Thank you, Gobstopper. I am enlightened.
Posts by Inventor of the Marmite Laser
1307 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2011
The Register disappears up its own fundament with a Y2K prank to make a BOFH's grinchy heart swell with pride
BOFH: 'Twas the night before Christmas, and the ransomware struck
Email blackmail brouhaha tears UKIP apart as High Court refuses computer seizure attempt
BOFH: I'd like introduce you to a groovy little web log I call 'That's Boss'
Christmas in tatters for Nottinghamshire tots after mayor tells them Santa's too busy
Thursday 28th November 2019 20:08 GMT 
Re: "Lies to Children"
As a family, we are into a second generation of children blessed with tooth faries inspired by Sir PTerry. Ours seem to be Fat Mick and Bert, who are Tool Fairies, plus Fairy Fred, who moved into a tree in the garden of two grandchildren, to "look after them" following their move to a new home in a new county.
The tooth faries manage tooth rewards as you'd expect but all the fairies will occasionally drop little personal notes to the (grand) children to mark the odd momentous event in their lives. Strangely, any letter sent from fairyland appears to go through some kind of dimensional transformation and always appear in mirror writing, much to the (grand) children's fascination.
I have fond memories of our youngest son, who by that time knew full well it was mum & dad, but kept the whole thing going as it was a cash cow and fun. He appeared in our bedroom one morning with his latest tooth dividend, the accompanying note from Fat Mick and Bert and a silly grin. For about five minutes all we could get out of him when we asked innocently "oh, have you got something there?" Was an absolutely continuous fit of the giggles.
Happy days.
One day I hope to start the same for great grandchildren - or at least be responsible for someone else kicking it off.
Thank you Sir PTerry, thank you. Without your inspiration Fat Mick, Bert and Fairy Fred would have never been born.
A short note to say I'm off: Vulture taps claws on Reg keyboard for last time
Boffins harnessed the brain power of mice to build AI models that can't be fooled
I'm still not that Gary, says US email mixup bloke who hasn't even seen Dartford Crossing
Tuesday 12th November 2019 10:05 GMT
Me too
I've got a lastname.firstname Gmail Addy, which I've had for many years.
For a while I've been getting emails to lastname.john@gmail.com, for several American airline bookings and a swanky NewYork rooftop restaurant booking, amongst others.
I did a bit of digging against some of the personal details I got and eventually discovered it was a guy with a lastname.jon@gmail.com addy ("Jon", not "John" - no "h").
I forwarded his airline booking on to him and got a grateful response. It seems he'd given his email address verbally in each case, saying "Jon" but it had been written down with the "h" as John
From other info I trawled up, I know him and his SO were expecting a baby last August. Hope it arrived OK.
Socket to the energy bill: 5-bed home with stupid number of power outlets leaves us asking... why?
Remember the 1980s? Oversized shoulder pads, Metal Mickey and... sticky keyboards?
Friday 25th October 2019 10:56 GMT
Finest keyboard I ever used was in the venerable ISC 3651 desktop computer, a heady 8088 powered mechine with a whole 16k RAM.
Said keyboard had nicely spring, full height keys, each with a teensey magnet underneath, working a corresponding hermetically sealed reed switch on the PCB underneath. Lovely and I've never found better.
A cautionary, Thames Watery tale on how not to look phishy: 'Click here to re-register!'
Excited about dual-screen laptops? Make your own with duct tape and the ThinkVision M14
Mission Extension Vehicle-1 launches to save space from zombie satellites
Don't take Uxbridge, but TfL's given Uber a mini-licence for London
How to fix the global slowdown in broadband rollout: Redefine what broadband means
Boffins build a tiny nanolaser that can be inserted inside our cells
Allowlist, not whitelist. Blocklist, not blacklist. Goodbye, wtf. Microsoft scans Chromium code, lops off offensive words
Wednesday 4th September 2019 08:29 GMT
"Reply Icon
Black tea and white bread are fine, because the colour words there have no particular moral weighting."
Don't you believe it. My Mum in Law - one of the nicest and most inoffensive people you could imagine - was told off by a nurse (of a non-reflective nature and apparently so well balanced she had a chip on each shoulder), when she asked for "black tea". Apparently, said nurse considered only "tea without milk" was acceptable.
Gobsmacked.
I just love your accent – please, have a new password
Friday 30th August 2019 08:38 GMT
Reminds me of a repeated instances with my Human Remains idiots at my former employer, a very large French multinational offering everything from cable ties to data centres.
Every so often we'd get emails requesting personal data. The requests all came out of the blue, always from some kind of outsourcing company specialising in that kind of activity (think managing driver licence ID records, etc). Every time the request email came through its header showed the originating email address fo an outside company, made no reference to my employer, and the only links presented for response or more information were to the websites of outside companies.
The email address and each of the more info etc links were all via different URLs, so different in fact that they could each have been to separate organisations. The emails were often written by someone whose first language was obvously not English. All the indicators of a potential phishing trip, in fact.
I raised the issue with our HR people and IT security people as if it was indeed an outright phishing scam and left it there.
Took ages for anyone to come back to say it was kosher and then only to me.
Nothing ever changed. There was never any corporate announcement to expect these emails and there was no change to the emails themselves
Time after time after time.
The irony was that pretty much each time this happened we'd have had the mandatory IT security refresher not long before.
Glad I'm not there any more
Biting the hand that feeds IT
