use Perl

$work is into skype in a big way. Rather than getting my own interno, I got given a headset. Then I cursed as Skype telephony failed to work on ubuntu hoary at work and on my laptop.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SkypeHowto gave some clues, either configure your sound card or just brutally killall esd, preventing sound from working in anything else.

Work isn't however into irc, and irc and ssh ports are blocked. Asking around on various perl channels about ssh tunneling, gelly and castaway eventually pointed me in the right direction: sshd -p 443, and my box listens to ssh traffic on the https port. Yay! We mused how many servers listen on 443 to get around corporate firewalls: "probably lots".

I'm still being too stingy to play for flickr premium, and already used monthly download limit with flathunting photos. So I uploaded pictures to webhosting, and then had gf complain that they were too big. (Safari doesn't just sanely resize the picture like Firefox). Luckily imagemagick was a simple apt-get away, and the incantation

for filen in `ls *`; do convert $filen -resize 800x640 $filen; done

did the trick.