Happy Stupid Day from all of us RinkWorks fans… Be sure to enjoy the new Computer Stupidities and Things People Said.

More strangely ironic news via Fark:

A small Christian college in Kentucky wants to change its phone number. Why? Quite simple, really: the current one starts in 666.

Oh my.

One of Mercer’s students just sent out one of those (in)famous e-mail hoaxes involving the merger of two prominent technology companies. You know the one, right? Forward this to x number of people and a “tracking algorithm” (obviously very secret, since it doesn’t exist!) will be used to award you some amount of money…

Apparently the student in question didn’t realize that sending out a message to approximately one tenth of the entire Mercer population (only the surnames A through C would fit into the recipient list), using Mercer’s address book server, was not, in fact, a good idea. The list of recipients was over 70kb in size— larger, in fact, than the actual text of the message!

Yes, the list of recipients included, among others, several members of the technical support staff, several computer science and engineering professors, and even the editor of the school newspaper. Ouch.

And if that weren’t enough, all Mercer user names are in the format lastname_f. Which means that it’s very obvious who the sender was from the username alone, and as a result, very easy for students and faculty to find the sender’s room number and phone number in the campus phone directory.

What was this person thinking, exactly? The only thing she’s won is the enmity of numerous computer-savvy students and faculty…

Time for a useless personality test, albeit one by which I was quite amused…

Which Kind of Driver Are You?
by Don’s Windshield Replacement

Originally, incidentally, I was a “Smart Driver”— but then I realized, hey, I wait for the intersection to be almost completely clear before I turn. Still, though, where was the option for “make three right turns instead”? Now that’s more like me…

Heh. From the popular satirical web site BBspot: Bush Administration’s Bright Shiny Object Fascinates Americans.

Ooh, shiny objects! ::stares::

From this week’s News of the Weird:

The Merced (Calif.) Sun-Star reported on Dec. 10 that an unnamed man was taken to a hospital in Modesto, Calif., after his head was split open by a brick. Police, called to the scene, were expecting to find foul play, but witnesses said the man was merely trying to see how high up he could throw a brick, and since it was dark (2:30 a.m.), the man lost track of the brick’s flight and could not get out of the way when it came down on his head. Police said alcohol appeared to be involved.

The lesson, of course, should be obvious to all RinkWorks fans.

Mercer’s English department sent out a flyer to all students yesterday, via campus mail, regarding a guest who will be visiting the campus and teaching one of its courses for a month.

Only one problem: “English” was misspelled on the flyer as “Engish”.

Oops.

You’d think that of all the departments, this would be the one to most carefully proofread its flyers…

Strong Bad– or should we say StinkoMan?– does anime. Needless to say, hilarity ensues.

I think I’ve decided how I’m going to split things up between my weblog and my LiveJournal:

I’ll post links and random rants on life in general here at Letters to the World, while I’ll use my LiveJournal for specifics about my life, my classes, my friends and the like.

Eh, it seems to be how a number of others do things, anyway…it can’t work too terribly.

Well, it’s official. In addition to this blog, I now have a LiveJournal account as well. Letters to the World will still remain my primary weblog, however.

The main reason for the LiveJournal account, however, is so that I’m able to post to such communities as I mentioned in this post. It’s great to see that there are, indeed, community blogs with a collective respect for proper grammar and spelling…