The view is scary from inside my brain

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Does anyone know what this icon means? I keep seeing it but it’s not particularly clear. Is it something to do with user profiles in Chrome? I’m confused.

It seems to come up in the taskbar whenever a site opens a pop-under and the searches I’ve done so far would seem to indicate it’s to do with the profiles and the Chrome sign-in, but as I’m not signed in I’m not sure what this icon is trying to tell me. There doesn’t seem to be anything obvious in the Jump list either.

Well, having waited since I bought my Desire S for the OTA update of legend, it has finally arrived, so I’m now rocking Sense 3.0 on my Orange branded Desire S. Very shiny and some nice new (and totally pointless) features to play with.

Had a bit of an occurrence tonight. Windows started spazzing out so I rebooted. Oh dear, Windows is not coming back.

After staring at the loading screen for long enough to know it wasn’t coming back I tried safe mode to see the last loaded file was CLASSPHP.SYS. A bit of Googling later and it seems it may be a SATA problem.

I pulled all drives out but the boot and the system loaded fine, so I started reconnecting each drive one by one and starting the system again.

With all but one drive connected the system loads fine, but as soon as the last drive was connected it started freezing on boot up again.

Just to confirm this I yanked out the SATA cable whilst the system was frozen and it continued on to the desktop almost immediately.

At least I have a working system again even though I may need to re-download the entire contents of my Steam account. Could have been a lot worse.

Getting bored now.

In the old days you’d get an email from a friend of your parents who had forwarded it to you stating that there was a virus going around that would delete your computer if you opened it, that would be sent from someone you knew, exactly like the email they had just sent you in fact. I got more of these friendly warning emails than I ever did actual virus emails (none, if you’re counting), and this was back before smart filters like Google and other providers now use.

At least with these it would be once in a blue moon and, after advising you’re folks that not opening unexpected attachments was generally a good idea, and mindlessly forwarding this kind of thing was just a waste of time, you’d be fairly certain not to receive any more from them for a couple of months at least.

Now we have the hive mind that is Twitter and Facebook. Oh, dear good, someone put them out of my misery.

There’s nothing wrong with these social networks themselves, but to paraphrase the words of Dr. Emmet Brown, something’s gotta be done about their users.

Again, it started out harmless and inane enough, people would forward emails claiming that if you forwarded it too Bill Gates himself would know and either give you $5 or if it reached 500,000 people he would donate a million $ to charity, or something quite implausible if you actually spotted for a second to think about it.

No-one even then thought ‘what could someone do if they get this list of hundreds of your friends and their friends email addresses?’ I swear this is where a majority of spam comes from.

But that’s the problem, now we have Twitter and Facebook, why stop and think?

The internet has hit critical mass, it’s been there for a while now, and it’s now so ingrained in our society TV programs have hash-tags in the opening credits. All that means really is that this network of universities and geeks who went out of their ways to get online had been replaced usurped by a hoard of unthinking sheep.

It used to take days/weeks/months for a completely unfounded rumour to gain traction and get completely disproved mostly before it had gained much ground. Now in a matter hours a rumour can be around the globe twice by people ‘thoughtfully’ passing on something they heard from someone else they don’t really know. It’s ludicrous.

There are still Facebook campaigns to keep Facebook free, Facebook has never, and I’m confident in saying, will never charge for it’s use.

There are campaigns saying to turn off your timeline as hackers can use it to access your account.

These are by the same people that are playing mind numbing games, allowing their programmers unfettered access to their Facebook profile and friends lists without a care in the world and inviting their friends to do the same.

Now Kik messenger is being ‘reported’, and I use the term in the loosest possible way, as a virus created by Japanese hackers, trying to access your personal information. I can think of nothing more ridiculous than a bunch of Japanese hackers writing a well put together bit of software, on multiple platforms over the course of several years, releasing multiple versions and improving both usability and design over several iterations whilst circumventing the phone carriers text message charges, to gain access to your phone book.

Surely it would be easier to create some Facebook app that automatically does all the work for them and stick a picture of a kitten on it so everyone installs it.

Just remember, don’t believe everything you read and before forwarding that friendly warning to everyone you know, stop for a second and engage your brain, maybe even do a little research in to what you’re saying before you say it.

I dare say a lot of people who would have quite happily used Kik have now been turned off the while idea because about half a million unthinking sheep have forwarded lies and misinformation.

Also, while we’re here, the world is not a popularity contest. Anyone who has over 300 ‘friends’ on Facebook is a douche.

Well it’s done now. Just bid and paid for a nearly new HTC Desire S on eBay, so hopefully it should be here some time next week. I think it was actually cheaper than the old Hero at a shade under 200 quid.

Hmm, turns out it’s only been 2 years since I got my HTC Hero. I could have sworn it was longer. The old girl has done me well and having been updated to the latest Cyanogen (2.3.7 as of writing) it’s hanging in there, if getting a little slow, but that’s really to be expected with the RAM and processor she sports.

This all comes around as I’ve been tempting myself to a new Desire S (I say new, I mean off eBay) and trying to justify the £200 spend to myself. I’ve already gone into ‘profit’ on the Hero having spent less on it and a contract to go with it than it would have cost to get it free on contract.

Looking at the deals on-line, the cheapest I can find a Desire S for is 26 quid a month (staying with Orange) for 24 months. As I only pay a tenner a month at the moment, that would be an additional £384 over that period. As long as I can get a phone for less than that and stay on my current contract I’m saving.

Or do I want to go to 3?

They actually seem to have decent coverage and network speeds in Exeter, something which Orange are sadly missing but they are going to be nearer the 30 quid mark with the phone free, so that’s a no-go. Will just have to keep an eye out for cheap eBay deals…

This time from +447999702129

Our records indicate that you may be entitled to £3300 for the accident you had. To apply free reply CLAIM to this message. To opt out text STOP.

This time from +447907801443 (or 07907801443):

URGENT: Banks have agreed to refund all customers for miss selling Payment Protection, if you took a loan prior to 2007 just reply CLAIM today. 2 stop txt STOP

Don’t know why I’m suddenly getting these.

Just got an interesting text from +447845218459 (or 07845218459) showing the following:

FREEMSG: Our records indicate that you may be entitled to £3250 for the accident you had. To apply free reply CLAIM to this message. To opt out text STOP.

I have no intention of replying in either way as I have not had any recent accidents and I’m not a gullible mug. If my years of dealing with spam emails has taught me anything it’s don’t confirm there’s a person at the other end. I’m pretty sure my mobile number is registered with the TPS, so this unsolicited message may likely be illegal.

**Update**
Having read up a bit on this with the TPS and they’re in agreement, ignore it, don’t reply at all and for god’s sake don’t buy anything from them.