ask-mark.com

I’m about to go to bed, so I’m going to make this short. Yesterday, we had a power outage in the area, knocking my computer offline for a few hours. When power was restored, my Linksys router was not working right. After playing around with firmware, I just bypassed the router and plugged my computer directly into the cable modem. Today, I was jumping up and down on the couch connecting and disconnecting the router to the cable modem so that printing and internet browsing could be done.

I gave up on that and tried the old “broken” router I had left over from Chris’s house. What do you know…that one “works.” Strange world I live in. We’ll see what tomorrow brings me.

According to this post at Ars, geeks are more prevalent than previously thought. 31% of US residents claim to be technically savvy. That’s about 25% more people than I thought would have been. So, it begs the question: are you technically savvy?

Answer in the forums.

The world has gone mad! I cannot believe the utter stupidity of the people on this planet. From a slashdot post:

SlashChick writes “In an interesting twist on political correctness, LA County has banned the use of the terms ‘Master/Slave’ (commonly used to denote hard drive arrangements.) According to Snopes.com, ’someone within the County bureaucracy… had taken offense at “master/slave” references and complained to the board.’ LA County now requires that vendors working with the county remove all ‘master/slave’ references. Incredible. Read the full story.“

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I was looking at away messages this morning, and I noticed that Erin changed her profile. Instead of linking to some insult maker that I could never get to work (maybe I’m stupid and that’s part of the insult), she’s linked to the Top 10 Bushisms at About.com. Once you’re done with the Top 10, check out the link to Bushisms – Adventures in George W. Bushspeak.
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I saw a Yahoo! News story from the AP that reports Massachusetts’s Governor Mitt Romney is going to fight a ruling from his state’s Supreme Judicial Court that declares a gay couple’s right to marriage is guaranteed by the state constitution. While I am not against gay marriages, I agree with one of the points made by some of the dissenting justices: this decision should have been made by the state legislature, the elected officials of the state. The court should have only ruled on the constitutionality of legislation that allows gay marriages to be recognized by the state.

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The image above shows a breakdown of states’ policies on gay marriage. On the west coast, the government employers in Washington, Oregon and California offer some sort of benefits for domestic partners; most of New England does on the east coast. Wisconsin (go figure), New Mexico, Wyoming and New Hampshire are the only states that do not have laws prohibiting gay marriages. Every other state in the union has some sort of prohibition on gay marriages, including California and Washington.
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For those of you who are like me and have an AIM screenname for every workstation you could possibly use throughout the day, you may now enjoy having a single screenname to use everywhere. Adam pointed this out to me this morning. So, I tested it, logging off my OmniatWork screenname, and logging in as MarkOmni. I checked my computer at home, and lo and behold, I was logged in as MarkOmni in both places. It’s pretty sweet.

Checking AOL’s message that they send, I found out that AIM will send IMs to whichever computer is not set away. If all computers are away, then all computers receive the message. So, if you use AIM, check it out.

419 Eater is a site showcasing various ways people have scammed the Nigerian E-mail Scammers and other scammers by wasting their time leading them on. 419 refers to the section of the Nigerial penal code addressing fraud schemes. I find this funny because I was recently tempted to do just this sort of thing when I recently received a scam e-mail via the PHS website’s Ask the Webmaster form. I’ll refrain from scamming the scammer until after I read about all the things others have done to their scammers. Enjoy the reverse-scam material.