Lost In The Web

How stupid can some people be?

Particularly when it comes to work email accounts?

Here at work, we utilise Surfcontrol for filtering web and email for certain items. Its biggest benefit is that it blocks loads of spam, as well as the occasional false-positive (because of certain keywords being caught) as well as Adult Material.

Of course, recently the spammers got intelligent and started sending .MP3 files in with advertisements. Queue the File Formats folder getting inundated with messages and promptly deleted.
(Where am I going with this? just hold on one more second )

So, sitting here clearing down the spam list today so any false-positives caught gets passed on and the spam nuked from orbit. I get down to the File Formats folder and find 1 message in the queue.

Someone had decided to forward on a message with a video attached, a nice little video with a comment in the email. So in the course of doing our work we “verify” the video is work related and/or suitable for viewing within work.

Okay, so the first minute was effectively Page 3* material.. , but it went rapidly downhill from there to effective pornographic material. Needless to say the email was deleted immediately from the system, I should of sent a “this message has been blocked due to inappropriate content” to both sender and receiver but I was amazed at the stupidity of the sender in the first place!

The point of this? someone at another company had received this into their work email account, then decided to forward porn onto someone else’s works account!

It seems to be a point where people forget that sending material like that in most places of work is deemed a serious breach of employee guidelines and worst case scenario you get immediately dismissed from your job with no warning.

*for anybody not from England reading this, Page 3 is from the common “red-top” newspapers like News of the World or The Sun published in England. Where a nicely endowed 18+ female shows off her body wearing very little except for a pair of shorts or bikini bottoms.

Another painless upgrade to WordPress, and a new theme to give a bit more “space” to the page.

There seems to be a growing style of “squashed”  themes where its all clumped down the middle of the page with huge white bars either side of it, so I went for one which fills most of the page.  All I need to do now is to do some quick modification and it’ll be sorted.

Also went to stick WordPress Gallery Embedded (WPG2) onto this blog again, only to discover its a bit of a disgruntled employee… doesn’t want to work and if it can get away with it, wont   So it’s been stripped off for the time being until I can figure out how to get it working.

Im also back to my old K750i which I had to fix, the SPV M3100 just has been bugging me with in-car bluetooth issues lately in the Qashqai.  Good news is the K750i does work, but I dont know for how long!

Ever had one of those days where everything seems to be off by 1

Everything seems to be out of whack?  your typing a key off so what comes out as ejsy instead, and anything you do seems to not work out right?

I hate days like that Its not worth the effort doing anything as you know the next day your having to do remedial work to fix everything which is wonky.

still to get used to this new laptop keyboard as well, fingers are all over the place as well so have to keep re-typing stuff

Well, awkward situations seems to be the norm these days so far in life.

Around 2 months ago I discovered that my left shoulder was numb to touch, similar to the feeling you get after going to the dentists.. that one where you can chew your cheek for 5 minutes and not feel anything except blood

Ended up I didn’t think much of it, until the thumb and forefinger on my left hand went numb as well. This is where it went awkward, since I am what you could call a “southpaw”
(Left-handed just in case that reference went orbital)
No sense of touch in your thumb and forefinger means its bloody hard trying to pick anything up, or even grasp a pen properly.

So, down to the doctors to explain the symptoms after spending the night before reading up on the internet. (*note to self, do not believe anything from so-called “health” sites) I was promptly diagnosed with a trapped nerve in my neck and the information was passed across to Physiotherapy section to organise an appointment.

I hate Physios

It should be classed as an unorthodox form of torture, particularly that “traction” machine itself.
Easiest way to piss off a physiotherapist? slouch

At the bottom of my last post in August I mentioned about upgrading my phone to Windows Mobile 6.. Yes I do happen to run around with one of those annoying PDA Phones and decided since I do work in IT, to have a fiddle with it and see what I can break

HTC produces rebranded items for large service providers (T-Mobile, Orange, O2, etc) but were sly, they only made it available through their HTC website to people who had a legit HTC serial number… thanks to some kind souls they managed to find their way onto the XDA Developers forum for all owners to download and try. So I was running the HTC WM6 version on my Orange SPV M3100 (tip: use the XDA Developers WIKI if you want to DIY )

Discovered that WM6′s bluetooth stack isnt the most “stable” of releases, courtesy of my cars bluetooth stereo having problems keeping connected, or having the wonderful “calling” bug appear when I start the engine. (It thinks the phone is making a call, and only way to solve it is to Soft Reset the phone)

So I tried a few other WM6 versions, only to discover that they all exhibit similar bluetooth problems so I am now back on the original WM5 rom from Orange until someone releases an updated WM6 rom which does not suffer issues with Bluetooth.

Well its either that or buy a new phone, and I’m tempted for one of those new Motorola Razr2 V8 phones.

Hell, I would of went for the new Sony Ericsson K850i but at over £450 for the phone, fuck that !

