Danger! Offensive comments ahead!
Posts tagged computers
WARNING! New phising attack on the loose in NC
Feb 26th
This is just to alert people that the identity thieves and account thieves have started using a new tactic to steal your personal information and get access to your account. They have now started sending out random text messages to cell phones with the following (or similar) text:
From: auto-notice@ncsecu.org
Message: State Employees CU urgent notification:unusual activity. Please verify your online information at 877-336-6029
In this text message, the domain of the sender is valid, although the email is not, and the phone number does *not* belong to the credit union, no matter if they answer like it does or not. In addition, they are sending these text messages blindly. I don’t have a SECU account, and I got one. So they are spamming a *LOT* of people.
Laptop is broken
Dec 28th
After two days of drying, we tried to power up ryeth’s laptop and it has very serious screen artifacts. If I attempt to fix it myself, the warranty gets voided. If I send it in, it’s on our dime. She’s screwed. We’ll probably send it in since once they fix this, they will honor the rest of the 310 days of warranty (according to the tech support person I talked to). Probably gonna be expensive though. We’ll see when we send it off 
This computer incident reminds me of the time…
Dec 26th
ryeth wanted to go somewhere one day. This was about 13 or so years ago. I had been up all night working on computer stuff for work. I was dead tired, had only had about 4 hours sleep, and the car battery was dead in her 280ZX. So, she comes in and asks me instructions about how to jump start the car. I give her some quick, very groggy, instructions about look for the red wire coming from the battery to the car and hook the red jumper cable up to it, and ditto for black. About 30 minutes later she wakes me up again. This is what transpires:
Her: “Doug… Sorry to wake you again, but I’ve been charging the car battery for about 30 minutes and it still won’t start.”
Me: “Does it even crank over?”
Her: “No. And there’s smoke in the car.”
Me: “Shit! What the hell!”
So, I go outside, and there isn’t a red and black cable coming from the battery. They are both black. And since they are both black, she took a stab in the dark at hooking the jumper cables up right (as opposed to either looking for the + and – symbols on the battery for the positive and negative terminals, or coming in and asking me for clarification). She got them backwards. After 30 minutes of repolarizing the battery to the wrong electrical output, she tried to start the car, and she promptly let all the magic smoke out of every electronic item in the car: the main computer, the ignition system, the fuel injection, the radio; all deader than shit.
I’m just saying….this laptop incident wouldn’t be the first magic smoke she’s set free if she indeed did so this morning. If she comes to your house sometime, you might want to hide your electronics 
Sometimes…
Dec 26th
For those of you that read both mine and ryeth’s journal and are wondering why she might be off-line for a while…
Well, she’s been feeling kinda sickly the last few days. Scratchy sore throat, cough, that sort of thing. General cold or flu. This morning, she takes a sip of her coffee, and then immediately gets one of those totally unexpected and uncontrollable coughs and spits coffee all over her laptop. We are going to need to disassemble it and clean it out to keep it from shorting and being destroyed. We’ve got it unplugged and the battery out right now, but there were some artifacts on the screen by the time we got it powered down And this is on her laptop that was an early Christmas present a month or so ago. Sometimes, you just wanna tell someone to TURN YOUR HEAD WHEN YOU COUGH! (Ok, I didn’t need all caps, but it looks better that way
New computer hardware
Nov 8th
Work bought me a new kvm and two new LCD panels this week. The kvm is so I can take one of my old panels and put it on there, that way I have two distinct kvm setups, one a dual panel two machine kvm and the other a single panel four machine kvm. The nice part about the new panels though, and the reason I wanted them, is that I get more screen real estate out of the deal. The two new panels are 24″ 1920×1200 displays. I was able to set the font size on my dual terminal virtual screen back up to 10 point from 7 point without loosing any rows/columns of information. Talk about much easier to read! 
