Thunderbird seems to have deleted my inbox. I’m following the intstructions from Mozilla, and, well, they’re not working. I only seem to have the emails sent after 9:00 this morning.

Any tips on how to rebuild my inbox? I’ve been regularly deleting and compacting and transferring, but of course, it had a huge number of messages. I’m a packrat, and email makes me an e-packrat.

It errored out before deleting all my messages, so I’m wondering where they’re hiding. I also seem to have duplicate folders, one dated january 2006 and one dated today, so I don’t think that fits under their duplicate-folder error. I tried rebuilding the index. No luck. I tried deleting inbox.msf. No luck.

The files are there. Inbox has 79 megs in it. But inbox.msf is 2k. Something’s wrong.

Anyone have any ideas?

A group of Israeli teenagers pwned a few terrorist websites.

Izzadin Kassam’s site displayed a blank white screen and Hebrew text notifying of a technical error.

The websites of Arab Israeli political party Balad, and left-wing activist groups ‘Hagada Hasmolanit’ and ‘Occupation’ featured a black background with an Israeli flag, and the emblem of the ‘Extremist Zealots’ group, similar to that of Meir Kahane’s Kach movement.

The lyrics from the Israeli national anthem ‘Hatikva’ were also posted on the sites in Hebrew, as well as pictures of Palestinian babies dressed as suicide bombers with the caption, ‘Murderers from Birth.’

Pictures at the link.

Ynet doesn’t label the kids right-wing, and talked to some of the hackers, who don’t sound nearly as scary as the JPost is making them out. (The JPost is going Ha’aretz on us? WTF?)

“The criteria are defined as anti-Zionist or anti-Jewish sites that support or assist in harming Zionism and the existence of Israel as a Zionistic, Jewish state”.

According to him, the group consists of young adults from 16 to 18 years of age.

In addition to the Hamas military wing’s site, they also broke into the Balad political party site, that of the Hagada Hasmalit (the left bank), the Kibush (occupation) site and more.

[...] Despite the fact that the slogan, “Kahane was right” appears and with it, the symbol of the Kach party, a yellow and black fist, the groups’ members clarified that they are in no way connected to the Kahane Chai party, “except for many common opinions and agreement with Kahane’s ways, out of the understanding that there is no other choice.”

Fanat al-Radical is a new group of hackers whose members were members of another group called Kamikaz Team. “Since we didn’t want to include politics in Kamikaz, we created a parallel group that supports the destruction of Arab sites.

I actually don’t care what their politics are. I wish them success in hacking all the anti-Israel sites they can find.

And now it’s working.

I did nothing.

The wrappers are back on Hot Air, and since I didn’t get around to recreating my Firefox profiles, well, I did nothing.

It wasn’t working yesterday. It’s working now.

Go figure.

Score another one in my continuing list of “Why computers will NEVER take over the earth a la Colossus and Skynet.”

Anyone out there using Firefox and NoScript?

I installed it earlier this week, then got really tired of having to pick and choose what sites I would let show scripts, so I uninstalled it. Now it doesn’t show the proper display for Hot Air, and only Hot Air. The javascript wrapper is completely gone; only the raw (and ugly) html is displayed.

For the hell of it, I tried reinstalling and uninstalling it. No dice.

Anyone? I’m pretty sure there’s something resident in Firefox from the NoScript installation, but I don’t know where to begin to look. I’m using the latest release, 2.0.0.14.

Folks, I dropped my WD portable hard drive. It’s not spinning properly. Best Buy’s Geek Squad thinks it’s pretty much done unless I want to spend over $1500.

I can pretty much recover the data I need for work, but I’m going to lose all of the photos I took since last June, since I’ve been lax transferring them to CDs. That means all of my final Tig photos are gone.

Is there anyone out there who knows of a good data recovery place that might be able to pull the data off for less than I’ve been quoted?

Roee Nahmias is hereby officially pronounced an Apprentice of Juvenile Scorn™ for this story about the PIJ haxxor d00dz incredible hacking skillz.

Islamic Jihad operatives have been able to hack into several Israeli websites, the London-based Arabic-language newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat reported Sunday.

“The electronic surveillance unit of the media warfare division has been able to hack into several Israeli websites and take them over,” said a statement by the al-Quds Brigades, quoted by the paper.

