I was happily iPodding my bicycle route home when my Shuffle went south, blinking amber lights. The battery drained, cutting the Clash off in mid song. Wow, after getting used to the audio track while biking, the lack of it was, well deafening.

It turns out when I plugged it into my iBook at night, I was not getting any battery recharge since the computer went to sleep. I think that one did not make it into the user manual. So when I am seeking technical answers, do I reach for customer support, a “FAQ“, and official help file, or even a “Knowledgebase“? Do I rush out and buy a fancy charger?

No way José.

Previously I have documented the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) diagnosis of SpamNymphomania, the sad, desperate attempt to stick Porn Pill Casino links into any web form that contains a textarea and a submit button. In extremely sad cases, they continue to do so when there is no payoff at all, […]

Well, humph, Apple, is well, updating in a rather… um… “Redmondian” way. The OS X 10.3.9 update has done a few things to Safari (I still cannot find the supposed HTML editor, but viewing RSS feed URLs looks even worse in the browser window). But here is a real kicker. While updating my new blog […]

Yesterday I was trying to clean out a swath of comment spam on a blog we set up for one of our college’s sites, wiping directly from the database, e.g.: DELETE FROM mt_comments WHERE comment_blog_id=XX AND comment_author like “%poker%” DELETE FROM mt_comments WHERE comment_blog_id=XX AND comment_text like “%cialis%” DELETE FROM mt_comments WHERE comment_blog_id=XX AND comment_email […]

My (non-)friends in the Texas Hold ’em camp are knocking about again. Shoot, maybe one of these days I may get around to learning this game of poker, though it surely will never be via one of their #$*@-ing web sites. These spammers are nymphomaniacs in the sense they just cannot seem to stop shoving […]

Last weekend I discovered the web server that hosts our Ocotillo Blogs+Wikis+boards had been compromised and some nefarious person had been able to change the root password for the server. As I was 90 miles from the machine, I had no way to seize back my root account, no way to shut it down remotely. […]

I just spent about 20 minutes doing my regular spam rotations- this is a shuffling of my MT blog script names, changing of the required key phrases on some of the sites. I have a half written post I’d like to finish soon on what to do to make yourself less of a target. In […]