The web browser and the email programs are frikkin’ HUGE now too. That helps keep that long list of mail folders in view without having to scroll though, so that’s another awesomeness about it. I talked work into this upgrade because they had told me I was authorized to get a new laptop. Well, last weekend I took my old laptop, disassembled it, found the short on the motherboard, resoldered the connector that was shorting out, and basically fixed my laptop. Then I told work that given how rarely I travel, my old, newly working again laptop is good enough and that I would get relatively little benefit from a new laptop, but the same money spent on two larger panels for the increased screen real estate and the second kvm would allow me to see productivity gains on a daily basis, making it money much better spent. When I added in that the upgrade would allow me to have a spare lcd panel, which would prevent the same thing from happening to me again that happened earlier this year (which is that both of my lcd panels went out in the same week…I contacted the normal places at work to check on a loaner panel while I shipped these units off since they were still under warranty and no one had any, so I went out and bought two panels with my own money, shipped off the two broken ones, and once the two broken ones finally came back from repair I just gave them away to relatives and kept the two I bought as replacements), that was enough to put things over the top and they approved the purchase. All I can say is I feel like I have an entire wall of computer screens in front of my eyes 
The display wall…
Fucking malware bitches…
Nov 1st
If you get redirected by an add or some such to viruslivescan.com, it’s a malware site. And it will do this totally bogus virus scam and tell you that you are infected and won’t let you get out of their without installing their software. If you used tabbed browsing, closing the tab works. If not, you just need to close your browser window before it has a chance to install the .exe file. Fortunately, I run linux, I can’t process .exe files regardless so I’m safe. It also tries to do the same thing to Mac OS X computers. In mine and ryeth’s case, we were browsing a few lolcat and loldog pages this morning, and the fucking thing actually redirected us from the lol pages to their page without us clicking anything.
Saved whois information about the bastard that made the site
Been lazy with posting lately…a few updates.
May 24th
First, my arm is much better. I have full range of motion now in the shoulder joint itself. After the doctor told me I could move it as long as I kept to a 1 lb weight limit it had a few ways that it didn’t like to move. After a couple times of reaching for something and having it pop rather painfully, it was suddenly able to move through the full range of motion and the popping quit and totally went away. I’m happy
The only thing still wrong with my shoulder is that the pin keeps the collar bone from moving as freely as it should be able to move. Things like I can take my left hand and move it over my right shoulder and actually place it on my back. My right arm can’t do that. About the time my hand reaches my left shoulder, the pin in my collar bone starts putting pressure on the bone itself (which doesn’t feel all that good). So, shoulder joint itself moves fine, collar bone/shoulder blade junction it limited in movement by the pin. All in all, I’m happy with the recovery.
Work this week was less productive than I wanted. I had to deal with lots of email that kept interrupting my ability to get things done. On top of that, the laptop I’ve been using was OK for email and things like that, but it was too wimpy for real work. That meant I had to log into other machines to do real work, and they weren’t always available. So, today I’m trying to get some real development work done. In order to make that easier, I went to Circuit City Thursday and bought a new laptop. The one I have now isn’t one of those small, light laptops, it’s a beast! But, it kicks ass performance wise. It’s actually quite a bit more powerful than my desktop machine at work (which is a couple years old now). The laptop I got is a p4, 2.4gHz, 512MB DDR 2100 RAM, 40gb disk, dvd/cd-rw, ATI Radeon Mobility 7500 video (which Linux supports rather well, thank God) w/32MB video RAM, and the best part is the LCD panel on the laptop does a native resolution of 1400×1050 so I have *tons* of screen real estate 
Between Thursday night and last night I managed to get it installed and working the way I want so that I’m ready to actually get to work on this thing now. My one bitch about it? It’s got a full sized keyboard. Between that little Vaio I was using and the keyboard I was using on my computer prior to my accident, I’m *tired* of readjusting to different keyboard sizes and layouts. Typos suck…
One of the things I did with this laptop is to finally track down the software I need to make full use of the things I own…I can play my mp3s and dvds on this thing under linux even though rh9 doesn’t ship with software to do that. Sshhh, don’t tell anyone that I like to be able to listen to and watch the shit I’ve paid for. RIAA can kiss my ass, fair use doesn’t mean shit to them.
New toys rock…
May 15th
Since I had my arm surgery, I’ve had to use a laptop to do any work because lifting my arm up to use a mouse or raise it up to the level of a keyboard on a desk was a problem. For my own use, I pulled an old, abondoned unit out of my closet. God that thing was slow, 128mb ram and only a p3/333 is really painful running rh9. So, taking pity on me, my manager sent me a not currently being used laptop he had up in Westford that is a nice Vaio with a p3/600 and 256mb ram. It is *so* much faster by comparison that it makes me want to go buy a Vaio for myself