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.

Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13

The IRS teaches fractions every year. That's 1/3 for you, 2/3 for them.

They always make the suction tube too short inside the bottle, which is probably intended to get you to buy another bottle rather than use up what you have left. I usually try to fit on a nozzle from a taller bottle if I can find one. I save old spray nozzles for that specific purpose. Otherwise, get a drinking straw, stick it in the bottle until it hits the bottom, then cut it just below the upper lip of the bottle. You can tape the straw to the suction tube at the point where it enters the nozzle. Scotch tape will dissolve after a couple uses, but electrical or duct tape works good.

My high school got a trampoline and day 1 of gym class that year one of the guys went too far onto the edge. One leg went through on one side of a spring, the other leg on the other side of the spring. No one else dared go on it after that so it collected dust in a storage room. The poor guy who suffered the mishap sounded like Michael Jackson for almost a week and grabbed his crotch a lot. If we had only known ... he might have had a future in the recording industry.

The game I hated worst of all was dodge-ball. Being an American growing up outside the U.S., especially during the Vietnam era wasn't all that great, and dodge-ball was the perfect opportunity to pelt the shit out of the stupid Yank. I always came home with bruises that would last for days. If one of the balls was laying on the gym floor, the teacher would haul back and boot it as hard as he could in my direction. I fixed that problem one day though. Before class one morning, I took one of the balls and let the air out, then filled it with water and strategically left it in the middle of the gym floor. The teacher came walking in, spotted the ball on the floor, hauled back and ... I'm not sure exactly what happened to him, but he wore a cast on his foot for the remainder of the year. And that, my friends, is what's called American ingenuity.

Yep. Those and the "what is the first word on page 4 of the booklet that came with your game," type stuff. The funny part of it was they would put in elaborate schemes to validate your response to the question and then a simple valid/invalid test once it was completed. So you'd have something like: CALL (call to validation scheme) JNZ (jump if invalid answer given) JMP (jump to actual game code) Then a simple hack would fix that annoyance: CALL (call to validation scheme) NOP (no operation) NOP (no operation) JMP (jump to actual game code) A simple two byte patch to the game totally undid all that garbage of code wheels and stuff. I did find a nice surprise in one game though, embedded in the code was a message "If you're reading this, we're hiring!"

Most people, it seems, would rather stay at their job and complain rather than take the incentive of learning whatever job skills are necessary for a more enjoyable career. If they do change jobs, it's usually the same damn thing but at another place. It's like a friend of mine when I order something at a restaurant, he'll tell the waitress "I'll have the same thing ... but on a different plate." I did a disaster management course once. It was for managing high casualty incidents such as plane crashes, explosions, and such. Working in emergency services, several of us had the opportunity to take the course at no cost and completion of the course meant a pay increase as well. Only two of us took the course. The others didn't take it because it crimped on their personal time and they thought they should be paid if they took it. The saying holds true, "you're the author of your own fate."

That really depends on where you live. In smaller communities something like that is not at all uncommon, especially if you're a regular customer. There's a local restaurant owned by a Vietnamese family that my mother used to frequent. On her birthday they would bring a cake to her table with additional plates for her friends, or at Christmas they would give her gift certificates for a free dinner every month, or similar things like that. We also tend to do other things you would probably find equally bizarre, such as if a neighbor is in the hospital or away for several days, someone will go over and mow their lawn or shovel snow off the walkway. As much as I loved living near Seattle (Woodinville), I appreciate small town living even more.

Probably the most useful thing you can get are Super Scissors. Paramedics typically use them to cut off seatbelts or heavy clothing, but they're strong enough to cut the metal on a car door. When she was still alive, my mother used to use mine to trim her plants in the yard.

Back in the early '80s most of those games came on a floppy disk that you had to boot the computer from. What I found much more entertaining than the actual game itself was the methods used to copy protect the disks. Over the course of time I would extract the binary image off the disk, reverse engineer the disk I/O calls and recode the works into a DOS compatible program. Haven't done that stuff in years, but I can still look at a hex dump and disassemble a lot of the opcodes from memory.