Commentary about those things I find interesting.
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Wow… I have been ignoring a lot of propaganda lately.
Work will often send email to all the employees. A filter sends those to my propaganda folder. I only have 5 for the first three days of September and 11 for the first three days of October. Not a promising start.
Of course, it is election season, so both the DNC and GOP are asking for my vote.
Meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings.
Event invitations from all corners.
Need to hit reset in my brain and boot from ROM.
An author who did a session at a conference some time ago asked me to take down 3 photos of him. I did. I just don’t like that I did.
He didn’t say why. I thought about asking.
This guy claims to have a video of an alien looking through a window. If NASA does find life on Mars, then would anyone believe it?
We never get to stay bored at work for very long. Every day has an emergency from something caused by a user of the institutions we host, the admins at the institution, or even people who work for our project. Wait…. Maybe it is the boredom which is the cause of the mistakes which keeps the rest of us from really getting bored. So eliminating the boredom in one part of the system would cause boredom in other parts.
Thankfully our philosophy is to automate monotonous activities as much as possible. Computer brains do not get bored to make mistakes.
According to Dr Eichele of Norway and Dr Stefan Debener of the UK, when the brain switches to autopilot is when we are likely to start making mistakes. The brain economizes by shifting electrical activity from the prefrontal cortex (attention) to the default mode network.
I can’t want for them to figure out brains which sit in the default mode network are more likely to develop Alzheimer’s or dementia. 
Of course, the worst mistake you could possibly make is to get bored enough to get involved in social networks.
The Earth is an amazing place.
A person intending to rob a convenience store filled out a job application while waiting for the store to clear of other customers. A good idea, assuming the potential robber does not give his real name and phone number of someone who knows him. This is exactly what the police say he did. Ouch.
The first time I read it in local news sources, I thought it deserving of going in Yahoo’s Oddly Enough. Sure enough, this story did make it.
A ticket our Blackboard technical support manager marked as really urgent was picked up by another technical support person who left a note about calling me. Except, the familiar phone number called wasn’t my office number or even my cell number. Nope, it is the office number at my previous job. Yup. I have not worked there in over two years. Yet, no one at WebCT or Blackboard has updated my contact information so Blackboard employees can find me. Isn’t the whole point of having my phone number to be able to call me? It is okay. As it is the end of the work day I was headed home anyway.
Sorry, Andy, if they left a message….
Cross posted from Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric?
Babies are fascinated by me. When the two of us are in a room, they often find me the most interesting thing in the room. Usually, it is mutual.
So, a mutual friend of a friend, Mojan has a fantastic blog. The past year or so has been about being pregnant and most recently figuring out how to be a parent for the first time. Well, a crazy woman set up a ‘blog” which hotlinks images from Mojan’s blog and falsely represents the child in the photos. Ick. I offered to help with this identity theft issue.
Once upon a time, I was annoyed with people taking images from my last employer’s web site. Since I was the campus web designer, I created an image which said, “All your image are belong to VSU.” Also, as the web server administrator, I figured out how to defeat hotlinking with .htaccess by using mod_rewrite to give them my annoyance rather than their content. For the next couple days I watched the perpetrators try and figure out what was wrong. The hate mail I got was fantastic! I recommended Mojan do the same. When she agreed, I went researching to do what I did once upon a time. This is the .htaccess file I recommended she try.
# Basics
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On# Condition is true for any host other yours
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mojansami\.com/ [nc]# What to change gif, jpg, png to which target. In this case does not exist.
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|png)$ http://mojansami.com/images/stolenpic.jpg [nc]
My directions were not all that specific. So the next thing I know, her site is sporting an Internal Server Error. *headdesk* She used Dreamweaver to create the .htaccess file and upload it to her site. She reported the file she uploaded disappeared. Eventually, it did occur to me to look for the error.log and see what it said. The log complained about DOCTYPE in the .htaccess file in the home directory. A file which did not show in the FTP listing. So, replacing the bad .htaccess file with a blank one fixed the Internal Server Error.
The .htaccess file in the right place, of course, resolved the issue with the crazy woman hotlinking.
Nothing can fix the pain of another person committing identity theft against you or your loved ones. I really hope Mojan doesn’t become discouraged and abandon blogging entirely. Between moderation and authentication she might find a better balance.
Do you have any stories of online identity theft?
UPDATE 2010-MAR-06: She pulled down the blog. Facebook is safer from crazy people.
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