Archive for May, 2008

May
28
Lobster Boy
Filed under (Cubicle & Campus, Random Mutations) by The Cubelodyte on May 28, 2008 @ 12:05 pm

The SunNaturally it’s only on the VERY LAST DAY of a four-day weekend that I get sunburned, so I get to dazzle my colleagues with an embarrassing, bright red forehead. It’s a good thing I’d already unscrewed the fluorescent bulbs over my desk; perhaps the relative darkness will hide my parboiled visage.

Now with just a bit more luck, my irradiated epidermis will remain intact through tomorrow’s data center meeting, so my colleagues, who already suffer enough by having to look at my ugly mug, won’t be treated to the additional displeasure of watching my face-flakes drift down onto the conference table.

 


May
22
Intermission
Filed under (Random Mutations) by The Cubelodyte on May 22, 2008 @ 08:48 pm

I know I haven’t been very active in posting for the last week or so. Things have been pretty busy both at home and at work. In the meantime, please enjoy this musical interlude.

 


May
15
Ignorance is Bliss
Filed under (Cubicle & Campus, Random Mutations) by The Cubelodyte on May 15, 2008 @ 01:23 pm

safety razorI just saw a fellow in the hallway with shaved legs. I probably wouldn’t have noticed if they’d been completely hairless—but this guy was fairly dark-haired, and depilated only up to the middle of his calf. The effect was like he’d been wearing Nair™-filled socks or something.

I figure the less I know, the better.

 


May
13
Captcha Woes
Filed under (Minor Details) by The Cubelodyte on May 13, 2008 @ 02:54 pm

cogThe captcha plugin isn’t working correctly. At least two people have notified me that it consistently fails to process the string displayed in the image, and I’ve reproduced the problem. So if you’d tried to register to comment on the last spambot-related post, sorry about that!

The plugin is disabled until I can figure out what’s wrong with the thing. It’s always gotta be something…

 


May
12
Another One Bites The Dust
Filed under (Minor Details) by The Cubelodyte on May 12, 2008 @ 01:53 pm

spamThe third time is supposed to be the charm, but it took four for me. Another bogus user, “ ken75muraski“, with the address “muraskiken@gmail.com”, registered last night, and didn’t post a comment. Same pattern of firsnameNumberLastname, associated with a Gmail address. ¡Adios, puto!

A quick Google search returns (at the time I write this) less than a dozen results, but, as before, the sites returned mostly disparate WordPress blogs. Some of the results mention more than one bot, which alone is not necessarily damning, but certainly threw another flag.

Jan 2, 2008 … Contributors. alina77vere9uk; ken75muraski; poorplayer; ralyjones25. Popular. Theatre Blogroll. Theatre Ideas. May 2008. M, T, W, T, F, S, S …

That makes four iterations of the bot that have registered:

As of lunchtime today, I’ve got a captcha system in place, so hopefully this’ll keep the phony registrations at bay for a while. The captcha images aren’t the best in the world, being rather easy to analyze for those apps that do that sort of thing, but hopefully they’re good enough to screen out the bots. Or this bot, anyway.

 


May
06
Evicted
Filed under (Cubicle & Campus) by The Cubelodyte on May 6, 2008 @ 10:19 pm

biohazardDue to campus building plans, my unit is slated to be turfed out of its current digs and moved to new offices over the summer. Since we currently languish in a 25-year-old, decaying “temporary building”, the news was not altogether unwelcome.

What’s interesting is that the building we’re moving to is currently being used as an animal morgue. It is also right next to a couple of infectious disease labs. When the dreaded zombie apocalypse breaks out, we’ll be the first to know. Setting up a Twitter feed suddenly sounds like a good idea.

While this might not, on its face, seem particularly onerous, consider that this is a university with an agricultural mission; piles of dung are readily to hand, so it could be worse. Still, it shows the IT staff’s place in the scheme of things here. And we are actually moving closer to the cow pasture, so maybe this is just part of a gradual transition.