Category: Rant

Making money off the Marching Morons

In Online Auctions, Misspelling in Ads Often Spells Cash

In case you don’t have a New York Times free registration (or don’t know one of the many fake ones floating around there), this article describes people who make good money off of eBay by looking for articles that are going for way less than they’re worth because the seller can’t spell well enough to be found by buyers. It also includes the advice that sometimes it’s the buyers who can’t spell worth a shit, so you should probably include alternate spellings in your listing so the buyers can find you.

You gotta love free enterprise, especially when it’s crafty people getting rich off of the idiots of the world.

I’ve decided…

…that there is one thing worse that the epislon sub-morons who get viruses. And that’s the idiots who wrote those “oh so helpful” mail clients that when they detect an incoming virus, they strip the virus payload and send the rest of the message back to the person in the From line of the message. Has there been a virus in the last 3 years where the address in the From line wasn’t a forgery? Who thought this would be helpful? And why is he still allowed to breathe?

At least I can filter out viruses by dropping anything with a Microsoft executable payload. But I can’t filter out these “virus reports” because they’re all different.

You must be smarter than a stick…

The Register on the “Bagle Worm”

I have a sig file that says “You must be smarter than >—- this stick to put a machine on the Internet”. People who, in this day and age, click on an email attachment in a message with a subject line of “Hi” and a body text that just consists of the line “Test, yep :)” have failed that test.

What the fuck is wrong with you Windows users? I’d say you have the brains of kelp, but that would be an insult to kelp.

Bloggers Block

I haven’t updated in a while. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is that I’m busier than shit – too much to do at work, too much to do regarding Maddy’s memorial. Another is that both of my kids appear to be in total melt-down mode – one is in hospital because of anorexia and the other seems to think “not getting caught” and “doing the right thing” are totally equivalent. Another is that my dad apparently found the blog and I’m a little freaked about that, but I’m coming to terms with it. I try very hard not to censor what I write here – it’s done more for self therapy than for anybody else’s consumption, and I’m quite likely to say stuff that I wouldn’t say to people’s faces (and then say the exact opposite in a subsequent entry – I’m nothing if not self-contradictory). So guess what, dad: If you don’t like what you see here, don’t read it.

How NOT to start your Monday

First thing: Clock radio isn’t working right. We’ve been on vacation, so we haven’t been using it. I remembered to turn it on, but evidently the tuning has drifted because all we hear is static. I attempted to retune it in my usual groggy state, but not very successfully. It apparently doesn’t want to recieve any radio stations this morning.

Second thing: Cable modem isn’t working. “Cable” light isn’t on. Wonder of wonders, though, when I call Time Warner they actually admit there is a problem. In the past, my history with Time Warner has been that I call to report a problem, and they say that nothing is wrong anywhere, so they schedule a service call about 4 or 5 days from now. An hour or two later, I call and there is a huge wait time on hold because everybody else in Rochester has discovered their cable modems aren’t working either, and when I finally get through this time they admit the problem, and I cancel the service call and then some time later the cable modem comes on.

Third thing: My badge doesn’t work in the turnstyle at work. Oh oh. I’m a contractor, and contractors live on a hair trigger anyway, especially since Kodak stock is plummetting. Could this be the long-feared layoff? Turns out no, it’s just some paperwork didn’t get done.

When I finally get into work, my home page loads so I know that the cable modem access at home has come back magically, so I log back in to find mail and news flowing. So things are looking up a bit.