Deliver Us From Swedish Furniture » Tech

We are perfect for each other – really, who says?

tulip — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 04:54:30 +0000

This article made me chuckle to myself. As someone who has the ability to attract only those women that my friends affectionately call ‘nutters’ the idea of having a ‘grown-up’ sorting things out for me is actually getting to be appealing. I remember a few years ago a friend of mine from university asked his parents to arrange a marriage for him. At the time I was totally amazed as he had spent his entire time running around after blondes and now here he was asking his parents to find him someone from back in Mauritius. When I asked him he confessed “I’m just fed up with all this relationship crap. I just want one that is…you know?” “Ah yeah, yeah, I know” I said in reply, but I must admit that back then I didn’t have a clue what he was on about. However, after another false start of a relationship and another tick added onto my cynicism chart, I am now really getting to understand what he meant.

In the article they mention that the western approach to letting kids get on with sorting out their own relationships as opposed to other cultures where the parents are involved in ‘approving’ the relationship. I must admit, this is still not something I would be too happy with, I mean I can’t even agree with my parents about my choice of car and I know full well they have been less than happy with the girlfriends of mine they have met….although it must be said they probably have a point….about the girlfriends, not the cars!! Still somehow the idea of having a completely data driven approach does appeal to me. The reason? Well firstly, and spoken like a true geek, there have been some phenominal successes in data driven decision systems recently in everything from scouting baseball players to much of the field of genetics. The second is that if you can find one of these systems that you think might work, then the women that go in for it might have a similar outlook on life.

Anyway, in my quest for knowledge on meeting Miss Right (or at least not Miss Borderline-psychotic) I spoke to one of my friends who has used eHarmony. The results of this highly statistically significant survey of one, showed that they did do pretty well in getting her together with people she could talk to, although the X factor was generally missing. She did confide that there was one, a German of all things, she liked until the good-night kiss, which felt more like he was trying to suck her face off….

I think this is what they call ‘Linkbait’

tulip — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 03:55:49 +0000

…and it obviously works, you can tell as I am about to link to it right about here….very funny though!

Can’t get a virus through a Banner Advert? Think again…

tulip — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 01:13:34 +0000

According to this article, banner ads distributed from heavy-weight online advertising company DoubleClick have been inadvertantly spreading malware. The code was wrapped up cunningly into the adverts themselves, actually buried in the Flash. Once loaded it diverts the user away from the site they were looking at to tell them it’s doing a virus check and you need to install software. If you hit the ‘cancel’ button, it simply restarts the process and asks you to install it again. The only way I found to get around it was to shut down your browser….not good! There is some more info in this YouTube video.

This has apparently been tracked back a company called AdTran, based in Russia, so keep an eye out and if you aren’t expecting to download anything then don’t. Also keep this in mind even if you are on well known sites. There was a recent case of Alicia Keys MySpace being hacked so that when the user clicked to watch a video (or almost anything else) they were told they needed to install a video codec to watch it. If they clicked ‘OK’ on this, then they got really clobbered. It also installed less nasty stuff in the background which could be picked up by a virus scan, but only if you remember to do this regularly and keep your operating system up to date.

So, the two things to take away from this

Regular updates to your system and your virus software
If in doubt do not let software install – especially if you hit cancel and it tries again!!