Wow, that’ sounds pretty scary. What websites did they hack? IAF? IDF? Mossad?

A Ynet probe has revealed at least two websites hacked by the Islamic Jihad – the Kfar Truman and the “High-Tech Motors Body-Shop” websites.

The next sound you hear will be the sound of millions of true hackers around the world snorting with derision. Oooh. A body shop website. The world trembles at the loss of yet another scratch-and-dent repair website, so vital to Israeli security.

And here’s where Roee gets that Juvenile Scorn apprenticeship:

Website defacement of this nature requires only basic programming know-how and usually boils down to changing the main page – a file easy to reconstruct.

[...] A statement by any terror group pointing to a unit dedicated to defacing websites does not necessarily indicate any operational sophistication, since any teenager with basic programming skills can do the same.

[Snicker]

Well done, Roee.

The IDF will be deploying robotic machine guns to guard the Gaza border. My forecast: Expect a lot more reports about 65-year-old men killed while tending their farms, no matter how many terrorists get killed.

First report: A new system deployed by the IDF in the Gaza-region enables soldiers stationed in the operations room to fire at Palestinian terrorists near the Gaza fence, Ynet has learned.

The systems, which are equipped with a camera and a machine gun, enable soldiers to watch any activity that takes place near the fence and if necessary to fire at the push of a button. The new system will soon be officially declared “operational.”

Do you think they’re going to call it Skynet? But wait, here’s more about the bloodthirsty Zionists, who want only to destroy the Palestinians:

“The system is not supposed to replace soldiers on the ground, and it won’t replace the need to charge at terrorists when necessary,” an IDF official said.

“We will be able to distinguish between terrorists and innocent civilians,” another military official said. “We won’t fire needlessly, yet at the same time we are responsible for protecting IDF soldiers.”

Damn ruthless Zionists. Pure evil, I tell you. Evil!

In honor of Women’s History Month at work, we were given a talk on women in computing. Part of the presentation was playing this YouTube video of the late Rear Admiral Grace Hopper on Late Night with David Letterman. It was extremely entertaining. Letterman seemed a bit unsure of the technical side of Adm. Hopper but he was a gracious host.

Admiral Hopper was known for many things including writing the programming language COBOL. She also found the first computer bug. (Go to the bottom of the page.)

Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator while it was being tested at Harvard University, 9 September 1945. The operators affixed the moth to the computer log, with the entry: “First actual case of bug being found”. They put out the word that they had “debugged” the machine, thus introducing the term “debugging a computer program”. In 1988, the log, with the moth still taped by the entry, was in the Naval Surface Warfare Center Computer Museum at Dahlgren, Virginia

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

There is no controversy regarding the Daily Kos visit count. Patrick Ruffini is misunderstanding the difference between what SiteMeter shows you on a summary page, and what is counted as a visit or a hit. SiteMeter is not inflating DKos’ site stats. In all probability, SiteMeter is undercounting DKos traffic, as it does with everyone. Let’s take Ruffini’s primary “gotcha” moment:

Then it hit me: SiteMeter only accounts for the last 100 visitors individually. On a site like Daily Kos, the 100th most recent visitor could have been 15 seconds ago. If you are the 101st most recent visitor and you click on a new page, you are counted as a new unique visitor in SiteMeter’s all important count. On a normal site, this wouldn’t matter, since it’s highly unlikely you’ll stick around long enough to have 100 others show up after you. On a site with hundreds of thousands of page views a day, it’s extremely likely you will.

Um, no. That’s not how it works.:

When you are browsing a site, every time you follow a link, it is treated as a single “page view”. Site Meter defines a “visit” as a series of page views by one person with no more than 30 minutes in between page views.

You are counted by IP address, not by virtue of being on the SiteMeter “last 100 visits” page. If I go to DKos and read a post, click on the message thread, spend the next 40 minutes reading the messages, and then click on the main page again, that counts as a single visit. Ruffini wrongly thinks that a second click is counted as another unique visit. It is not. SiteMeter counts a second click as another page view, but page views are entirely different statistics from visits.

