September 09, 2004

• No wonder these guys "go postal"
• I had no idea these mail carriers had supervisors following them around town, watching them do (or not do) their jobs. Great find, Melinika.
• i had no idea that postal employees could be given a seven day suspension for calling in sick once a month. i mean, once a month ain't bad, right? it's not like once a week. two different citations, one for 3 sick days over 3 months and one for 6 sick days over 6 months. but these were "unscheduled days off" and were therefore punishable. WTF? are employees supposed to tell the postmaster "hey joe, next thursday i'm planning on getting the flu, so can i have the day off? no? how about a week from saturday? yeah, i can reschedule for then. thanks." i really like the anal-retentiveness of issuing a warning for backing out of an assigned postal vehicle parking spot rather than backing into it. wonder if it's just this office or if this is symptomatic of the whole us postal system...
• In 1995 or 1996, I happened upon a USPS bulletin board system. I never found any advertisements for it, just happened upon the number during a war dialing session. It seems like there was no password on the BBS at all, or else it was something extremely easy to guess, because I'm pretty sure there was no hacking of any sort involved in gaining access. There wasn't anything as personal as those Kazaa-found files but there was a large database of postal related scams and what the USPS was doing to prevent them. A lot of them were ideas I'd never thought of before and probably would have worked easily in the low-tech area I lived in at the time. As easy as it was to access, I have to presume that far more malicious people than myself were probably reading all of the files as well.
• You could not pay me enough to work for the Post Office. But, then again, I really couldn't work for any federal agency or corporation. I have a bad habit of bucking the system. /Off Topic; I am super-naive about computers. I wondered if there is such a thing as backing up your C drive onto an online site? Does that make sense? Or is it completely and totally unsafe to do and/or do I have to pay for the service?
• Another great bit of advice--don't store your jewelry and other valuables in a cardboard box on your lawn out by the curb overnight.
• Does anyone but me get the sneaking suspicion that Newman is somewhere at the bottom of this?
• Anyone have a mirror of those letters? It wants me to create an account to view that post.
• Google cache here.
• Thanks melinika!
• This is funny -- I'm at a local coffeeshop using their wifi, and it won't let me access this site because it has been "blocked as PORNOGRAPHY." Fun!
• Darshon: People do indeed offer such services. Some of them may even encrypt your data in transit so the whole world can't read it. But you know what? Unless you really, really want to make everything on your hard drive shared with the rest of the world, I wouldn't use it. I used to work as a sysadmin, and while most folks are stand-up types that wouldn't peek at other peoples' stuff, there have been a few I've run into that have no compunction about digging around the data in their care looking for the interesting stuff.
• Is it just one of those weird quirks of fate that the code of conduct is found in Section 666 of the handbook?
• *cue eerie music*
• Thanks for the info, rodgerd. So, what are my options? I can't backup with a disk, I don't have the time or enough floppy's nor would I even consider that route. Is it safe to just save to a file? Again, I am super 'atarded when it comes to computers, so don't laugh at my stoopid questions, and if you do, don't tell me about it.:)
• Darshon: back up onto CD or DVD? (Floppies, or magnetic media in general, are just not a great idea for a long-term backup. Even CDs deteriorate with time.) If you can save your data to a file and encrypt it using something like the GNU Privacy Guard, then that should be safe to just dump in your gmail account or whatever. Saving more than one file is not much harder if you can just zip it up. If you want to dump an entire disk image, it gets a bit tricky. If you run Linux, it would be as simple as creating an encrypted loopback mount which you can treat as a normal filesystem. You can probably do this in most UNIX-like OSs. Dunno how it is in Windows.
• If you use WIndows, WinPT seems promising.
• Uuhhhhhh, whahuh? I want to back up my entire C drive. Because I refuse to ask any of the males in my life, they are pig-headed and aren't quite as computer-savvy as they'd like to think, I want to do this without my husband even being aware that I've done anything. Here's my problem; Went on vacation, came home to a crashed computer. Was using crappy old Windows ME. Got Windows XP Professional put on, even though it's a bit too big for computers' actual capabilities. Had been having some problems with our sound before the crash, assumed it was card. Didn't get around to doing anything about it. Now, with WXP, I have no sound at all. I think it's because friend who put XP in forgot that we would need a compatible audio thingamabob (card, drive, I don't know) to go with new system. So, my thinking was, I would mess around with stuff and see if I can download a drive, maybe fix the audio. But....I need to back up first so that when, yes..I mean when, I fuck it all up, I can just restore. Someone, please tell me what to do.
• Sounds like you want something like Ghost then, though it's not free.
• Yea, someone else brought that up, and I fortunately have access to it without having to buy it. Thanks.