Rat thoughts

I was in my roomate's car the other day and he had the radio on to a talk station which was broadcasting some tech program.  An older-sounding woman called in complaining that she was having trouble with her e-mail and I immediately knew this was going to end in lulz.

Host:  "Are you using Outlook?"

Caller:  "No, it comes up as Windows"

It's very strange, out of the dozen or so people here who have RAZR phones, all but one have been putting the phone into the plastic holster backwards.

The phone quite easily fits into the holster with the screen facing outwards, and indeed, the way the clip is designed, it looks like it's made to do that (the prongs on the clip wrap neatly around the bulge of the camera.)  It actually snaps in slightly easier this way

Today I received a double-capacity battery for my phone, which makes it about 1/3" thicker and no longer able to fit into the holster.  Until I turned it around and tried to put it in screen first.  It fit perfectly.   Better, in fact, that before.  It's now plainly obvious that's the way the holster is designed:  the holes line up with the buttons, the shape of the clip fits perfectly into the bulge for the camera, and the slight slant at the base of the holster matches up perfectly with the slightly slanted bottom of the phone.

I noticed someone else putting their phone into the holster with the screen out, so I went around and asked everyone how they holstered their phone.  Only one person said screen inwards, everybody else was putting them in backwards.

I was wondering why we were having an abnormally high number of broken holsters, now the reason is obvious.

I got a call from work today. The entire office was in a panic because the mouse on the receptionist's computer seemed to have a mind of its own. It was supposedly moving around, clicking on things, opening menus and copying files. Everyone was certain it was a virus or a hacker or something. I had a pretty good idea what the problem was, and it had a very simple solution, but they wanted me to come in anyway, and since my car was in the shop, they sent a cow-orker over to pick me up.

I get into the office and find that someone had disconnected the cable to the T-1 line to prevent further 'hacking'.

Of course, I knew all along what the problem was.

The day before I'd replaced the receptionist's mouse with a wireless mouse. There was another user with the same make and model of mouse, but he was a good 25 feet away, with several walls in between. I'd hopped that was enough distance between the machines to put them out of each other's range, but apparently not. Sure enough, moving that person's mouse would cause the pointer to move on the receptionist's machine. All the activity was just coincidence. There was no hacker, no virus infection.

Still, just to be on the safe side (and justify my timecard), I ran some virus and spyware scans. Nothing, just as I suspected. Nothing unusual in Sysinternals Autoruns. Nothing in RootkitRevealer. Nothing out of the ordinary in Process Explorer. Nothing unusual in the firewall logs. If it's a hacker or a virus, it's something incredibly advanced. (Of course, if it were that advanced, why would it need to take control of the screen and use the mouse to do things like copy files?)

I needed to spend some time working on the file server today, so I stayed late hoping everyone would leave so I could take the machine down. 3 hours of OT later, nobody had budged, and they're going to be working for several more hours. So I headed on home.

Now I'll have to come in insanely early tomorrow morning so I can work on the server before anyone gets in. Bunches more OT tomorrow. Yay. :P

Our primary copier/printer/fax machine ran out of toner, and whoever used the last cartridge never told anyone, so the machine is down until the supplier can get some new carts out here.

Which means no one can print from this machine, no one can copy from this machine, and any incoming faxes cannot be printed. There is a second laser printer/copier in the office, so people can continue to do their work. But that machine was never properly wired up to recieve faxes.

However, having had trouble with these Canon printers before, I've got a spare fax machine sitting around for just such emergencies. It's a cheapo inkjet Canon Faxphone, a real piece of junk, but it's better than nothing.

I dug it up and moved the phone cable from the big Canon to the little one. That way any incoming faxes can still be printed without delay. Then I made a sign warning people that the printer was out of toner and taped it to the printer.

That was yesterday.

I came in this morning and noticed there were no faxes. At all. Nothing had been recieved lately. Which is really unusual, because most people here are REALLY lazy about picking up their faxes, they usually sit on the printer or in the INCOMING FAX box until the receptionist or someone distributes them out.

So I check to make sure the little fax machine was still plugged in. Nope. Someone unplugged the Faxphone and plugged the phone cable back into the big printer, which now has a whole queue of unprintable faxes. Brilliant.

After scanning the WiFi Access Points located around the office complex where I work, I decided to try the same thing at home. I walked up and down the street, which is about 325 meters long and located in stereotypical 1960's suburbia, using my PDA's wireless and a copy of WiFiFoFum. The results were even scarier.

Number of Access Points scanned: 10
AP's not using encryption: 8
AP's on the default channel 6: 5
AP's on a non-standard channel*: 1
AP's using a default SSID: 7
AP's using the SSID "linksys": 3

*Non-standard channel = Anything other than 1, 6 and 11, the only 3 channels that do not suffer frequency overlap.

Went warwalking with my new PDA today. I circled around about half of this office complex, and discovered about 15 different companies using wireless. Of these, 5 were totally unsecured, and 3 of them I could get a strong enough signal to not only connect, but access the web.

Nearly all of them were on channel 6, which makes for a rather noisy environment. Only 2 users bothered to try 1 or 11 (I'm one of them), and there were a couple jackasses using 4 and 8 (for those not familiar with 802.11, each "channel" actually overlaps the 4 above and below, so the only channel selections that allow for the maximum number of channels is 1, 6, and 11. Using any other channels reduces the available clear bandwidth down to just 2 channels)

Fortunatly the construction of the buildings here seems to drastically cut down on noise, you have to stand right in front of the door to get a strong enough signal to connect.

I was tempted to try poking around on our neighbor's networks, port scanning and whatnot, but that would take more time and battery power than I have at the moment.

Now the question is, should I tell these people about their security problems, or should I let Darwin weed out those who don't understand the technology?

I love it when someone just leaves their laptop on my desk at work, and doesn't bother to leave a note or anything. Since most of the computers here are Dell or HP, they all look alike, so I don't even know whose machine this is. Fun fun fun!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3639679.stm

More than 70% of people surveyed would exchange their computer password for a bar of chocolate, and 34% would give out their password freely.

I got up at 5 am this morning so I could get to work early, 6:15 to be exact. Put in 8 hours, dash home, do a last load of laundry, pack the car, and be in bed early so I could leave early on Thursday. Easy-peasy.

Of course not!

At exactly 2:10 the company VP comes into my office and complains that Outlook won't launch. In a bizarre twist of luck, the company VP has the OLDEST computer in the company, and it takes 2 hours to repair his .PST file and show him how to archive stuff. Argh!

So now I'm 2 hours behind. Traffic is at it's worst about now. And then I remember I need to check my PO box. And I notice the gas tank is down a 1/4 since Sunday. Feh. More crap to take care of.

I get home about 5 pm, toss most of my stuff in the car, then I notice how dirty the windows are after the rain, and decide to clean them. Then I notice the bottle of glass wax that I forgot I had, and decided to apply some since it'd been a while. Big mistake. That wasted an hour of my time.

It's 6:20 now. Dinner will be rice with chicken bullion. The rice maker will take at least another half-hour. And the laundry will take at least another full hour to wash and dry. And I still have to pack my clothes, wash the dishes, make sure the house is locked down, do my daily VCL hunt, sync the furry porn on my laptop ;) and pack up the laptop and the last few odds and ends.

Then I can go to bed. @_@