rograndom

Ha! I had one of those in the late 90's. My father had it first and I inherited it when he passed. A couple of months after he bought it, I bought a 1985 LTD, which was basically a 4 door Mustang GT. He asked me if I wanted to race, I said it wouldn't be close. He said "Both cars have the same engine." Yeah, not quite. The Thunderbird had like 120hp, no fuel injection and bogged down to meet emissions, while the LTD had close to 200hp and was several hundred pounds lighter. Another person up the street had the same vintage Thunderbird with the 350ci and had done some work to it. That one went pretty good.

I was working at a web design company a little after windows XP went EoL. One site had a member on thier board who kept raising a stink because the redesigned site didn't work right on their computer. Found out that they were using IE6 or whatever on XP. Our estimate for the fix was $600, which was like an additional 2-3% on top of the original estimate so it was approved. The $600 was used to buy a new laptop for that board member with Windows7 and whatever the latest IE was installed.

Back before flexible web layouts or modals were a thing, we went through a phase of opening a new browser window for some content, and locking the size. Sometimes we'd want to open multiple windows and reference them later on, so we had a naming convention like "_popup_a" and "_popup_b". We had an intern one summer who coded all of his new window calls as "_poopup_X". I have no idea how the client actually found it, but boy did we hear about it.

Most every cPanel based hosting company, including the large ones, will offer a product with LiteSpeed. It's sometimes re-branded, but it's there. The main benefit is that it's a dropin replacement for Apache on cPanel servers and performs much better when it's tuned for that purpose than Apache.

I worked at a place in the late 90s that had a mix of older actual Apple Macs and newer Power Computing towers. One night some water line in the ceiling went and almost all of the machines got showers. Most of the wet Power Computing died but none of the Apple machines did. There was even one that retained probably a quart of water that was dumped out through the disk drive holes the next morning.

My wife has a similar problem with the iMac supplied wireless mouse. She'll go to click-drag something and catch the power switch, which is on the underside of the mouse, on the mousepad turning off the mouse. This has happened maybe four times in the two years we've had it, but everytime it's been "The computer crashed!" and gets power-cycled, losing work. Of course it's still "crashed" when it comes back up because the mouse is turned off. This post makes me feel like I should put a sticky note on there to check the mouse next time.

“I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I’m certainly not the dumbest. I mean, I’ve read books like "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Love in the Time of Cholera", and I think I’ve understood them. They’re about girls, right? Just kidding. But I have to say my all-time favorite book is Johnny Cash’s autobiography "Cash" by Johnny Cash.” ― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

I grew up in the strange time where the cars we got as "hand me downs" had 8-track players. At a yard sale we found an 8-track to cassette adapter, and then put one of those cassette to line input adapters to have a discman playing in these 1970s era cars.

Magic was probably the first instance of where I learned that sometimes it's ok to not try to "solve" games or put too much thought into being competitive.

I'm not sure how my friend group found Magic originally, but it was around like 3rd edition or so? We all really liked it and spend way too much money on cards. We would play around the kitchen table in a single game, 5, 6, 7 people all with decks a mile high building huge armies before someone finally gave in to break the peace and attack, usually resulting in everyone else attacking them. Great fun.

I had some access to the internet at work and during a break I started looking up stuff about Magic and found a deck that won a tournament recently. It was a red burn deck, and the tournament was a draft, which I had no idea what that meant, but I had a "winning" decklist and I had most of the cards in there. I traded with my friends for the other stuff I was missing and we set about to play. I think I killed everyone one after another with that "stupid deck" with cards the others just flat out gave to me because they were "bad". I took that deck to a tournament a couple of weeks later and found out what the difference between drafts and constructed decks were, mainly that my deck needed 20 more cards. I still get fourth place and a box of booster packs.

My friends one by one stopped playing not too long after that. I went on to win most local tournaments and play in a handful of pro tour events, but none were ever as much fun as sitting around the kitchen table.

Doom barely ran on 386s and lower 486s, so running at all on a 286, let alone better than most any 386, is pretty impressive to me.

Many, many years ago I was at a company where a manager (M1) wanted full root access to all of the internal servers (mostly file/web servers, router/firewall and the mail server). It's lost to the sands of time as to why, but he was persistent.

There was quite a bit of back and forth between the team that managed the servers, the owners of the company and M1. After a few weeks M1 was finally given access. Within a couple of days he brought a complaint against another manager (M2) that M2 had hijacked M1's personal email and was storing it on one of the internal servers.

Meetings were held into the night to discuss what should be done. M2 was called in, credentials revoked and they were placed on leave while an investigation could take place. Overnight every single server was compromised and no one could get in to anything.

M2 brought in a lawyer, the company brought in a lawyer and all of management and most of the employees were sat down in a room to figure out what to do about this mess.

Turns out M1 had re-used the same "password", which was a single lowercase english word, on EVERYTHING. His personal email, any account on any service maintained by the company and had changed his secure password on the superuser accounts he had just been given to the same one.

There was a literal paper trail of M1 providing this password to the majority of the people in the company. Provided in printed memos asking to have accounts set up, emails asking to have accounts set up, other people having it on the standard sticky note on monitors, M1 saying "and make the password..." in the common workspace for anyone to overhear, etc etc.

Of course, one of the servers had SSH open for remote access... and you can see where this is going.

Expensive forensics team was brought in, servers recovered, and it was determined that M1's account on the SSH server was targeted by automated logins not too long after he was added to the company's website.

M2 is cleared and brought back, M1 had their role decreased and was gone not soon after.

If you're in the US, contact your state attorney general. This is a widespread, known issue that a few are building cases about. They have back channels to facilitate getting the account back.

I've done sub-sub-contract work for a few government and military orgs where standard procedure would be I would be mailed a thumb drive of what should just be images and word docs to add functionality to a small section of an internal website. Every single time there would be things on there, totally unrelated to the project, that I should definitely not have been given.