Time plods ahead steadily, as I drift backwards, a stick in the current of raging rapids.

A lot of people I know believe that weight is proportional to quality. The heavier a device is, the more "solid" it is, and therefore, a more reliable/higher quality device. "Feel the weight of this power supply." or "This cell phone has more weight to it, which indicates higher quality components.".
Now, to be fair, there is some truth to this. A heavier power supply typically means a larger transformer, which is able to handle higher loads. Weightier components can handle more abuse than their smaller counterparts. Yet, I feel I could exploit this belief. "Every system comes with a block of lead."

Some of you were expecting a different rant #108, and I'm sorry to dissapoint you. Stay tuned for rant #109 though. For those who have no clue what they're missing, let me tell you. A local fellow recently has been having trouble with his laptop's power adapter. I had bought him a new adapter (with his money mind you), and then he had problems with that one, so I replaced the new one. Months pass, and the new new one has problems. This time, he discovers that the connector inside the laptop is loose. So he tears the laptop apart in order to crazy glue the thing in place. Well, the plan was pretty good except a) the crazy glue didn't hold it in place, and b) he couldn't get the laptop back together again.

The laptop comes to me. Check it out here.

For those of you who have been watching the space from rant 105 and are feeling a bit put out, let me put your fears to rest. The non-geek in this story is the friend in rant 109, while the geek in 105 is the ex-boyfriend in 109. The co-worker's computer in rant 109 is as of yet an unknown entity.

The following rant was submitted by windex/theinx/theOracle/redinx at my request. When I first heard the story of the borrowed floppy drive, I couldn't believe it. However, strange as it seems, the following story is true. We just can't make stuff like this up.

So, Squegie asked me if I knew anyone who is into graphics design and could
create a logo for one of his websites. I told him I knew of someone who was
between jobs and looking for something interesting to do besides calculus
homework, so I passed the word along.

That weekend I asked her if she had a chance to think about how she was
going to design it, and she said she was done and ready to send it back,
except for one small hitch...

Despite having almost the best computer you can build off the shelf, there
is only one way to get files off the computer and onto another one, short of
removing the hard drive and throwing it into another computer.

Note that it is "almost" the best computer.

There's no working CD burner.

I pitched the idea of buying a USB memory stick, but no current job = no
spare money. I had left my memory stick at work over the weekend, so there
went that idea.

There is a NIC installed, but no phone or Ethernet jacks in the room.

What about a floppy drive, you might ask?

The computer used to have one, until her boyfriend borrowed it for "a few
days" to fix his co-worker's computer. They broke up a few days later, with
him still having custody of "his" floppy drive.

So, the only possible solution is to take her computer downstairs and
network it with mom's computer, and email the file to herself so she could
then download the file from her email and copy it to a floppy.

Someday, kids 'round the world will learn of this story and use it as a
convenient excuse in school. It's the digital equivalent of "my dog ate my
homework". You heard it here first.

Feel free to customize SQBNet to your liking with the new Prefs page. SQBNet has been capable of this for years, but I haven't gotten around to making an interface to this capability until now.

See if you can catch the professionalism in this communication I received from one of my vendors.
If you are a "PRICEWATCH" customer, please take a second to give us your " FEEDBACK ". We need your advise to provide more good products and greater service as our goal.

Please note that I myself am quite guilty of many spelling errors, some are at the business level. Imagine a antire roll of address labels that start off with "Seviced by". I don't know if it's comforting or frightening to see the same errors from my vendors.

Watch this space. I've been hearing about the breakup of a geek/non-geek relationship and the troubles it has caused the non-geek in dealing with her computer. I heard about about it because the non-geek girl has created a logo for me, and it is on this computer. More to come as this rant unfolds.

Re:Six inch floppies? (Score:4, Funny)
by martinX (672498) on Thursday March 04, @05:44PM (#8469600)
When 3.5" floppies were introduced to South Africa, in order to distinguish them from the flexible and floppy 5.25" disks, they were called "stiffies" ... so the campaign was 'would you rather have a 5.25" floppy or a 3.5" stiffy".

I have found something worse than spam. When people spam using your email address, you get the bounced messages. What makes that even worse is when tons of people who have received spam from your email adress (but not necessarily you) get infected with a virus, your address is in their list. So, you will either a) get the spam victims' virus email, or b) the spam victim's computer will send messages from your email address and you will get the virus scan bounce backs alerting you that you had a virus or your message was rejected. There's nothing greater than receiving a message stating that the .pif file I sent contained a virus, or that I am possibly infected with mydoom.

Now, some of you may be thinking: this idiot is running an open relay or has a virus. I even wondered that myself. However, after checking through the headers on these messages, and never once seeing one of my ip addresses, or even an ip adderss belonging to my isp (which I used to work for, and know their ranges), I was able to put that question to rest.