{"id":170,"date":"2005-09-13T22:53:54","date_gmt":"2005-09-14T06:53:54","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=170"},"modified":"2005-09-13T22:57:40","modified_gmt":"2005-09-14T06:57:40","slug":"more-stuff-from-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/?p=170","title":{"rendered":"More stuff from today&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Posting over neighbor&#8217;s unsecured wireless because our Internet access was cancelled&#8230;but moron that later.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of the radio: Wow, you can say the n-word on the radio? I never knew that. Whatever on-air personality my officemate listens to said it about 5 times in a row this morning in the course of the usual morning-zoo clowning around (honka honka). In college in the <a href=\"http:\/\/cexx.org\/therag\/orig.htm\" title=\"at an engineering college, something to do instead of dating\">third notch of the Bible Belt<\/a>, IN, we could (and did) get censured for <a href=\"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/images\/satan_interview_clip.mp3\" title=\"'2 girls...who like each other...' didn't go over well, either\">joking about Satan<\/a> on-air, among many many other things.<\/p>\n<p>I dreamed last night that I was in a squad car, riding along on a big Cops-style bust of someone suspected of Downloading MP3z. It was huge! We&#8217;re talking a mega crime ring here (sarcasm), a 12-year-old boy came out of the house escorted by an two officers and crying, and the computermachine behind this criminal mastermind featured a nice but uber-graphical OS shell the likes of which I&#8217;ve never seen (imagine if a candy factory exploded all over GNOME) that gave me a few interesting ideas. In typical Tim-dream fashion, I was watching this somewhat nervously because about 50% of me was busted earlier that same dream-morning for the same thing, so half of me was watching from the *back* of the squad, which was getting rather crowded this being the 3rd Evil Downloader bust of the morning. It would have been amusing if e.g. a murderer ran by and the cops couldn&#8217;t keep him because they were too busy busting downloaders, but that didn&#8217;t happen.<\/p>\n<p>So anyway, (in real life) our Internet connection has for the past few days been returning a &#8220;Comcast Help&#8221; page in response to any HTTP request (e.g. www.google.com), prodding us to download some Windows executable. Much as I <a href=\"http:\/\/cexx.org\/adware.htm\" title=\"they all love you and want to share their stock tips\">love<\/a> to download untrusted Windows executables, I figured this looked like a job for Mr. Complainypants.  The lengthy background process, meddling spyware, behind-the-back-settings-changer-ware, alternative OSes rant was just about ready to spill forth when I was informed that not having paid the cable bill in several months might, you know, have something to do with that.<\/p>\n<p>Come again?<\/p>\n<p>It turns out that for the approximately half a year we&#8217;ve had our own internet access at this house, the bill has been sent to our landlord in his name, and he had been billing Erich, designated bill-handling housemate, who in turned split the bill to everyone else. (Or that&#8217;s how it worked in theory, anyway.) I found this out by calling the landlord to find out who was in charge of the account, and hearing &#8220;Oh yeah&#8230;Comcast&#8230;I have 2 or 3 bills from them I&#8217;ve been meaning to send you guys&#8230;&#8221;. Mystery solved, probably, but it looks like it won&#8217;t be pretty (the last bill he found was for July, already reporting 60 days late and a reconnection charge, and it&#8217;s now mid-September&#8230;).<\/p>\n<p>QOTD:<br \/>\n[00:19] HAL: Generally solid-state relays get killed rather dramatically, requiring some patchwork on the (now scorched) relay board&#8230;. there are other failure-prone parts as well<br \/>\n[00:19] HAL: And yes, stupid users *do* have a habit of hooking up outputs to the mains :(<br \/>\n[00:20] HAL: &#8230; or peeing in the box and shorting everything out<br \/>\n[00:20] Me: but typically not the SMD chips, CPU and etc, right?<br \/>\n[00:20] HAL: &#8230; or destroying the screen with a hammer<br \/>\n[00:20] Me: haha&#8230;you&#8217;ve actually had (l)users do that?<br \/>\n[00:20] HAL: In union shops, yes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Posting over neighbor&#8217;s unsecured wireless because our Internet access was cancelled&#8230;but moron that later. Speaking of the radio: Wow, you can say the n-word on the radio? I never knew that. Whatever on-air personality my officemate listens to said it about 5 times in a row this morning in the course of the usual morning-zoo [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":"","iawp_total_views":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}