Another error in his thinking is that SiteMeter “only” counts the last 100 visitors. No, it counts them all. (Well, except for the ones it misses, which is another complaint about SiteMeter.) It only shows the last 100 visitors, and only in the default free view. When you become visitor 101, you are still tracked as if you were visitor number 15 on that block of visitors that Patrick saw on his screen. But you are no longer seen on the “Last 100 Visitors” screen. And you are just as active on SiteMeter’s radar as you were when you could see your IP address in the Visitor 15 Slot.

On Patrick’s second point, that the clickthrough rate isn’t as high as Andrew Sullivan’s, well, that’s due to a number of factors, and it’s a common problem even with high-traffic sites. I know that I have a high clickthrough rate, even though my blog isn’t a very high traffic blog, because my readers tend to be longstanding readers with similar tastes in reading materials. They also trust my opinions. Linkfests used to be a staple of this blog, and still are, in respect to Haveil Havalim.

People don’t go to DKos for linkage. They go to DKos to read what’s there. Glenn Reynolds entire site is about clickthrough. People read Instapundit because they want to find other bloggers or information that Glenn provides. High traffic doesn’t guarantee high clickthrough rates. I’m not surprised that most people did not click through to Patrick’s blog. The DKos readers do not like conservatives. They do not like Republicans. Of course they’re not going to click through.

The content of the link also makes a difference. My highest-traffic links from Glenn all had to do with sex. The Comic Book Superhero Dating Ratings? Through the roof. I think I got nearly 10k hits from Glenn, whereas an ordinary Instalink generated about half that number. If Patrick wants to see DKos clickthroughs in high numbers, he needs to post that he’s given up being a conservative Republican and has joined the ObamaWagon, or some such thing. Or maybe something to do with sex and Democrats.

Lastly, Patrick tries to extrapolate DKos traffic via some arcane formula he invents regarding page views and stats of similar blogs. Ah, no. Bad move. That’s like trying to calculate the traffic on the NJ Turnpike based on the traffic on I-95 in northern VA and the Long Island Expressway. Now he’s just reaching, and looking really silly while he does it.

In short, there are many reasons to criticize Daily Kos. But blaming SiteMeter for inflating DKos visits and pageviews? No. That’s just a case of Patrick not really understanding SiteMeter and server logs. I don’t have the best grasp of them either—it’s been a long time since I read the raw server logs and decoded them for my boss at Lucent—but I do know enough to know that Patrick is way off base on this one.

It’s back, and they did not reformat the hard drive. The keyboard seems to be working. I’ll check the battery later, as I simply don’t want to have to reboot. But geez, it’s nice to have a 17-inch screen again.

And my own email. I didn’t transfer Thunderbird to the loaner laptop (of course), so I was checking my mail via the web mailbox, which is inefficient, primitive, and annoying. Plus it was on a much smaller screen.

Aaaah. The sound you are hearing from this post is a great big sigh of relief. I am typing at over 100wpm on my laptop again. Life is good.

I sent my HP laptop to the shop to get the keyboard and battery issue fixed. I asked about reformatting the hard drive, since I know that the knee-jerk reaction of all techs when faced with a laptop that doesn’t work right is to reformat—sorry, re-image—the hard drive. Last time, my problem was the laptop screen, which had developed half a dozen pixel-wide vertical lines in the display. This time, random keys were not responding to being depressed, and my battery died. Cool note on the extended warranty: Apparently, when you purchase the HP extended warranty, it also covers the battery (and woo-hoo! for that).

Before I sent in the laptop, I did a full HD backup. And then I wrote a note and taped it to my computer. It said, roughly, “The keyboard is not working properly and the battery is dead. Do not reformat the hard drive without calling me first!!” and then listed my phone number.

I checked on my computer repair online today, and found this under “Current status:”

Hewlett-Packard is currently trying to get in touch with you regarding the current status of your order. If we have been unable to reach you, please call us at the customer service phone number listed in the Contact HP section at your earliest convenience.

I called. The nice gentleman at HP asked what he could do for me. I told him that HP had told me to call them about my laptop repair, and that if they wanted to reformat my HD, the answer was absolutely not.

Guess what they wanted to do?

Yep. Reformat the hard drive.

I knew it. I asked if I could take the HD out this time, but the person I spoke to said they might not repair it without the HD available. I knew I was right to tape that note to my laptop.

