“Wardriving” or using someone else’s wireless internet without their knowing/permission is more common than many would think and more controversial than it ought to be.
Finally, someone with an intelligent and informed take on the subject says what all of us with a tech background have believed all along.
Last month I read that Yahoo! was going to give users unlimited email storage. This pleased me as I am currently using about a third of my Gmail account (I delete next-to-nothing) and my usage is growing faster than Gmail’s automatic increase.
Since reading that, when I log into my Yahoo account, I’ve seen the bar-graph at 6%. Today, I looked and it was 30%. That caught my attention and made be stop what I was doing to ponder how I managed to receive that much email overnight. But as I gazed upon the 30% bar-graph, I saw a wire coming from it to a Wile E. Coyote kind of blasting plunger. Within a few moments a fine looking animated man came upon the scene and pressed the plunger, eliminating the bar-graph. Mousing-over it revealed the words, “You now have unlimited storage.”
Woo-hoo!!! Thanks, Yahoo!
Today, I was ripping some of my CDs to mp3 when iTunes froze. More than iTunes, the whole WinXP Home Edition of Windows was stuck. I rebooted, but after it went through the bios startup screens, windows would not start. It didn’t even flash the lights on the keyboard.
I tried to restart in safe mode and it got to a file called mup.sys and stopped for good.
I set the PC bios to default. I took away all the electricity. I yelled a bit. Nothing worked.
Then I called Ken at shieldsit.com and he said, “Unplug that DVD drive.” I did and it worked fine. I was delighted.
I tried doing a system restore and reinstalling the DVD drive, but that didn’t help. I put a different DVD drive in (a twin to the one I removed) and the new one worked. I noted the new one was set to “Cable Select” so just for fun, I changed the jumper on my old DVD drive from “Master” (where it has been working fine for a couple years) to “Cable Select” and connected it up. It worked great.
Thanks Ken!
UPDATE (January 2007):
This was a problem with my power supply. I replaced it and all is well.
UPDATE (January 2007 – later):
Nope. Still does it. With BOTH DVD-RW drives. Puzzling.
UPDATE: (January 2007) – later):
Got it — the drive cable had been installed backwards. There are three connectors on most 80 connector ide cables: Connector A separated by about 10 inches of cable from Connector B separated by about 5 inches of cable from Connector C. Because of the physical distance between drives, some goofball had plugged connector C into the motherboard, and then B and A into the drives. A was plugged into the DVD drive. I relocated the drive and installed the cable correctly. All is well. Oh — the goofball? That would be me. Maybe I should file this post under HUMOR.