Random Noise

Waiting for the mini-series. Bilgistic Blues. Part 1 - Christmas Chaos

You might like to visit Dawson Creek (the town, not the TV show), the sun never goes higher than sunrise this time of year. Clear skies too, but dress warm. Very, very warm. Alaska is good as well, but more coastal weatherwise. Kind of like Seattle but colder with lots of snow. And on a clear day, you can see Russia! Edit: Sorry, I meant Whitehorse, Yukon, not Dawson Creek. Dawson is further south but still damn cold.

I look forward to the passing of the 21st as well. It doesn't start getting light out until 8 AM and it starts getting dark around 3:30 in the afternoon. It's also -17° C (1° F) here right now so I don't really go out much unless I need to.

I was just thinking back to a gag we used to pull in the late '80s that went like: +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ * W A R N I N G * Your computer has just been infected with a Virus. Unfortunately our programmers are not experienced so we require you to manually delete all the files on your computer. We're going by the honor system here. +------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Everyone thought it was a great joke, and what made it even better was we actually had someone ask "what should I do?"

Thanks for adding that. My brain tends to always think in terms of linux so I forget stuff like task manager in Windows.

This would probably be a good time to mention, if you ever do land on a website that tells you your system is infected and to call a number to have it unlocked, it's a spoof. It's really just a web page with the warning garbage, a bunch of phone numbers, and a small snippet of javascript designed to keep the browser so busy that it can't do anything else. If you close the browser, then restart it and clear the cache, then everything is good. It doesn't really damage your data.

I run what's called a "honeypot," which is part of a volunteer cybersecurity network among web administrators. Unless you run or maintain a server, you can't really appreciate the number of attacks on a system. A decade ago they would simply scarf up any email addresses they could find and you'd end up with an inbox full of spam, but spam blockers made that ineffective so now they crawl the web looking for anything that has a login, online shopping cart, or something that requires your input, and flood it with web links to various sites, mostly porn. I think a lot of overseas porn sites pay people to draw in traffic. As annoying as they are, the "are you human" boxes are designed to protect the system you're accessing, and the fact that you see them much more often is an indication as to how many sites get attacked on a regular basis. It's also a protection for you, because a single link that you may find interesting could land you on some malicious code, ransomware, or spyware. What's bothersome about it for me is I generally have to go through the links to determine whether the site is harmful or not, so I may have to solve anywhere between 100 to 200 of those in a day. The other one is the "horny women" one which was probably misconstrued and I should have elaborated more on at the time, but I've gone through 300 to 400 of those on some days. The code is obfuscated so the process can't be automated. I have to manually go through each one. If you have an ad blocker on your browser that blocks various sites, or you get a "this site may cause harm to your computer" message, that's from data we collect with a honeypot. Eventually the "are you human" boxes will be replaced with something better but for now it's a fact of life and that's why you keep getting them. Peeve On.

Except when you're showing your niece where to download TV shows from and she wonders if uncle is a perv.

I encounter those all the time. Those, and the "horny women in your area are looking for you." Damn horny women are a real nuisance.

About 2 weeks ago I discovered a bread bag that had slid down between the fridge and the stove and it still had 2 slices in it. They were green, but I guess I'm not as health conscious because I threw them out.

Here it's hockey, which I hate as much as football, baseball, basketball, curling, or any other sport. When I was 19 I worked at a furniture store in the local mall and directly across the hall was a coffee and sandwich shop. Inevitably someone would walk across the hall and flip one of the TVs we had on display to the channel showing the game. Within minutes there would be as many as 25 people all crowded around the TV and then some would start dragging over chairs and recliners from the display areas. I think it was a god-send for the women because they would just set their husbands down in front of the TV and carry about their business without the men tagging along.

There goes my "a rabbi, a priest, and a politician" story ...

i gone and went?

I hate IT people, and that's from someone who got into the field when we were still DP (Data Processing) people and had to know enough electronics to repair interfaces and hardware problems rather than simply swap out a plug-in card. I'm sure a lot, if not most, women in the field experience the problems you have but I've had more than my share of ego-driven competition flung at me over the years. I know there are women who are smarter than I am in several ways, and offer a fresh perspective of managing a project or problem. I wish more were inclined to pursue technical fields.

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