I’m not a tech, but I can do a hell of a lot of work on my own computer. I’ve added RAM and various hardware to my laptops and desktops in the past. I can troubleshoot my own system with the aids provided by the manufacturer, and sometimes with a little help from my friend (hi, Jay from NJ). I think the problem here is that the computer repair system is utterly skewed toward those who don’t know anything about computers. While I think that’s the right thing to do, I think computer repair departments also need to have a little box on the form you can check that says, “Yes, I know what I’m doing, so leave my HD alone.”

What is it with techs and their insistence on destroying your data to “fix” your computer?

Feh. It’s not a virus. It’s a hardware issue. Hands off my HD, tech boys.

Last week, I tried to save myself some time by using online chat options instead of waiting endlessly on hold for tech support. Turns out I shouldn’t have bothered. Neither Comcast nor HP chat support was accurate. And the inaccuracy of the HP support nearly cost me $135. That’s the non-online price of a new battery for my HP Pavilion. Turns out my extended warranty covers the battery, too, so I’m sending the laptop in for that, plus the (sigh) keyboard problem. Random keys are not printing. I doubt it’s dirt or cat hair.

This may cause a dearth of posting this week, because typing gets very frustrating when you don’t know which key won’t print, and as a touch-typist with speed over 100wpm, it’s killing me to slow down my typing to help the keyboard figure out which key is getting tapped.

Then there’s the whole loaner laptop from work issue. Damn. This thing will be so much easier when I’m on staff. I’ll just have to drive up to NorVA if the laptop goes hinky. My laptop will once again be personal use only.

Back to the HP support: They got my model and warranty information wrong on the chat, and on the email survey they sent me afterward. I know they have accurate information, because I sent in the laptop to get the screen fixed earlier this year. You’d think they’d be able to keep the information up to date, but no. The recording informed me that my computer is out of warranty. I have an email and warranty number that says otherwise.

Time to back up the HD again… I still don’t trust them not to wipe it clean and reformat it

I had one of those “Oh, so THAT’s how you do it!” moments tonight.

Found the Firefox extension Video Downloader, and immediately downloaded my current obsessions off YouTube. (Obsession number one is “Waiting for My Real Life to Begin” number from Scrubs episode 213, which, come to think of it, I shall embed below.)

There, that’s better. Anyway, that one, and the Ofra Haza version of “Jerusalem of Gold,” which I intend to teach to my new class come fall so they can present it at my bat mitzvah, if they wish to do so. Rahel has already kindly agreed to help teach them via GoogleTalk lessons.

Anyway. Obsessions. Yes, I get them from time to time, and right now, it’s a Scrubs obsession. I put all the seasons on my wishlist, if some of my “invisibles” are feeling particularly generous. You can send them to me without identifying yourself, you shy boys and girls.

Funny, Scrubs has always made music—and characters singing and dancing—a huge part of its presence, so when you think about the Scrubs musical episode from this year (that would be Obsession Number Two, but I have it on tape from its repeat and can watch it whenever I like until season six comes out on DVD, anyway), it’s a natural progression. Between Ted and his late-night barbershop quartet, Turk’s dances, and J.D.’s many imaginary musical numbers, the musical episode was to be expected.

I cannot explain why I am currently obsessing over them. I wouldn’t know. All I know is that it will wear off eventually. But I have been watching since sometime in the first season. It’s a good show. I’m glad they decided to re-up for another year.

And technology—well, it just rocks. YouTube clips come and go, particularly clips of NBC shows. But downloading is forever. At least until I buy the DVDs.

I keep getting pop-up windows telling me I’ve got all kinds of system infections and I should click to download Errorsafe. Of course, I do not click to download, and in fact, am leery of closing the pop-up window until I’m sure it’s not scamming me into clicking “yes” somewhere.

The thing is, I can’t figure out where they’re coming from. I’m not sure I have Errorsafe or not, and Symantec insists that it’s preventing Errorsafe from infecting my system.

And yet, twice today, I have had an Errorsafe pop-up window asking me to d/l their annoying program. The first thing that happens when something like that occurs is my reaching for the cable modem and immediately disconnecting from the internet. Then I try to figure out what, exactly, I’m looking at.

Anyone have any ideas where this sucker is coming from? It hit me after I was surfing a Hot Air story, but that may be sheer coincidence. Then again, I went to some site called the Epoch Times, which may have been the source of the window.

