Dancing with Hobos

Today I had to deal with the problem that the official channels of buying software at my esteemed university were taking too long. This particular software has a 30-day trial license, which I started using when I initiated my order for the full license. Well, 30 days later, the provisional license ran out, and still no official permanent license from the university. I’m really on a tight schedule, and can’t spare any day to sit around and wait for software to come to me.

So what’s a busy soon-to-be-graduating grad student to do? Well, it turns out that it’s far easier to find programs on the net that will generate valid registration code numbers for programs that use such numbers to unlock important features. If you’re able to find these programs, you will be able to say astalavista to the box you’re trapped in (in Slovakia). Ahem. cough

Anyway… My point is, that when I go to these sites, it’s always about getting just close enough to accomplish your task, but not so close that you pick up some viruses or a million popup windows from the website. It occurred to me that it’s the online equivalent of dancing with a hobo. Now, I can’t say for sure, because I’ve never danced with a hobo, but it seems like a similar situation. I’ll leave it as an excercise for the reader to complete the analogy in all its details. Describing dancing with hobos with too much specifics would merely give those of the base persuasion plenty of fodder for lewd guffaws and knowing glances, and that’s not the goal here. We are in search of intellectual clarity.

To summarize, don’t get software from hobos more than you absolutely have to. It’s a dirty business. Even if it does give you every single toolkit! Every single toolkit! Ahem. Don’t do drugs kids, stay in school.