Jes pointed this out to me some time ago, but I just got a chance to go back and really look it over...if you want a pretty good laugh, check out Chris Rae's online English-to-American dictionary (scroll to the bottom for an index). The humo(u)r archive on Chris Rae's home page is pretty entertaining, too.
Congrats to Shane Haskin, who won his political bid for Clare County Drain Commissioner last week!
I think many people don't realize...the 'from' part of any email you receive can be faked...almost as easily as faking the return address on a regular letter.
The email's header information has details about where it really came from, but to expand on the analogy above, it's roughly the same as seeing that the postmark on the envelope doesn't match the city of origin...and in reality, even that information can be forged in an email.
Even if you receive an email from someone you might normally expect, if their name/address don't look right in the 'From' field, be suspicious. Be wary of extra quotation marks, spaces, or other punctuation in their details, because it might not really be from your friend.
Me (goofing around, to my 6 year old son): “Who's your favorite daddy?”
His immediate reply: “You are, 'cause I don't have a stepdad, but if I did, it'd make my decision harder.”
Some good friends of ours (to protect the guilty, we'll call them...“Steve” and “Julie“) were recently traveling with their 4 and 6 year olds by vehicle, and the kids were watching a DVD in the back seat. When they got home (after dark), the kids ignored multiple parental requests to “shut it off”, “go inside”, etc., so our friends shut off the car and left the kids in it.
“Steve” and “Julie” live in a pretty remote area, so when the lights are off...it's really dark. Anyway, they shut lights off, went inside, and shut the garage door. About 20 minutes later, the phone (in the house) rang. When they answered, they found it was their six-year-old, calling from the cell phone...from the car in the driveway.
He asked them to turn on the lights because it was too dark outside.
It's been about 15 years since I was involved in the Boy Scouts, and frankly I haven't thought about it much during that time. Now that we have a son old enough to be a Tiger Cub, he and I have both joined Cub Scout Pack 3944 in Roscommon.
I'm impressed with the number and apparent dedication of the adult leaders in the pack. It's great to see how the whole Scouting program has grown (and, apparently, how strong it is in our own hometown) while I was away from it all.
After installing Windows XP's Service Pack 2, now none of my running/open applications appear in the taskbar. I still have the Start Menu and the Quicklaunch and systray icons, but nothing else. I can still use Alt-Tab switching, but that's it.
Maybe I shouldn't have installed SP2 yet...I'm assuming that's the cause of the problem...the timing is too much to ignore.
[edit date='2004-09-21']
So I 'restored' this machine to a previous point, ran and re-ran “sfc /scannow“, and scoured the Internet (and my registry) for a solution, but none of them worked....until I found this link, item 240 on Kelly's Korner's XP tweaks.
Thank you very much to Kelly!
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For quite a while now, I've tolerated this issue on both a Windows 2000 Professional and an XP machine...whenever I select and 'delete' files, it can take up to two minutes to complete the action. Those machines weren't always like that, but over time the delete process just seemed to slow way down.
Worse, the whole system is pretty well locked up while we wait for the files to go away.
Brian Cryer has a neat little article with an obvious solution...empty your damn Recycle Bin once or twice a year! It worked for me...I only had about 1.2GB of crap in there...go figure. Thanks Brian (for pointing out what probably should have been obvious)!
We spent two days last week at the Great Wolf Lodge in Traverse City...what a blast! We played most of the first day, checked in, stayed overnight, then played until lunch time the second day (that's plenty of pool time, I think).
The hotel is really nice, and the water park is awesome. The only complaint I have is that we were told (during the telephone reservation process) that our room would be ready at 1pm...we couldn't get in it until after 4:30pm. That's pretty poor, because the kids needed someplace to go before then...otherwise, a very good time.
Two days after learning how to ride a bike, Johnny earned 8 stitches above his eye...he hit a rock in the road and went down hard...road rash and all.
This afternoon, Johnny rode a two-wheeled bike for the first time! His training wheels are all mangled from dropping the bike on it's side (to be fair, they were messed up even when we bought the bike), so I took them off and told him he was going to ride without them.
It took about 15 minutes (~10 laps around the cul-de-sac), and he was off! I was going through the whole “pretend to hold onto the seat” thing, thinking he would worry if I let go. I had Steph take some laps with him, and she just jogged alongside him...he didn't care at all.
So far, only one significant crash, but it didn't slow him down much. Now he wants to practice "taking off" by himself, so he can be totally independent.