So, almost 2 years ago (circa November ’05) I went and exchanged my old Peugeot Partner, for a new Ford Fiesta 1.25 Style.

This was because the Partners fuel economy was closer to a Hummer than its figures made out, so it was effectively costing me loads to drive to work and back each week. A minor niggle back then was also the fact that I was a temporary employee for who I work full time for now, You never do get “job security” when your a temp. so changed cars to something more affordable in case the SHTF (shit hit the fan)

So, 2 years later and I’ve been Permanent for over a year and a half and still driving the Fiesta has proven one minor flaw in my plan. Boot Space.
The Boot in the Fiesta might be “big” for its class, but its bloody tiny when you work in IT. constantly having to fold down the back seats to get stuff in and out gets annoying after a while, so I decided to start looking for a bigger car over 2 months ago.
Ended up last week picking up a brand new Nissan Qashqai 1.5d Acenta from Charles Hurst Nissan in Newtownabbey, fair enough its not as big as some of the Estate cars I had been looking at (like the Mondeo Titanium estate) but its big enough for me.

I’ve also started kicking myself into gear to getting all my Airsoft stuff sorted out for going again, just shortly before the VCR Act starts to affect us.  Picked up a nice M16 SPR (Mk 12 Mod 1) AEG from RSOV in Hong Kong for cheap, its one of these dreaded Chinese clones (aka Cheapsoft) so it might develop a fault but its all simple gearboxes and motors at the end of it all… dead simple to fix. All thats left is some load-carrying equipment and I am ready to go.

Now to go and attempt to upgrade my phone (Orange SPV M3100) to Windows Mobile 6…

Well back in BT for the 3rd time in this job, to the old BIC Systems building down Airport Road West.  This time the course is on Microsoft ISA Server 2004 (One of the vital services in my Remit).  There is only 3 people attending it, myself and two guys from Dublin… guess its not a course many people want to do!

2nd day already, the first went past in a blur (mainly because it was very old ground, theres only two ways to setup ISA2004… the correct way, and the half-arsed way.)  So today, we are picking up on how to configure ISA as a Proxy Server, the likes of Access Control Lists and whatnot (last time I done ACL, it nearly caused my brain to dribble out of my ears courtesy of Cisco)

The only sour point is that everything is done within Virtual PC 2007, but the machine is Windows XP, 2 gig of ram and a 2.8gig P4 single core…. they might need to rethink this course with a couple of C2D with hardware virtualisation

anyhow, back to the course!

So the last week we have been having somewhat of a good turn of weather, the Sun has been out and essentially “baking” here and everyone has been enjoying it.
Well except for today, which has been grey, dull yet still boiling… that was until the rain came.

One lovely thunderstorm later, and its feeling somewhat cooler I pity anyone who was caught out in it!
(embedded video courtesy of the WordTube plugin for WordPress, using the Flash Player from Jeroen Wijering)

Seriously where the fuck have all these sales calls came from? its like a spate of morons calling up looking for someone looking to flog the Next-Best-Thingâ„¢.

My boss is now off on the sick, his road trip to Germany for his new fancy Trike has knocked him back to suffering from the dreaded lurgy.
The Senior Manager Brian is on an away day with the rest of senior management, so isnt available. (its that bad, he  has his mobile turned off, as I discovered) This means that I am the only person available this week to do anything, as everyone else is sick or off on holidays.

I also now have to deal with the wallies upstairs, the finance and accounting package is playing up and they come crying to us, and when we tell them to contact the supplier of said package for the support they shout about having, they get grumpy.  Scrap that they are phoning the supplier, its now an irate user who cannot manage a simple password reset in Windows

You cant win at times.

I wonder if going on a toe-curling, blood hungry rampage using a plastic spoon as a deadly weapon would be beneficial?
(note: they should include plastic spoons into the deadly weapon range, you ever seen how easy it is to scoop out a heart with one? )

Or maybe taking a week’s holiday would be better…

I have always wondered how some people manage to forget their passwords after 3 days.

Hell, I have had people change their password, then forget it less than an hour later!

I would see past it if we were strict with passwords and had them set to something like Bk3@~99Dra$1 and you had to write the bloody thing down, but nope.. ours are less than complicated Asswipe1 works pretty well on our systems (I wish we could use it at times!)

I have also grown to hate the way Citrix handles print queues in Presentation Server 4.0. To get your lovely network printer working you need to put the same driver onto the Citrix Server, which is a pain in the ass if the printer driver isnt best of friends with Citrix in the first place (a-la Xerox Workcentre M/Pro 123/128 Photocopiers)
Or you happen to end up with a corrupt printer driver which brings down all 28 people’s printers connected to that server (they vanish like a slice of chocolate cake at the weightwatchers slimming class)

Also in a very under-manned department doesnt help, two guys doing the job of 5 guys (well actually, one doing the job of 4, my boss is already overloaded courtesy of our senior numbnut lumping everything on him)

Me Spiteful? never!