#ROW80 4TH QTR - WEDNESDAY CHECK IN – SPAM COMMENTS FROM HOMELESS CHRONICLES “READERS?”

Who knew I had so many readers or followers? I certainly didn't until today, when I happened across my SPAM comments folder or doohickey or whatever it's called out there in cyberland, where all of these fabulous bits and bytes occupy space, if not time. It's up to me to occupy time and try and persevere over it, but we'll get to that in a moment.


Needless to say, I was just gosh-a-mighty pleased to find that so many swell folks had bothered to comment on my blog, until I started to notice a few things. One of them is this, all of the comments are coming from “Anonymous” and I'm pretty sure it's not this guy:

Anonymous' corporate logo of choice. As a protest group, or a focal point for protest, their Mission Statement may seem apt for our times, but there is always the possibility of becoming vigilantes merely to make a point, rather than justice.

Number two; depending on the subject, the spam is sorta related to whatever topic I was blogging about that day. I am hoping and praying that this has more to do with the search-and-spam algorithms, or else we are up to our eyeballs in a universe of deranged madness. The It's not just the pornoQueen sites, it's the sort of puckish, yet demented cross of one of those translator robots and AutoText Correct.

Of course, once I started really trying to decipher it, it just became hilarious; well, to me, at least, because, it's confuse-a-what at it's finest. And in a weird, sort of Boolean, true-or-false, computer way, it makes sense.

 

Why yes, Anon, I do happen to know of plugins to protect against hackers. It's pictures of warts in ASCII code. 1001 0001 1111 0010 etc... or you can write it in Python, I understand... 

StopIteration... Wait! What?

To be sure, the comments were rich and varied but none so filled with irony and self-fulfilling prophecy or fate, or something high-flown sounding as this:

For you non-programmers in the reading audience, site () = null in JAVAscript, which is about as nihilistic as it gets. Of course, my upside-down sense of humor finds this hysterical, to the point of almost-apoplexy. There are times, when even the heaviest of psychotic medications are penetrated by the unreality of this world.

Meanwhile, over in Russia, happy is sad; sad is happy. Too much is truth, pravda and vremya and once again, тротскы, виолафурыжс феллош травелер ис чоме. It's pretty bad, when your alter ego has an alter ego, but Имагинары Тротскы and ViolaFury have traveled along for many years. So, I guess it was natural for this to show up:

My Russian being slightly less horrible than my Spanish which is awful-to-mediocre on any given day, this loosely translates as "Samsung Corgis and Vodka Being Please No Stop." Or, it's just a bunch of garble kicked off by the 2013 Bloggers' "A to Z Challenge Letter, Z for Zither."

One night I was working on a post and I got one of those annoying "Restart" messages for some doohickey or another. I try to jump on those and kill them as quickly as possible, but I wasn't quick enough this night, so of course, I received the legendary "Windows Update..." message, for what seemed like 6 years. 

Since I write most of this dreck in my head, I had plenty of time to wait, while Microsoft rooted around on my hard drive and snooped and pried and did absolutely nothing except slow things down and cause me to uninstall most of whatever it had installed in the first place. 

Of course, some search-and-spam algorithm responded with this:

Yeah, I do need some quality meds, and Vodka, if you expect me to work with your stupid operating system, thank you very much! Bring me some blinis, black bread and sour cream too, you stupid apparatchik! Balalaikas, too!

WE'RE STILL WAITING! OH, THE HUMANITY, THE HUMANITY!

Still another response to the "Windows Updating. . ." post. Apparently, I had much to rant about, being as how it's Microsoft and it sucks and all and IBM has a much superior product in it's operating platform for PCs, called OS/2 or Merlin. IBM just didn't know how to market it, so the majority standard is Windows with Java and it ALL sucks!

I'll leave you with this; I had to look at this for the longest time to understand what was so familiar about this type of spam. Well, when I puzzled it out and. . . Shit. I was being really good about the cuss words and then. . .

This is actually kind of creepy; this particular (data-mining) response is to my post "TECHNO-STUPIDITIES," but the algorithm is from this post. So, all that Eye-in-the-Sky paranoia, is maybe not so paranoid after all. 

Which kind of leads me back to Anonymous, our "V" guy. The whole personal freedom thing here in the U. S. of A. Now, that as of today, we have once again, veered our lemming hordes away from the fiscal cliff, I guess we can breathe a sigh of relief.

