$00.002 a gallon gas? Hook me up!

http://www.wsoctv.com/automotive/9181126/detail.html

PLAINFIELD, Ind. -- [SNIP]

The gas station is not exactly sure how many people took advantage of the situation. Since customers paid at the pump, clerks did not have face-to-face contact with the customers.

Mental note: From now on pay at the pump!

Driver Kenneth Krebs said he couldn't believe what he saw that allowed him to fill up his truck for 7 cents.

"I pulled into that gas station, put my card in to get gas and hit the 87 octane button and it came up like two-hundredths of a cent," said driver Kenneth Krebs. "So, I proceeded in filling up my truck."

Oh hell yea I would to.

A woman went into the store and told the clerk what was going on, showing her receipt for a few cents for several gallons of gas. That woman offered to come back into the store later Tuesday to pay the difference.

You fraking whench. Why you think gas prices are so high? Because idiotic people like you are obviously willing to pay that price. Honesty my arse.

The gas station is trying to determine if it can go back and charge the people who got the bargain regular price after the fact.

Yea I don't think so buddy. Your loss. Fire whoever the screwhead was that screwed up the pump.

OSHA safety inspection day

Safety inspections amuse me. The "safety commitee" at the place I currently work at decided to inspect the server room. First of all it's a server room. There is a lot of computers, a lot of cables, a lot of electricity and for security reasons dictated by the "security commitee" there is two doors in and out that are locked at all times.

Anyways so the three things they asked me, just being a regular grunt employee, is where the evacuation map was, where the emergency phone number list was, and if I feel secure working in this environment (supposedly the room has been deemed unsafe).

Okay so lets say there is a fire. I'm supposed to go look at the evacuation map, and find the emergency phone number list. No I'm going out the door, going outside and then I'm going home. I'm not going to bother calling 911 because our fire suppression system does that by itself if it is triggered, even if by accident. If someone needs to look at an evacuation map to figure out how to get out of the building they work in and find the emergency number list (911) then they deserve to die in a fire while I'm sitting at home watching it on the local news channel because I didn't waste my time looking for the map and number list.

That's just Darwinism.

Do I feel secure? Fire? Yea that I can handle. Unless the fire starts on my desk and I'm asleep on top of the stack of paperwork sitting on it fire doesn't bother me. Explosions on the other hand are a different issue.

However nothing in here is explosive except maybe the fire suppression system if for some reason the pressurized CO2 gets overpressured and blows up the pipes. Chances of that happening rank up there with the chances of a giant meteor crashing through the roof, hitting my desk, and starting a fire while I am asleep on the stack of paperwork sitting on it.

The safety commitee was very concerned that the tile floor hadn't been mopped for some time and that there was a paper clip on the floor though. Apparently I could trip and fall on that paperclip, landing on the unmopped tile floor, skid across, smack my head into a server, causing some sparks that leap accross to the stack of paper on my desk, and lighting it on fire.

Or something like that.

Security on the Net - MS Antispyware?

Last year about this time I was beta testing Microsofts Antispyware. Let me tell you first of all that it sucks. It was great at detecting things but was crap for actual removal of things. Even if you told MS Antispyware to remove it completely no matter what it said the spyware would come back on the next reboot. I wrote it off as just usual crap from MS and removed Antispyware from my system and went back to my tried and true standbys of Ad-aware, Spybot S&D, and Hijack This.

So today I was doing some research here at work and I stumbled on some interesting information. I wasn't researching spyware I was researching something completely different, but yea that's the nature of the internet.

Anyway I found some blog posts about a software company called Claria. Claria before their name change some years back was called GAIN, and before that Gator. GAIN and Gator are both well known spyware/malware companies.

Here is the Wikipedia entry for Claria: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claria_Corporation

So now that I have established Claria's presence in the spyware world let me describe what happened around the time I stopped using MS-Antispyware.

Antispyware originally had any products from Claria (GAIN and Gator) flagged as high risk and quarantine remove. At some point in time the default settings for those spyware programs were changed BY MICROSOFT to ignore and moderate risk. So what this meant is that is you used scheduled spyware scans MS-Antispyware would completely ignore anything by Claria and allow it to pass. If you used manual scan and removal then the next day MS-Antispyware would not flag the incoming reinstallation of Claria software as hostile, and again allow it to pass by.

This problem was of course easily remedied by ignoring the MS-Antispyware settings and setting them manually to remove/quarantine for the particular spyware. However on the next update (usually weekly during beta) the settings for those particular spywares would go back to the Microsoft settings of ignore moderate threat and the whole process would start over again.

Interestingly enough Claria is not the only company that MS has let skate by on their spyware/malware.

WeatherBug, which ships WITH AOL software (including AIM and ICQ), is considered spyware. While it seems to serve out weather information it also collects surfing habits and feeds that information back to a server for serving up directed advertisements. Yep spyware.

So MS-Antispyware originally had Weatherbug flagged as spyware for removal. Again the same thing happened. They updated the spyware database to show Weatherbug as a moderate threat, ignore. Here is the twist on this one though. AOL THEMSELVES threatened to sue Microsoft on the spyware classification of WeatherBug. Yea AOL, the guys with all the commercials touting their service and supposedly protecting their users agains spyware/malware. Microsoft instead of fighting, caved and deflagged WeatherBug as spyware.