If anyone else has had this problem, I’d love to hear about it.

I bought Acronis True Image and tried to start the backup of my HD. I keep getting stuck at the full backup because True Image keeps telling me I’m trying to save the backup to the same place as the HD. It is also not letting me create a file name.

If anyone knows where there are simple, clear instructions for True Image backups, I’d love to know.

Of course, I may just be exhausted, what with going to bed late last night and Tig waking me up early this morning.

I am going to bed. The backup can wait until tomorrow.

I was reading an article on Katherine Hepburn in the Times, and came across a word I didn’t know. I double-clicked it, intending to copy/paste it into my dictionary.com toolbar. But I didn’t have to. The double-click set off the Times’ internal dictionary pop-up.

Now that’s service.

I take back all of the bad things I said and thought about the Times for, oh, the last month. Tabula rasa for them, at least until their next anti-Israel editorial.

Oh. The word is chiaroscuro.

Update: They actually tell you about the feature at the very bottom of each page. Like I read the small print. But still—it’s there. I found it more amazing not to have been tipped off.

I’ve been procrastinating reporting my video problem in my HP Paviliion notebook because I was pretty sure it was a video card thing, and I was also pretty sure that HP would tell me to send the notebook to their service center. Which is tough, because it’s what I use to do my contracting job. Until they make me a full-time employee, I can’t have a company laptop. But the one vertical line is now six, and the screen keeps degrading, so I finally called, told them my problem, and was told that I’d have to send it in.

Okay, I said, and asked about this and that, discussed backing up my data, and then the rep put me on hold, and came back and told me that they were going to reformat my hard drive.

I blew three gaskets. I told them that was absolutely unacceptable. This is a video card issue. This is hardware, not software, and there is no reason on earth they should have to reformat my hard drive. I told them there was no way I was allowing them to reformat my hard drive. I was polite, but I was clearly angry. The tech put me back on hold, and when he returned, he said, “You can take the hard drive out and send the laptop to us without it.”

That is acceptable and, in fact, also solves any privacy/security issue with my current employer. But if I had been someone with no technical knowledge whatsoever, I’d have gotten back a machine that was restored to the way it was the day I bought it: Two and a half years ago. They’d have wiped clean not only two and a half years of information, but also the accumulated files from my previous laptop (which are currently unaccessable due to the damned Windows shutdown bug in my old Sony Vaio laptop).

I am still steaming.

HP has lost a lot of the goodwill they’ve built up from my past experiences with their support. It is absolutely absurd to pretend that reformatting a hard drive can fix a hardware problem when in actuality it has nothing to do with it. Unless someone out there can tell me that the vertical lines in my display are being caused by a software problem, and I got upset for all the wrong reasons. In which case, HP will be wasting their effort by replacing my video card.

But I don’t think I’m wrong about this.

I’m getting more and more involved with editing audio and video. Any suggestions on what software to get (besides the “Get a Mac” crowd, which isn’t software, but hardware)?

I don’t intend to spend thousands of dollars. I’m willing to go up to maybe a couple hundred. And I’d prefer one program that does both audio and video editing/capture/ripping. Is that possible, or do I need several different programs?

Can I just say, please, how very much Windows sucks?

Their freaking “automatic” updates are killing my computer, for the second month in a row.

The program chokes on my system for some reason, uses up all the CPU, causes my laptop fan to go bonkers, and slows down abso-fraggin-lutely everything. Just when I needed CPU time tonight, because I was doing something very important for Mother’s Day.

I hate Windows.

I am, frankly, on the side of the HD-DVD consortium on this. I am a firm believer in copyright protection and have refused numerous times to accept illegal copies of expensive software. Yeah, I’d like to have the software. But I grew up a while back, and realized that it’s wrong to steal. There’s a big difference between fair use (for example, using music clips in my podcast) and outright theft.

Michael Malone has a great article on the Diggers trying to subvert copyright law.

But the biggest problem with Digg is not the business itself, which is an impressive creation, but its community. One of the things we’re learning about the Web 2.0 world is that all communities aren’t alike; when you let millions of anonymous users design your product, you also let them determine your fate. And Digg has put itself in the hands of an army of postadolescents with too much education and too much free time, the age cohort that gets its news from “The Colbert Report” and holds the anarchistic view that all information should be, in fact, “wants to be,” free.

