that needed to be corrected quickly.

But we watched that door carefully. If someone snuck in there, it would be game over. And as we expected, we saw people trying to log in to our web server with all sorts of known-powerful user IDs: system, admin, oracle, dba, fluffy, root, administrator… Wait… WHAT? Someone was trying to hack into our server with the user ID “fluffy”??

Fast forward to 2012. My Dad and I adopt a cat, whose name just happens to be Fluffy. That started the legend of the l33t hax0r (elite hacker, in the lingo) Fluffy.

Last year as fiber was being run down the road in front of the house, Fluffy watched the crews with great interest, no doubt eager for more bandwidth to support her hacks in to the NSA and Russia and who knows what else…..

After I began working from home due to the pandemic, Fluffy would sometimes come into my home office for something, and I’d have to explain (again) “Fluffy, I’m at work now, if you need something, you need to put in a help desk ticket.” Apparently she didn’t like our ticketing system any more than the rest of us, because she never did hack that system to enter any tickets. Not that I have any doubt that she could.