I'm 79. I don't call the police when I get a scammer on the phone; I call the scammer a scammer and hang up. I don't just delete an emailed scam; I report it as "Phishing" and then delete it. If I'm not sure, I ask my husband, the Old Used Programmer, to look at it; and he points out that the sender's address is fake, and then I delete it.
Posts by Godgifu
11 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Oct 2020
Tech support scams subside somewhat, but Millennials and Gen Z think they're bulletproof and suffer
Florida Man sues Facebook, Twitter, YouTube for account ban
We know it's hard to get your kicks at work – just do it away from a wall switch powering anything important
Re: Why have the switch ?
We have a few of such switches in the US too. Long ago (fifty years or thereabouts) my apartment had a switch that powered a wall socket on or off. But it was maybe four feet off the floor, just at hand level as I walked through the front door. I assume it was to power a floor-stand lamp, but I didn't have one of those, so I hung an overhead light (I forget just not how I managed to hang it from the ceiling). A friend of mine visited once, looked at my rigged ceiling light and my used-graduate-student furniture (including brick-and-board bookcases) and said, "Oh, I see. You're just camping."
The Linux box that runs the exec carpark gate is down! A chance for PostgreSQL Man to show his quality
File format conversion crisis delayed attempt to challenge US presidential election result
Oh. My. Cat.
I got no further than reading the title of this article than I was struck with a parallel case that happened when most of us were not yet alive to know about it.
It was December, 1941. Ambassador Nomura and Special Envoy Kurusu had just received an encoded message from the Japanese government, instructing them to deliver a document which was, essentially, a declaration of war to US Secretary of State Cordell Hull early in the morning of December 7th (Washington time), well before dawn Hawaii time, when the Pearl Harbor attack would begin. Thus, they would have officially declared war before attacking, the way they were supposed to.
They began by sending all the secretaries (who knew how to type) home; these delicate "office flowers" were not cleared for so serious a document. They sat down to translate the document into English, and then type it, themselves. It took them several hours. By the time they got to Secretary Hull's office, in the afternoon, the message had already been intercepted, decoded, and translated by US personnel, and there was a copy of it on Hull's desk.
The following morning, President Roosevelt asked the joint houses of Congress to declare war, which they did. But Japan had failed to declare war before attacking, and lost considerable face.
So this was a failure more of wetware than of software, with a dash of male-chauvinist-piggery thrown in. But it's what immediately came to my mind.
Cats: Not a fan favourite when the critters are draped around an office packed with tech
Re: Dead mouse
We had a cat once who caught and ate roof rats. We once found a piece of animal tissue on the kitchen floor which, after cutting it open, we decided was a rat's kidney. (It was the size of my little finger.)
Another time, the same cat caught a mouse and ate all of it, from tail tip to brain case, and left the little frontal bones of its skull on my son's chest as he slept.
IT Marie Kondo asks: Does this noisy PC spark joy? Alas, no. So under the desk it goes
Re: cold feet warm computer.
Maybe THAT's what was wrong with my office, at a large university, back in the 1990s. It was a repurposed lab which I shared it with another secretary. It had no windows. It supposedly had air-conditioning, but in the summer the AC put out HEAT.
We called Grounds and Buildings, and they sent a nice young man to try to fix it (standing on my office-mate's desk). He fiddled for several hours, got nowhere.
Finally he said, "I'm sorry, I don't know what's wrong with this thing and I have another call I have to make. You know, if this were happening in a room full of lab animals, I would have to work on it till it was fixed."
Secretaries ranked lower than rats.