Can’t Swim, Can’t Graduate From MIT

Posted by in General

MIT, among several other ‘high end’ universities require all students to pass a swimming test of four laps in their pool in order to graduate. Swimming, a basic survival skill as viewed by the university, may be the first test many freshmen will fail in a long while. I found this amusing since it would be the first test that I would ace at MIT, if I was to attend that college. Someone that I know at Chaska is going to MIT, which he found out only a few weeks ago, and has been trying to sell off his AP test spots since they won’t do him any good for MIT.

Here is the link: The Boston Globe

-John Havlik

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Stupid Phishers, I’m No Idiot

Posted by in Enemy of the Spammers

Today someone claiming to be part of the Chase-Security Support Service sent me an e-mail claiming that they ‘discovered’ recent activity on my account and that I had to log-in to my Chase Online account to resolve the issue. Funny how they ‘knew’ that I ‘have’ a Chase card, which I don’t.

Hovering over the hyperlink, which they tried to discreetly insert a bit of cover code so the average moron would think it was valid, but instead of going to https://chase.com or some related URL the hyper link pointed to some adsl-numbers link and then the cover http://chase.com/… Knowing that this was definitely a scam, which Thunderbird warned of, I clicked the link. Firefox displayed the address as http://jaew.us/login.htm with additional variable passing in the address, defiantly a scam. I tried the https version, and got an access forbidden.

I have taken the liberty of contacting JPMorgan Chase, notifying them of this scammer, which wants your name, credit card number, mother’s name, social security number, and CVV2. After collecting this information, which I provided fake information such as 123 12 1234 for the social security number, and [Expletive] You Scammer as my ‘name’, I was sent to Chase’s real website, which is not entire secure as it redirects https traffic to its http server.

-John Havlik

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First Annual CSS Naked Day

Posted by in Events > CSS Naked Day

Spreading awareness of web standards is the goal of CSS Naked Day, a day in which webmasters and bloggers remove all CSS styling from their website and blogs, leaving the xHtml ‘naked’. In his blog Dustin Diaz announced that he wants April 5, 2006, that’s this Wednesday, to be the first annual CSS naked day.

That’s right, I’m starting the first annual CSS Naked Day. In the spirit of promoting Web Standards along with good semantic markup and proper hierarchy structures, April 5th will be a day of nakedness for all webmasters to remove their style sheets from their website for one day. Signing up is not required, just simply comment in this thread with a link to your website and let everyone else know that you’re participating.

Over at Digg some people are having hard times reading the actual article, so I quoted Dustin’s first paragraph.

Dustin is recommending that anyone who participates includes some html that he wrote that explains the disappearance of styling and a link to the CSS naked page.

I will be participating, will you?

Here is the link: Dustin Diaz’s Article

-John Havlik

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April Showers

Posted by in Weblogs.us

It’s a gloomy day today. Since waking up, it has done nothing but rain outside. Yesterday was much more pleasant. Daylight savings began today, which next year it’s supposed to change to the great bureaucracy that we American’s call Congress. The entire change is unnecessary and should be boycotted by all Americans, if we were able to resist using the metric system, we can resist the new daylight savings time.

Three swishes of blue, representing the earth, will become the new Weblogs.us logo, or at least for the next few mock-ups that I create. In the Weblogs.us forums we have come to an agreement that the blue swishes logo is generally accepted, even if it needs some refinement (which seems to always happen with time). This means that the new Weblogs.us webpage will have a blue color scheme; I’ve already uploaded two modified versions of my original mockup (Rev 14 and Rev 15) that are visible on the forums, so check them out and either leave me a comment here or help in the creative processes in the forums.

-John Havlik

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Meet Mtekkxpathlon

Posted by in General

Yesterday, at work one of the tenants was throwing away a ton of dated computer components. Most of the stuff was SCSI Pentium and Pentium 2 servers, some Pentium overdrives, and old apples and one old power mac. Among the mess were two jewels, one was a case with a Biostar motherboard with a AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.4Ghz, which we found later, and another was a Elitegroup motherboard with a AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.0Ghz. Both boards have AGP 4x slots, well the Biostar has a AGP pro 4x slot but AGP cards work in it so it’s all good.

The Elitegroup one wouldn’t POST so it has been robbed of its CPU and heatsink. The Biostar does work. It took a bit of coxing to get it to find the 40GB western digital hard drive to boot Windows XP, but it is working now. The 512Mb DDR ram from my brother’s shot motherboard fits nicely next to the ATi Radeon 9600 that was in my brother’s old box. My Sound Blaster Live! card, Pioneer DVD burner, and my 200GB hard drive will be making their way into the new system by the end of next week. I can finally play Halo at full settings without any lag.

-John Havlik

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