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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

Of course, who can forget the scene where the Son of Satan is leading a band of demons through Central Park, all carrying a gigantic glowing box of Popeye's chicken as Rock you like a Hurricane plays in the background. It's very inspiring.

Of course, there is nextel. I never really cared about cell providers before. It used to be just a comparison of minutes/dollar/month and coverage area. I had long ago bypassed the coverage area problem by getting a national no roam plan with the V provider. I recently went to check out Nextel's no roam plan, which led me to realize how arrogant Nextel is.

Nextel does not allow other phones onto its network. Kyocera? Nokia? Regular Motorola? Sorry, no go. Ok, fine. Now, I look on Nextel's coverage map and notice they don't really cover that much. They cover heavily populated areas and major highways. So what about their national plan? National on the nextel network. So what about roaming? There is no roaming on the national plan. What if I go off the nextel network? Oh, I see... the nextel phones will not work off of the nextel network. Let me repeat that. You must be in sight of a nextel tower in order to get cell phone service. That no roaming option will be very comforting to me when I'm standing next to my car with a crumpled manifold and I desire to call AAA.

Of course, nextel does have that walkie-talkie feature. Have you seen the commercials for this thing? Done. In nextel's vision, people will bark one word sentences at each other to accomplish that elusive goal of communication. I could see that in my line of work. Them: Servers down. Me: Really? Them: Yep. Me: Which? Them: dunno. Me: Ah.

Compare that to a telephone call.
"Hi Squegie, I can't connect to the mail server. I get connection refused on port 25, and three other customers get that too." Me: "Ok, I'll look into it." Done.
Of course, we could follow nextel's vision and work our way down to single-word conversations in the professional business world. Eventually, we can degenerate into grunts and gestures.

You should be ashamed of yourselves.
I am ashamed everytime I look at my paycheck.

Oh drat. I missed it. The 100th rant of Sqbnet. Well, this is now the 101st Rant of SQBNet. May the world rejoice. Actually, I expect the world at large to remain mostly ignorant of this momentus milestone. In celebration I am offering everyone free access to the SQBNet website.