…when they’re reporting that the Internet is littered with abondoned sites. <sarcasm>Wow, that’s brilliant, thanks for letting me know </sarcasm>. Link via the bastard.
Kids under the age of six watch too much TV and play on the computer too much
And now there’s a study that tell us. Granted, it’s hard to get motivated to outside around here because it’s been so frickin’ cold (I think the high on Halloween was 23 degrees or so), so you’ll (unfortunately) see my daughter in front of the TV more than I’d care to admit.
Grasshoppers: 11, Humans: 0
I’ve heard of venomous bugs killing folks, but I can’t say that I’ve heard of anything quite like this:
Eleven people died and thousands were taken to hospital with breathing difficulties after a swarm of grasshoppers invaded a town in central Sudan, the government-owned Al-Anbaa newspaper reported.
The bugs didn’t attack, apparently they let off an strong odor that caused people to have breathing problems. Weird stuff…
Sexual predator gets beaten senseless by Catholic school girls
This has to be one of the funniest stories I’ve heard in a long while:
A man described by authorities as a known sexual predator was chased through the streets of South Philadelphia by an angry crowd of Catholic high school girls, who kicked and punched him after he was tackled by neighbors, police said Friday.
[…]
“The girls came and started kicking him and punching him, so I wasn’t going to stop them,” neighbor Robert Lemons told The Philadelphia Inquirer.
They stole all his stuff, but at least they cleaned up after themeselves
A California man had his apartment broken into and everything stolen. And I mean everything: soap in the soap dish, dirty laundry, frozen peas. Then they cleaned up the apartment. They even dismantled a custom shelf, his bed, and his custom-made table and hauled it down from his third-floor apartment. Full story.
Those damn copy editors
Joke that was just sent my way (and only folks who have worked in newsrooms will really appreciate this):
A reporter dies and goes to journalist heaven, where St. Peter issues him a harp and a set of moderate-sized wings. “These seem kind of small,” the reporter complains. “Well,” says St. Peter, “Wing size here is determined by how much abuse you suffered in your earthly life. See that guy with the butterfly-sized wings? He was a publisher. And the person with condor-sized wings? She was a night city editor.”
Just then a squadron of F-16s roars overhead, forcing the two to hit the dirt.
St. Peter stands up, dusts himself off and mutters: “Damn copy editors.”
“I wouldn’t be calling you if I hadn’t already read the documentation!”
The rants category was looking a little slim, so let’s add something to it, shall we?
I’ve worked in tech support for years. Both here at work and at previous jobs, I’ve been the guy people have bugged to get things fixed. If I didn’t know off the top of my head how to fix it, I’d figure it out.
Generally, I won’t call tech support people. I’ll go online, and try everything I can find and try to figure it myself. I’ll only call tech support as a last ditch effort. Last night was that last ditch.
One of our production servers here at the office is a Compaq Proliant 800. It’s a good little server, but it’s getting beaten up bad. It’s our Citrix Metaframe-serving machine here in the office, meaning it does the processing duties for all the thin terminals in the office (all 12 of them). Well, the CD drive (an IDE drive) in the thing went caput, so I pull the thing out and replaced it with a spare we had in the office. Turn the server back on, and the thing won’t boot, giving me SCSI device errors — basically, it can’t find my drives. I’ve got a Smart Array 221 card in the system, so I check it out. There are some LEDs on it that I’m assuming refer to the items in the SCSI chain. One of them was flashing. So I traced the cable around the system, everything was connected properly (cut my hand to pieces — the edges of the inside of that case are sharp), hard drives are powered up fine, and everything worked earlier. So I’m stumped.
So I search around the newsgroups. try Compaq/HP’s site, and try everything they document, no dice. I couldn’t find anything useful on what the LEDs on the card meant, and why one was flashing, so I figured I’d just call and see what happens.
The man on the other end is obviously from India (or thereabouts), so I’m assuming Compaq/HP, like many other companies, outsource their call center duties to India.
So I sat with him on the phone, answering a bunch of mundane questions (name, phone, etc…), and then he started going through a checklist — basically scripted troubleshooting that I had already tried. I told him “Look, I’ve tried all this, please let’s just skip this, and maybe you can tell me what the heck the LEDs on the controller card mean?” That dumbfounded him. Every time I wanted to get something more specific he said “This is all the information I have in front of me.” I asked him to let me talk to somebody who did know. He couldn’t.
So the guy gave me an all but useless case ID number, and I got off the phone. I turned off the server, let it sit for a minute, turned it back on, and it started working. Why? I have no idea, but I know I won’t be rebooting the thing any time soon. It’s probably a sign of things to come, and will hopefully give me enough of an excuse to get rid of the thing. That’s the hope, and if the company makes enough money, they’ve already said they’d give me money to bulldoze things. Just crossing my fingers for this one.
Further proof that Google is the center of the search engine universe
Where do all the search engines get all their content, news, etc… and who supplies content to others? Use this VERY handy Flash tool and see for yourself.
Be sure to check those URLs very closely
I quickly mentioned a while back that Barney had been taken for some cash by a PayPal scam. He’s written up a story about his experiences, and this should be a lesson to everybody: 1) PayPal will never ask for your PIN, and 2) Is it really PayPal? URL spoofing is the most common way of hiding this sort of thing. Looking through my logs, this is the URL that Barney was sent to (but, on his defense, you couldn’t really tell you were going here as it was an HTML formatted message):
http://211.113.186.42/pp/http://www.paypal.com/process.htm?id=65455nbn{snip}
Needless to say, it’s not PayPal, it’s 211.113.186.42 which is an IP address in Asia. That’s a complicated and ugly way of hiding URLs, but there are simplier ones:
You could put (nearly) anything in front of that “@” sign, and get this page:
http://scams_like_this_suck_microsoft.com&[email protected]/
Here’s a good writeup on the various tricks used to obscure URLs. Regardless, make sure you’re really going to the right place. Otherwise, you’ll have to deal with what Barney did.
Student faces criminal charges for stealing 25-cents worth of cheese
This is why I RARELY vote for school bond measures. They’d have plenty of money if they’d just get rid of morons like this. All tenth-grade Corey Cambell wanted was some cheese with his fries, and he was willing to pay for it. But they wouldn’t let him.
“I was walking out of the door and the lady called me over,” Cambell said. “I said okay. She asked me what I had, and I told her cheese. She told me that cost 25 cents and I said ‘OK, let me give you 25 cents for this cheese’. And she said ‘No. Give me your ID’.”
The next thing Campbell knew, Deer Park Police were giving him a ticket.
“The ticket says this is a Theft, Class-C violation, including one plastic container of melted cheese,” said Corey’s Mom, Donna Campbell. “It’s valued at 25 cents.”
Money Corey offered hand it over, but the school said to tell it to the judge.