Nothing wrong with that. Indeed, been there, done that. But now, in my gray-haired middle-age I’ve come to realize that if you are going to create a venue for children to play, someone has to be the grown-up. And that is where Digg blew it.

[...] In other words, Digg was willing to block porn and hate sites, but was perfectly willing to violate trade secrets if its users said so.

It was a breathtaking abrogation of responsibility by a person in a position of authority. If you sign up to be sheriff, and are rewarded handsomely for doing so, then your job when the howling mob shows up outside the jail is defend the prisoner under attack, even if you despise him. At the very least, you run away and accept the shame of your cowardice. But the one thing you don’t ever do is join the mob knocking down the jailhouse door.

And that is exactly what Kevin Rose did. Rather than maturely endure the momentary anger of his community, he instead caved in the most craven manner possible. With a certain justice, all that this gutless move managed to do was earn Rose even more contempt for being two-faced and spineless.

Read it all.

Update: Background on the Digg revolution that the article above misses.

While it’s obvious why the creator of a movie or a song might deserve some special claim over the use of their creation, it’s hard to see why anyone should be able to pick a number at random and unilaterally declare ownership of it. There is nothing creative about this number — indeed, it was chosen by a method designed to ensure that the resulting number was in no way special. It’s just a number they picked out of a hat. And now they own it?

As if that’s not weird enough, there are actually millions of other numbers (other keys used in AACS) that AACS LA claims to own, and we don’t know what they are. When I wrote the thirty-digit number that appears above, I carefully avoided writing the real 09F9 number, so as to avoid the possibility of mind-bending lawsuits over integer ownership. But there is still a nonzero probability that AACS LA thinks it owns the number I wrote.

This time via Sarah: What tech support would look like when the book was introduced.

If you think this is making fun of the idiots who call tech support, you’re right.

By the way, it’s Sarah’s second blogiversary, and she has links to a couple more very amusing sites. She’s responsible for the source of my anti-V-Day post. Happy Blogiversary, Sarah!

Okay, tech folks: I want to get a program that captures audio and video from what’s running on my computer, such as FairStars Recorder (I’ve tried it and don’t like it enough to buy the pro version).

Ideally, it would let me grab a song from a DVD and transform it into an mp3 file. For instance, I have a DVD of Mary Chapin in concert, and I’d like to be able to take the songs and put them on a CD so I can listen to the concert versions without having to play the DVD. I’m pretty sure this is legal, as it’s for my personal listening, not for sale.

I’d like a program that would take the songs and transfer them in fairly good quality.

Any suggestions? The only other caveat is I don’t really want to spend a lot of money. I’m looking for something in the midrange (double digits) price if possible.

I just got an unexpected windfall due to making a really stupid mistake on my taxes. I am using the tax money to buy an mp3 player. I was thinking of buying an iPod, then got into a couple of discussions with people.

As I know exactly zero about mp3 players (other than their general concept), any suggestions out there from my readers? iPod or not iPod?

I want two things: A decent amount of storage (I’ll get the 60 gig iPod if I go that way) and the ability to play videos (but not on a one-inch screen, I’ll probably plug it into my widescreen laptop or my TV set). Wait, three things. A decent headset to go with.

Anything else is gravy. Lair Simon suggested a player that comes with a phone. Or a phone that comes with a player. Don’t need it, and really don’t want it to be overly complex.

Suggestions? Comments? Preferences?

I didn’t say it. Ted Stevens, the Republican from Alaska who voted against Net Neutrality explains why he voted against net neutrality, and while he was at it, explained to us exactly what the internet is. I thought his explanation could use some illustrations, so I created a PowerPoint presentation to help Ted explain.

Ted, feel free to download my PowerPoint file and use it in future committee meetings.

For those of you who don’t have IE or PowerPoint, I’ll work on turning the presentation into images over the holiday.

Update: Patrick turned it into a series of images for me. Since he did the work, he gets the link. Thanks, guy.

Update 2: And now, for your viewing pleasure, an Adobe PDF file, thanks to several readers, but specifically, Nathan B., who sent me the smallest copy.

