Egads. The fact that people are opening this Mytob virus despite the utter illogic of its social engineering is scary enough, but what’s even more scary is how much of a bandwidth eater it and others of its ilk are. Here’s a screenshot of what greeted me when I checked my mail late this afternoon, after spending the morning and early afternoon on a trip away from the computer.

OK, so maybe I’m partly at fault for having a catch-all account, but still. At least you can’t say I’m helping to spread it… I’d have to load up Virtual PC and copy it into a shared folder if I even wanted to execute this trash in the first place. 🙂

Edited 2005/06/10 to add: Oh, yeah, and it was surprisingly easy to filter on the server side, too. How? Well, suffice it to say there’s no such product as “Zone38 Antivirus”, so why would any legitimate e-mail mention it? Of course, this needs to be changed to apply to your own domain, but still, it’s prevented me from having a mailbox looking like the one in the screenshot above…

LOL. Someone’s trackback-spamming my blog with a link to “http://thebest-pills/weight-loss-pills.html”. I’m not leaving anything out of that URL– that’s exactly what they posted.

Yes, that’s right. No top-level domain whatsoever. Talk about pointless spam.

Well, I’m visiting UGA‘s campus right now, and the good news is, I think I can get around the campus fairly well now.

Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about going off campus: not only do the city buses not run on Sundays, they also don’t run after around 6:30 PM. There go all my plans for nighttime mall trips. (And the street on which the mall is located is hardly pedestrian-friendly, I should add… besides, it’s an insanely long distance from campus.)

I hate this world sometimes.

Speaking of bad transit maps and UGA, this part of Athens Transit’s system map really needs to be redesigned. There are so many routes overlapping that I literally can’t tell what goes where in some parts of the map. And some of the street names and landmarks are obscured by the routes, too, which only makes things worse. Oh, and forget about trying to find one of the smaller streets on campus under all those routes– as far as I’m concerned, they don’t exist on this map! >_<

I hate my sense of direction.

I seriously wonder how I’m ever going to find my way around the University of Georgia campus, much less around its surroundings… and the pedestrian-unfriendly bus maps I’ve mentioned in the past don’t help things a bit.

Edited 2005/06/17 to add: Maybe I’m just weird, but I find this older version of UGA’s map to be easier to read than the newer versions. I think it’s the 3/4 overhead view… makes it a lot easier to identify landmarks! (Seriously, I wouldn’t get nearly as lost if maps looked a bit more like console RPGs. :-p)

To whoever wrote that Mytob virus that’s currently spamming itself out:

Your attempt at social engineering is a commendable one, but it fails on so many counts. Let me dissect it so you can see how misguided it is.

(more…)

Yahoo! Music has one of the best collections of streaming music videos on the Internet, but unfortunately, the people behind the site still steadfastly refuse to support Mac OS X, instead recommending that viewers use Netscape 4.7 for Classic to view the videos. (Buhhh?!)

So, well, I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands. Based upon the VBScript offered in this OSNews guide, I’ve hacked together a rather rudimentary AppleScript to take a music video URL copied to the clipboard and open the direct link to that video stream. So, without further ado, here’s the script; share and enjoy.

I’ll gladly take down this script as soon as Yahoo decides to support some OS X native browser… and until then, this isn’t exactly stealing any ad revenues from Yahoo, since video ads don’t show up in Netscape 4.7 either.

Edited 2005/06/24 to add: Obviously Yahoo’s figured this one out; they’re now hiding the direct links inside the onClick attribute of the links, while pointing the actual href to a different page. Viewing source will solve that problem pretty easily. 🙂

Edited 2005/09/28 to add: It seems like they stopped hiding the links in Javascript now, at least from what I’ve seen.

Edited 2006/03/23 to add: Yahoo fiddled with their links a while back so that this particular script doesn’t appear to work anymore. I recommend using Firefox together with PKLaunch, which does the job admirably.

Oooooh. Google is working on creating a 3D VR map of San Francisco, according to BoingBoing. I’d like to see someone do this for Atlanta. And the University of Georgia/Athens, for that matter. 🙂

OK, here’s a prime example of why I find some bus maps incredibly hard to decipher.

Here’s a map of the University of Georgia’s weekend bus route (PDF link). Simple enough. Now look toward the bottom at Rogers Road and Milledge Avenue. One would think that those roads ran in some direction resembling east-west, right?

Nope. Not unless north-northwest counts as ‘some direction resembling’. Here’s an actual map of that area via Google:
Rogers Road, Athens, GA

That is *so* not east-west. In fact, I’d say it’s far closer to north-south!

And people wonder why I look at these sorts of maps and can’t make head or tail of them…

Edited to add: Yay. Apparently there’s a grocery store that’s a two-minute walk from the part of Milledge Avenue that the bus covers, according to Google Maps. I just wish the bus map had been clearer so I could’ve figured this out sooner– I had been looking for a north-south route on the west side of the map, not an east-west route on the south side!

Oooops. The Scripps web team seems to have misspelled champion Anurag Kashyap’s name on the Photo Gallery page.

Naturally, I’ve saved a screenshot of this momentous error for posterity’s sake. 😀

And speaking of misspellings at the Bee, anyone catch that John Minnich was representing the “Roanoake” Times, according to his official placard? Some proofreader needs to be sacked…