This week, really did nothing towards attaining any of my Deliberate Goals, but I did get some of my blood work back and it looks okay. Next up, Eyes (in the sky?) and Bone Density scan. Enough folderol. JC has been sick and is recovering from cancer surgery, as well. But, he is a trooper and all in all is feeling pretty good. On my "Deliberate Goals" blog, I am going to re-post 2 posts I wrote about a very wonderful pet we had when I was a kid. They will be part of my life's story, should I ever publish. 

#ROW80 POST 7 – COMPUTER TRANSLATIONS

I think that just about everyone knows I've supported, fixed, developed, deployed, trained and written software for every stripe of computer known and used in either big corporations, small businesses and even, God help me Law Enforcement. I did this all while I was still pursuing an active career as a violist and half-assed violinist and was fortunate enough to be granted leeway to pursue both; I guess I earned the respect from the people I worked with; they didn't give a fig if cartwheels were performed in the muster room of the Gastonia Police Department, or fierce hop scotch matches won and lost in IBM's server rooms at midnight, so long as the work was done. Those were the days, prior to scripts and metrics and stakeholders. Creativity abounded and it was fun.

I worked in an environment like this one at IBM and supported OS/2. As I worked 2nd and 3rd tier, I always got the calls that had cooties.

When I was actually in-house and not tearing up and down the United States, on either a bus tour from Hell, or driving myself with the latest Goombah tour with Al Martino, or channelling Elvis with the remaining Jordannaires, my managers would bring me the latest newfangeled whatsis. The purpose? To see how long it would take me to break it and then concoct a fix and write up a process. A break-fix. We had some doozies. Some of my fixes were rather high-tech, others were what we called “sneakerware.”

It goes like this: Step 1. Blow up, or corrupt some really horribly important file, like one of your *.DLL (dynamic link library) files. The key here is “dynamic link” which means they're used by several applications. Oh goody. Now, half of the shit that worked badly, doesn't work at all, or does stuff like give you blank menu drop downs, or if you click on “Edit” you get the “Tools” menu. Just really horrible stuff. You can forget about trying to figure out which *.DLL file augured in, because there are elevently-billion of the things on your system. So, now for step 2. Rummage around, and find yourself a bunch of disks. Go to your neighbor's desk, who has called in hungover and boot up in safe mode. Copy all of his *.DLL files. Reboot your system into safe mode, copy over all of your *.DLL files. Reboot. Fixed. We are talking early days, when people didn't really get the architecture of PCs, which are really not all that different that mainframes.

When I worked at the Gastonia Police Department, I wrote them up a "maintenance manual" for their Windows system. They had enough to do without trying to figure out Microsoft's gibberish. "Rule 1. Windows Lies." And we went from there.

It got to the point where I would stare at a Thinkpad or a config.sys file and figure out why someone's external hard drive wasn't working, then fix it through the software. Now that I'm ready to go off on another tangent and have pretty much gotten my hardware into place, it's time to learn some more black magic. I find it's kinda like riding a bike and all that arcana is coming back to me. I'm about the worst there is when it comes to hardware. I worked for XBox and I aced the software test. I had to take the hardware test 4 times and the instructor had to help me. THAT's how bad I am with hardware.

I am a lion when it comes to software, writing and I'm fearless, but if you present me with crap like this? I am completely and utterly undone. I would probably put it in the oven, cook it and try to eat it.

So, today, my friend who is a hardware guru, I mean seriously good with it, thoughtfully brought me a hard drive and a bunch of memory sticks, 80 Gig Seagate and 1 Mg of memory, for a favor. Eventually, I'll keep horsetrading and end up with another Quadcore and custom monitor. We do a lot of stuff like this. It's how I ended up with the T-42 ThinkPad. He brings me a bunch of papers he needs translated from English to Spanish. I can do this, so I find the web site and proceed copy the English translation to Spanish in Google and then, cut and paste into a document in OpenOffice.org. I don't use Microsoft Office, although I have it, it's not on my system.

I email it to myself and open it; this is what I see:

This isn't looking like any Spanish I have ever seen. I have forgotten one teensy, weensy little thing about hopping around between applications.

Well, shit. I forgot about that little thing called FORMATTING, even though I saved it as an *.rtf file (yeah, *.rtf does pick up formatting.) My friend thinks this is hysterical and says “I'm going home, you'll work it out.” And he left; he lives across the street.

Then, I remembered. Eureka! I took the English, saved it as a *.txt file, which strips ALL formatting. I ran it through the translator and saved the Spanish version as a *.txt file, sent it to myself to make sure it worked, then emailed it to him. I used to do this all the time, with corrupted Excel files, databases, I can't believe I forgot that! He had that sucker BEFORE he got home! Ha! Still good for now, until my next idiocy, 3 ½ minutes from now! Have a great day!