So Much Fishing, No Guts

Can't believe there are sites out there that still try to do this shit…

Was looking up some Hearthstone deck while building one, so wasn't paying attention at first. The browser suddenly got focus and this page came up. I just re-minimized it to get it out of the way.

 When I went back there I noticed it had automatically downloaded its installer. Yet the color scheme was all off and the bottom links didn't align. Then I laughed when I looked at the URL.

The thing is, I'm not sure where it came from. Only had Hearthhead and gog.com open. Might be a bad ad on Hearth but I suppose I better check for some kind of Chrome virus.

Damn Russians. Or Chinese. Or whomever…

Running Circles in Circles

Signing in to watch the inauguration a couple of friends noticed me on the Google+ Circle or whatever it's called. The notifications popped up saying they invited me into their circle. Yet there was no accept button. I clicked on an arrow to the right of the notification and got an even smaller, more useless window.

I then went to the profile page of the person who invited me. There was no invite notification. There was no means to accept their invite. There was no button allowing me to invite them to my circle. I then clicked on a Settings link and got this:

Wow. So I went over to Chrome to do things and suddenly... things were working. *sigh* Understandable to my cynical side yet still damn annoying. Oh well. Not like I will use it. Social networking is a plague.

Some Deals Must Be Passed Up

Was foolishly browsing the NewEgg Cyber Monday insanity and came across this deal...

Not sure how their prices get set but $99,999 seemed a little high for an HP refurb. Thought maybe the search returned something off so I clicked over to the product page...

Nope. $100k. Definitely going to pass on this one.

Theft? But It's Right There

So it looks like the built-in networking card on my main machine (Osiris) is the cause of my recent Internet problems. It was really frustrating to diagnose since the connectivity was intermittent. Anubis also had strange problems so I still wanted to blame the modem. I was at my wits end.

Yet a Qwest technician talked me through some things that proved otherwise. Naturally, I had to get him past the default “please use your system restore CD” response. At one point, the same cable that worked on Anubis wouldn't work on Osiris. Then a cable that worked on Osiris wouldn't work on Anubis. Insanity. But after a number of restarts and NETSH buggery, things looked bad for Osiris.

I want to convert everything to wireless soon anyway, so I ended up buying a wireless USB card for Osiris. Turned off all the WEP/WPA nonsense since I'm only allowing a few MAC IDs. The modem is doing quite well with both wired and wireless but I'll eventually have Bast do the bridging. Makes me want to get a better Palm with the 801g built-in.

As a pretty kewl aside, I bought the “uber range” USB card so I could fish for free connections. There are tons with pretty strong signal in range. It turns out one of the best open ones is from the Dunn Bros coffee across the street! Very handy. Will have to see if they leave it on during the night and weekends… *giggle*