DeeKnow’s Grotto

I pretty much try to avoid any sort of geeky writing here coz I read and write enough of it at work that it seems kinda silly, and lets face it, its boring. But I do have to share a couple of entertaining tales that anyone with even an remote sense of geekiness should appreciate:

The first involves the recent shutting down of an age old service at work which *was* used to share details with one another about who you are, what your 'plan' is, what your up to etc. Its known as 'finger' and hasn't been used alot recently so the admin geeks decided to switch it off. Here's the original announcement which went out to most of the IT folks...

Change title: Stop finger service
System(s) affected: finger
Details: Currently users can finger a [email address] and 
be told the user's full name... However the data returned 
is not useful. When the server that provides the finger 
service is replaced tomorrow morning, the finger service 
will not be. 

This all sounds pretty reasonable, but of course as soon as the email was sent out loads of nosy parkers started experimenting with the service out of the blue, which provoked the sender of the inital notice to broadcast the following hillarious folllow-up email:

Subject: Finger. Enough already, get back to work.
-------------------------------------------------------
Two things. Would the folk sniggering at me about the 
word "finger" please stop. Would the folk fingering 
themselves for the hell of it also please stop. 

Now thats what I call funny.... Urgghhh Urgghhh !!! ... I laughed so hard I almost went to Ethiopia.

The second geeky item of interest relates to email Spam. Work uses a tool which helps filter most of the shit out of our inboxes which is great, but what shocked me a little is that out of all the email accounts at work (and there are literally thousands) a recent report showed that I received the second greatest volume of spam in the whole enterprise...

Top spam victims:
User     Count  %Count   Bytes   %Bytes
-------- ------ -------- ------- --------
deans    743    (85.50%) 3902642 (73.14%) 

As you can see, unless you're an IT-thicky, over a two day period in February I received 743 freekin Spam messages which accounted for some 85% of all email sent to me. Terrifying!!!

Back when I was only getting a few Spams a day I used to keep track of the number of them and some of the funny titles. Now they're just a pain in the frigging arse and I'm quite happy allowing technology to filter them out of my life.

11:29:47 PM