I'm not sure what started it, but one day I fired up my trusty old Windows 2000 Professional box and instead of hopping on the Internet after it's usual 4 minute boot, I got the following error:
“Mobile Devices Properties, The TCP/IP Network Transport is not installed.”
Surprisingly, I didn't find many Internet sources that could help. The best one was at TechExams.net (http://www.techexams.net/forums/viewtopic.php?p=17654), as it seemed to have many of the same issues...Windows 2000 Pro, High speed connection via DSL/LAN, McAfee VirusScan, and synchronization with a Windows CE Palm-Size device.
After many attempts, here's the sequence that (I think) fixed it:
- In Control Panel>Network and Dial-Up connections, open the 'Local Area Connection' Properties dialog and uninstall all of it's components (including TCP/IP), but don't reboot.
- In Control Panel>Add/Remove Hardware, remove/uninstall the network card
- Now, reboot.
- When it comes back up, reinstall the drivers for the network card (Windows recognized the NIC as 'new' hardare and asked for the drivers.
- Go back into the 'Local Area Network' properties and install the TCP/IP protocol.
- Reboot and cross your fingers
When I was a kid, I really believed for a while that a little man lived in the refrigerator and turned the light on and off for you...why wouldn't I believe it? My parents told me that's how it was.
One fun thing about having kids yourself is you get to mess with their minds the way your parents messed with yours. This weekend, just before my wife took the whole crew out for the day, I pulled our 4 year old aside and convinced him that no matter what anyone says or asks him during the day, he should respond “I'm Batman.”
He did it. To my wife, and to the (surprised) guy running the bumper boats at the local fun park.
I know you already know, but if you haven't done it already (unless you're WAY brighter than me), you too will someday spend an hour troubleshooting a stylesheet before you realize you've got a friggin' capital letter where you shouldn't.
Like many owners of private domain names, all email sent to any addresses at bowenweb.com are eventually forwarded to my email account (except those that fall victim to spam filters and filtering rules). I was a little surprised to see the following text in a message this afternoon, though:
Dear user of Bowenweb.com e-mail server gateway,
Your e-mail account has been temporary disabled because of unauthorized access.
Further details can be obtained from attached file.
For security purposes the attached file is password protected. Password is "10571".
Sincerely,
The Bowenweb.com team http://www.bowenweb.com
Of course, the attached .zip file has the Bagle.gen worm in it as you might expect. I can just imagine plenty of people falling for this one, though.
By the way, this was sent to a valid email address, so I have to guess the address was harvested from the Internet...probably the Rainbow forums.
[edit]
8-18-2004, Another variation of the email-virus trick.
I got an email that appeared to be from an acquaintance of mine (I recognized the sender's address). It was a very brief message, complaining about sending messages using plain text, and giving quick instructions on how to open the attached .zip file. Of course, the .zip file contains a virus.
On further inspection, the email isn't from anyone I know at all...the sender's address is spoofed. Since we both share a common interest (and, thus, our addresses can be found in the same place), these guys must have harvested both our addresses, then used his to try to get me to 'trust' the message enough to open the attachment.
DO NOT OPEN WEIRD ATTACHMENTS, even if they appear to be from someone you know.
Here's a screenshot of the email (I blocked out the “sender's” address with a yellow box).
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I have used a number of digital cameras, but they've never come even close to the quality of a decent 35mm camera. I recently have tested a Canon EOS Digital Rebel, and can tell you honestly that times are changing.
The EOS Digital Rebel takes fast pictures (as fast as 4-shot bursts), in quality levels that easily rival those of 35mm shots. It has all the manual settings you would expect form a good 35mm (aperture priority, shutter priority, bulb setting, etc.), and is the size and shape of a 'real' camera. The Lithium Ion battery didn't move from 'full-charge' through the whole weekend of testing, and a 512MB card looks like it will hold about 220 of the 2+ MB images (I didn't even get into shooting in 'raw' mode with 6MB images. Frankly, I don't see a need).
The camera I tested was paired with a Canon CP-100 dye-sub printer (out of production...replaced by the CP-200) which produces 4x6” prints in about a minute (each). You can connect the printer to a computer first, or print directly from the camera.
Offloading images from the camera is a breeze with the wizard that installs with the Canon driver...pick which images you want copied by selecting their thumbnails, and the wizard does the rest.
By the way, the printer supplies can be purchased on Amazon.com for about $14(US) for 36 prints. The quality is good enough that we're using this camera for fingerprint comparisons (under magnification). Honestly, you can't look at the resulting prints and tell that they aren't from the photo lab.
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