It goes on more. WhenU, WebHancer and Ezula Toptext have also been autoflagged as ignore on MS-Antispyware. WhenU in particular was the program I was having the most fits with trying to remove.

Take a look at this screenshot from one of the reports:

http://www.sunbelt-software.com/ihs/alex/ignore1small.jpg

That is pretty much what my MS-Antispyware report would look like every morning, even AFTER spyware removal with MS-Antispyware.

So the point of all this is just because something is made by a company supposedly looking out for you remember that with enough money and scratch through back channels, or in some cases threat of lawsuit, changes everything.

Current Setup:

Firefox + Adblock + Filterset.G
Thunderbird
Grisoft AVG
Lavasoft Ad-Aware

Virus and Adware Free since August 2005.

Various links and references:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claria_Corporation
http://getoutfoxed.com/about/spyware
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,13793423
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_zdewk/is_200501/ai_n8671127
http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/2005/07/update-on-clariamicrosoft.html
http://www.pchell.com/support/weatherbug.shtml

Safe and secure at campus? Yea I don't think so.

A week ago there was a shooting at the college I go to. Someone died.

It's not really a college per se, but an extended campus. The college itself is in another state some fifty miles away, but they have various single building campuses around the area. I take all my classes at one of those single building campuses.

We have a high population of illegal (and legal) immigrants in this area, but quite honestly I haven't heard of any problems because of this. Sure the less honest of them will suck resources from our welfare system, but your average scumbag white guy does that as well. Scumbaggery has nothing to do with race. In fact the only problems I have heard are about punk white kids causing the migrant workers problems.

There is not really a large gang problem here. Oh sure we have the little punk white kids that think they are all OG, but I'll bet you odds that if you dropped them into the inner city somewhere in gangland they would cry like babies and head straight to the nearst way out. Occasionally we hear about a driveby, but in nearly all cases it is the aforementioned punk white kid doing it at 3am when everyone is asleep, picking a random house and shooting it, just to make himself feel more OG. We laugh at these punks.

The shooting itself had nothing to do with either of the two above. I just thought I would mention them to get them out of the way. Why not, the papers mentioned gangs and migrant workers though neither had anything to do with the shooting.

So it turns out that this shooting was an incident of road rage. Two people were driving down the road, something happened and the drivers pulled into the next parking lot which happened to be the parking lot for the college campus and the Migrant Council. I'm not clear, and neither were any of the news reports, if the driver of the first car was supposed to be in that parking lot for either the school, migrant council, or any of the small businesses that share the same parking lot. Either way he pulled in and the other driver followed.

The two men got out of their respective cars, one pulled a gun, the other pulled a cue stick. You do the math on that one.

The man with the gun walked into the campus and surrendered to the first person he saw. Police arrived shortly after, taped off the area, interviewed witnesses, cleaned up the mess, and then went back to their donut shops. Open and shut case in the matter of a few hours, the guy with the gun was chasing the other guy, pulled and shot first. The cue stick guy was the person being chased and self defense (or lack thereof).

Well of course the school now thinks that they have to do something about campus security, afterall someone was shot in the school's parking lot. What does the school do? Hires an out of shape, should be retired, unarmed, rent-a-cop from one of those local security firms.

This guy is way too serious about his job too. Should see him eyeballing the students with suspicion as they leave class. I'm just waiting for this smack tard to ask me what I'm doing and where I'm going. I thought he was there to protect the students, not watch them as suspects to imaginary crimes. Reminds me of something a Loss Prevention Officer told me at a retail store I used to work at, "Everyone is guilty, I just haven't caught them yet." Nice.

Okay first of all did I mention he was unarmed?

Let's say hypothically that the college had that rent-a-cop on campus when the shooting occured. How would it have been different? It would not have been. The guy still would have gotten shot. The only difference is that maybe the shooter would have surrendered to the rent-a-donut-eater instead of whatever poor student was surrendered to.

He couldn't have stopped the shooting. He could have yelled and hollered of course, or maybe thrown his nightstick at the guy....no sorry he is unarmed, not even a nightstick either. He could have run up and tackled the shooter, but only if the shooter was less then 20 feet away. Did I mention the rent-a-cop is out of shape and nearly (if not already) retired.

The rent-a-cop could do what everyone else is told to do, call 911 and wait for the police. Well you know how that one ends. The cue stick guy is dead, the gun guy surrenders to a student or the rent-a-cop, and the police arrive one minute earlier then they did.

So does this new "campus security" make the campus safer or more secure? No not at all. Sure I probably don't have to worry about my crappy chevy metro's stock stereo being ripped out of my dashboard while I'm in class anymore. Other then that I feel no safer nor more secure then I was before, which is honestly probably more safe and secure then other people are or feel.

Why? Because I carry a gun in my car for defense, and not a cue stick.

Come to think of it. I would probably be better off without the rent-a-cop guy. I need a new stereo in my car and there is no way my old one is gonna get ripped off with him standing there.