Bloggers@large

I could not resist blogging this story: State Employee Fired For Using State Property To Search For Aliens. It is about this guy that ran the Seti@home program on his work mainframe. The guy ran the program only on weekends and on weekdays between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m., when the server wasn’t being used. For those not familliar with Seti@home: this program uses grid computing to process the data from the Aricebo research facilty. Obviously some companies just look for excuses to fire people. I have no clue what kind of policy they had (if any) but I guarantee […]

Regular readers of my blog must have noticed that I avoid writing about my job and the company that I work for. Besides a close circle of friends I guess not many readers know where I work. My reason is simple: I firmly believe that one should keep their work an private live separate to avoid all kinds of irritating situations. Well, I guess this blog is going to be the first exception to my own rule, because sometimes work influences ones private life in such a way that keeping things separate becomes pretty damn hard. Or you might call […]

I just read the following article about ‘shock jock’ Howard Stern and I couldn’t help laughing my ass off. So, if you want to find out how talking on the radio about ‘blumpkins’, ‘balloon knots’ and ‘performing a David Copperfield’ can cost you $27,500 in federal fines, you should definately read it. In case the link stops working, you can also read the full transscript from the FCC here. Guess this is another example of some narrowminded twits in action. ps: If someone can explain me what Howard meant with the “strawberry shortcake” or a “Dirty Sanchez”, I would appreciate […]

I just love those useless titbits of information. Like this one: who invented the smiley in e-mails or for usenet postings? Well, you can find the answer (believe it or not) at a Microsoft website:The First Smiley 🙂. I really did not know it was already used in 1982 ! ps: finally those guys at Microsoft are researching some usefull things ;-P

Not so long ago the Internet was rather simple. You could not get a computer virus from an e-mail, and certainly not from watching porn. In fact, I remember how I scolded someone back in ’98 because he was dumb enough to forward a chain-mail to everyone in the company that warned for opening an e-mail with a certain subject, because supposedly it would give you a virus. Back then that was impossible unless you opened an executable attachment yourself. However: anno 2004 you DO get a PC-virus from e-mail (especially if you’re a windows user), and yes: looking at […]

I have to confess: when I first heard about this new “pyscho-babble” term (“sudden wealth syndrome”), I laughed out loud (lol). I mean: millions of people dream of getting rich, but when it happens they are having an identity crisis? Come on. But, as with many things, when you look at it closer, it seems there is truth in it. And it seems that the old saying “be careful what you wish for” still is a factor to be dealt with. In short; after you win the lottery or inherit a lot of money maybe: You feel uncomfortably different from […]

Yup, it’s that time of the year again: time to plan my Xmas trip to Carrie & Zach. I’m looking for some cheap flights to Tallahassee, and hopefully I can use some of my well-earned Delta SkyMiles to either upgrade to business class, or to fly cheaper. I wrote an e-mail to Delta because they did not add my SkyMiles yet from July this year. They added them almost the next day. But then I tried to see if I can redeem them for a flight, and their Website said they currently do not support non-us flights (which sucks). Anyway: […]

Guess I have a lot of short stuff to write about, so I decided to throw them together in one big post 😉 It was a long, boring week this week. Work was slow, I was uninspired and in general I was just too easily distracted. Guess it’s the time of year again: fall is always such a drag. The days are getting shorter, the weather gets bad, leaves are falling and it rains most of the time. To top things off the damn traffic jams are getting worse and worse under these conditions. Thursday morning I just didn’t even […]

So we all know that Windows is inherent unsafe. If that isn’t bad enough, Microsoft keeps pushing their shitty updates down our throats. Well the next pain in the ass is called XP service pack 2. This newest patch required about 104mb to download (in my case) and took over 30 minutes to install on my 2.8ghz HT P4. Go figure! Not taking any chances with this service pack I made a backup of my harddisks first.So far so good. Now I have two more machines to go to install this too. Since one of them is my webserver, this […]

Sick and tired of all those security issues involving M$ Internet “Exploder”? Browse the easy way. Browse the fast way:Firefox – Rediscover the web. Simply put: browse without the fear of being hit by some browser-hijacker, spyware etc. In fact: for security reasons you should not even use MSIE.