Category: Geekdom

A new doll action figure.
Via Steve

Tip for virulent spammers – get the grammar right and your intended victims may be more likely to fall for your cunning trap:
Dear user of Yahoo.ca gateway e-mail server,
We warn you about some attacks on your e-mail account. Your computer may contain viruses, in order to keep your computer and e-mail account safe, please, follow the instructions.
For further details see the attach.

I noticed yesterday that my smoke-free counter was getting ahead of me – the original code would have made today the three-week mark, which it is not. I quit on Friday the 13th, so 21 days has to be another Friday, no?
Perhaps it has something to do with the leap year…
Anyway, this morning I went to Dynamic Drive and found a better code that seems able to count. While it would be nice to say it’s been three weeks, it hasn’t.

So far this morning I have received four spam* for Viagra. I’m not sure who’s spreading the rumour that I’m having problems keeping it up, but I’d like to go on record as saying that it’s as up as it ever was, given that I don’t have an it.
Which means, by the way, that my it doesn’t need to be any longer or wider.
Two of these spam, interestingly, employ what I assume is a filter-busting method: a long string of unrelated words in the subject line. To whit:
“elizabethan valois thermistor weiss aplomb crisis aileen clash eden quickie tallyho mcleod ogre onion ace proteolysis hollandaise”
Aplomb?
As in ‘he swallowed his Viagra with aplomb’?
And I don’t even want to think about ‘hollandaise’ in that context…
*Is this the correct plural form? There are enough technical writers and their ilk reading this – is it spam? spams? spumati?

Yesterday, I bought two laptops on e-bay.
I have a friend here in Lennoxville who, now that she’s retired, is getting into the cyberworld. So she asked me to find her a laptop, not too expensive, whose primary functions will be e-mail and surfing.
Yesterday, I found her machine. Nice little HP, reasonably priced, no bells and whistles, and just enough power to avoid d-o-w-n-l-o-a-d-i-n-g frustrations.
Then, since I was in the market for my own new machine, I kept looking…

Continue reading “World’s Best Impulse Buyer”

I’m in correcing mode – only five essays left. But I think it may be time to throw in the towel for today. What makes me think this, you ask?
I just gave myself a fat lip with my own pen.
See, I had the pen in my mouth, I was trying to contain my hair in a clip… next thing I knew, fat lip. And the chances are very good that somewhere between my mouth and my nose, there is a lovely streak of red ink.
Yup, definitely time to go home.

Okay, here we go again – I did some more futzing with Photoshop, and here is the new new background. I’m using the laptop, so once again I rely on your input to let me know if the colour is hideous. I’m going for a mellow, yellowy-orange, not bright, screaming acid yellow, so I implore you to give some idea of what you’re looking at.
The current colour is “light goldenrod.” It was “Navajo white” for a day or two, but I was uneasy about the hex code: FFDEAD.
I toned down the flowers, as per Francois’ suggestion, so the text should be easier to read.

More tweaking…
I discovered that certain fonts were displayed in weirdly different sizes, and my beautiful mellow yellow was screamingly fluorescent, depending on which PC was used to view the blog.
I think I’ve fixed the problems, at least for those using IE. I’d appreciate notes from other browser users – do you see the flowers, does the colour look nice and unfluorescent, and do the fonts seem essentially uniform? I may try experimenting with browser-friendly code, if necessary.
Oh, and praise whatever higher being seems appropriate for MT user support forums!

According to Kaspersky Labs, the MyDoom virus most likely originated in Russia.
Does this explain the three hits this blog has had from Russia?
Both the SCO Group and Microsoft have posted rewards of $250,000 US for “information leading to the capture and conviction of the individual or group responsible for the release of MyDoom.B.”
In the last week, I have received more than the usual number of infected e-mails, but my various virus thingies appear to have quarantined all the nastiness.
Go to Microsoft if you think your computer has been hit.