Have to conserve the bandwidth, y’know. All those fat guys in tubes are hogging it.

This is a hilarious (to me) account of a man trying to cancel his AOL account, but getting The Phone Rep From Hell, who simply will not take “no” for an answer.

AOL: Okay, I mean is there a problem with the software itself?

VINCENT: No. I just don’t use it, I don’t need it, I don’t want it. I just don’t need it anymore.

AOL: Okay. So when you use this… I mean, use the computer, I’m saying, is that for business or for… for school?

VINCENT: Dude, what difference does it make. I don’t want the AOL account anymore. Can we please cancel it?

[...] AOL: I am trying to help.

VINCENT: Helping… listen, I called to cancel the account. Helping me would be canceling the account. Please help me and cancel the account.

AOL: No, it wouldn’t actually…

VINCENT: Cancel my account…

AOL: Turning off your account…

VINCENT: …cancel the account…

AOL: …would be the worst thing that…

VINCENT: …cancel the account.

There is no way my call would have gone on that long without an immediate demand for a supervisor. I simply don’t take that kind of crap. I am always polite to CSRs, but man, do I hate it when they don’t take no for an answer. One of them stopped the spiel after I got tired of saying no and said, “What part of no don’t you understand?” which, I suppose, isn’t all that polite. But no means no, y’know?

Side note: Neither MSNBC nor the local NBC affiliate station get it. Neither one posted the guy’s URL, which has the original tape.

Here’s a link to the full tape, which I suspect you may not get at the NBC stations, what with the end being expletive-impeded.

Don’t load the code.

Not that I think any of my readers are stupid enough to do so. But I thought I’d mention it, just the same.

Thanks to chsw for the tip.

Update: Whoops. Day By Day has not been hacked. Never mind.

Twice in the last month, I almost clicked on a very dangerous link.

One of them alleged to be from “postcards.com,” saying

You have received a postcard from a family member!

You can pick up your postcard at the following web address:

When I put my mouse over the link to see what the site was, it showed up as a web address with an executable file. The extension was .gif.exe.

Needless to say, I did not click.

But that’s the second time I came close to clicking on a dangerous link like that. Be very, very careful with your email. If it isn’t from someone you know and trust, don’t click on it — and even then, be careful. Many Outlook-based viruses spread that way.

Because I love to share: Have you ever used the formatting paintbrush? I use it as a shortcut all the time, particularly after I cut and paste between Word and other documents.

I just discovered you can toggle it. Double-click on the paintbrush, and it keeps the last format you clicked in.

Wish I’d discovered this years ago.

Toggle it off by clicking on the paintbrush again, or hitting the escape key. (The Escape key is your friend. First one I go to any time I want some kind of annoying MS feature stopped.)

You know, gremlins seem to follow me no matter where I go. At work, at home, anything to do with computers and I just get the most annoying things happening.

My computer was not set up properly in my new department. From the get-go, I had network errors, script errors, and problems logging in. I finally got the Help Desk to send someone on Friday. The guy fixed everything except one password, which is apparently unchangeable, reset my network settings, and fixed it so I could add printers myself, which had somehow gotten screwed up.

Only now I can’t print at all. Because the printer is looking for a printer tray that does not exist.

Everyone on the floor prints to this giant Xerox printer. It has six paper trays: 1,2,3,4, High Speed, and Bypass. My computer is looking for Auto, Top, or Main. It can’t find them when I print. So it puts my job in the hold queue. If I try to release it, it prints my cover page, and then tells me that Auto (or Main, or Top) is empty, and to please fill it with paper. But I can’t. Because the trays do not exist. Doesn’t matter if all the trays are full, it’s still looking for the fictional trays. I tried to fill them with fictional paper, but it didn’t work.

So I called the help desk and went through the usual help desk rigamarole. Favorite part: “Can you find the reset button on the printer and hit it two or three times?” Oh, yeah, sure. It’s only a five-figure high-quality printer that everyone on the floor (and I’m on the executive floor) shares, sure, I’ll disrupt their print jobs. I can’t even find the reset button, if the printer even has one.

She gave me a ticket number and set it to “urgent.”

I’m emailing my documents to my coworkers when I need to print.

Anyone want to take a pool on when the IT guy manages to come out and fix my printing problems? I call Friday.