Monkeyless

I don’t know why this was as tough to figure out as it was, but here you go.

I was trying to watch an MPEG-4 file in the .mp4 container, which I guess is somehow different than all the MPEG-4 videos in AVI containers that haven’t been an issue (e.g., xvid videos). But Media Player Classic, the only video player I use, kept saying “Cannot render the file.” Googling that error for MPC mp4 files didn’t turn anything up.

I tried a newer version of ffdshow and made sure that the right codecs were enabled in it (basically, it should have worked as long as H.264 was enabled, but it wasn’t.)
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I recently installed a fresh copy of Windows XP onto an old machine, and I’m going through the endless cycles of Windows Update trying to get it secure enough to be used (after the most important first step, installing Firefox). I turned on automatic updates, which installed 18 or 19 patches, but didn’t do any service packs.

So I went to the Windows Update web site to see if I could get SP2 installed there, but first it promtped me to do the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) check to make sure I was running a real copy of Windows. By the way, what a stupid name: genuine advantage. If it means jumping through hoops like this, as opposed to illegal copies that would just skip all of this, where’s the advantage? But I click through, figuring it’s no big deal.

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I thought this was universally decided to be really bad practice a long time ago. If nothing else, at least back in Y2K, when there were lots of instances of web pages showing crazy dates in certain browsers. Doing it this way just seems unnecessarily complicated and fragile, and, sure enough, I only noticed because it wasn’t displaying right for me on my Blackberry.
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I don’t know why Windows has to be so annoying about things like this, but every now and then the “safely remove hardware” icon disappears from my system tray. Since I’m often switching around hard drives that I use with my IDE-to-USB adapter, I use that often. It took me a little while to find out how to get to the remove hardware screen when it’s missing so I could unplug the drive without corrupting everything, so here’s where it is (at least under Windows XP) in case anyone else has this problem:
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Let’s look at some of the more amusing spam that’s been sent to me lately, shall we? No? You don’t like spam? Everybody likes spam! READ!
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Ok, I’ve posted a couple of really bad phishing attempts here recently. Today’s excitement comes in the form of really bad blog comment spam. Now, you have the ones where they don’t even try, and just post a bunch of links. That’s bad, but boring. This is more entertaining (found on Blogger):
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There seems to be a lot of interest today and yesterday in my post about the terrible phishing attempt e-mail I got a few weeks ago. I wonder if another round of identical e-mails just went out, so a lot of people are searching for it today?

While trying to find out, I came across this one described in The Washington Post. It’s not quite as bad as the one I posted about, but it’s definitely not very convincing. This one pretends to be from the Social Security Administration and warns you that:

Someone illegally is using your Social Security number and assuming your identity.

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I’ve been thinking about putting Technorati-parsable tags in here for a while now, and just haven’t gotten around to it yet. So this is an experimental post to see if the tagging plugin I just installed will work the way I expect it to work.
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This one has to be up there as one of the worst phishing attempts I’ve ever seen:

Subject: Attention! Several VISA Credit Card bases have been LOST!

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Bush’s state of the union speech inspired be to whip up this quick and dirty Photoshop of the horrors scientists want to unleash upon decent, God-fearing Americans:
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