Computer Forteana?

[Maviself]

Now, that sounds very plausible and I am disappointed.
I thought that my i-pod and i (ha!) had something wonderful going on.

 

[nyarlathotepsub2]

http://www.cnet.com.au/mp3players/music ... 094,00.htm

 

[fnordish]

ive noticed something similar with my ipod. i have a large and wildly diverse selection of music on there, and more often than not ill just set it to shuffle when i use it. and ive definitely noticed that it seems quite able to pinpoint my mood and play to it. if im angry, it plays predominantly heavy metal, if im happy it plays mostly lighter stuff, like regina spektor and rasputina. if im coming home from seeing my lady friend, or even just thinking about her a lot, it plays all the cheesy love songs i dont admit to liking.
and it cant be that im just tuning out the songs that dont fit my mood, as i do pay a lot more attention to my music than i really should while driving (yes... put me in the driver's seat - alone! - and i suddenly fancy myself a singer...). and it didnt start out doing this. when i first got it the random setting actually seemed pretty random. but over these years that ive had it (some maybe 4 or 5 now, its a first gen ipod), its seemed to get better and better at knowing what i want to hear.
sometimes it can really help me through a bad day, other times it can be my worst enemy, but its never, never just neutral. i, perhaps without adequate evidence, do believe that electronics and machines, if used often and invested with the kind of love and dependence that i put into it (the way a lot of people do with their cars) can form some kind of bond with their frequent users, so thats how i explain it to myself. if theres another, less occult, answer, i dont know what it could be.

also, in a related note, ive noticed that if i think hard about a particular song i want to hear, my ipod will play that song roughly a third to half the time. which is perhaps not that stunning, except for the fact that its done it more than once while not set to shuffle and playing a playlist that doesnt include that song.

so i figure my ipod is either the best personal, portable dj i could have, or else its one seriously glitchy piece of aging electronics. either way, i will burst into shameless tears when it finally does die.

 

[uair01]

These Fortean enough?

Food for conspiracy theory:

FBI Fears Chinese Hackers and/or Government Agents Have Back Door Into US Government & Military Computer Networks

Some months ago, my contacts in the defense industry had alerted me to a startling development that has escalated to the point of near-panick in nearly all corners of Government security and IT infrastructure. The very-real concern, being investigated by the FBI, is that either the Chinese government or Chinese hackers (or both) have had the benefit of undetectable back-doors into highly secure government and military computer networks for months, perhaps years. The cause: a high-number of counterfeit Cisco routers and switches installed in nearly all government networks that experienced upgrades and/or new units within the past 18 months.

News of the counterfeit Cisco equipment has been in the mainstream for some time:
Co llaborative Current Event: Counterfeit Cisco Network Hardware Imported From China Seized
Chinese Counterfeit Cisco Network Routers Targeted In North America
Counterfeit Cisco Gear Showing Up In US
But the US government has been attempting to avoid these issues by only using higher-end Cisco partners/suppliers for the gear. However, the highly-competitive lowest-bid environment of government procurement has inspired several vendors to look for cheap alternatives for hardware... resulting in a catastrophic meltdown of security.

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread350381/pg1

Nice revenge - with pictures of the criminals:

Stolen Laptop Helps Turn Tables on Suspects
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By LISA W. FODERARO
Published: May 10, 2008
WHITE PLAINS — The thieves were voracious, filching flat-screen televisions and computer games, purloining iPods and DVDs, even making off with a box of liquor and a set of car rims in a burglary two weeks ago at an apartment three young people shared here. Luckily, they also took two laptop computers.

One of the laptops was a Macintosh belonging to Kait Duplaga, who works at the Apple store in the Westchester mall and thus knows how to use all its bells and whistles. While the police were coming up dry, Ms. Duplaga exploited the latest software applications installed on her laptop to track down the culprits and even get their photographs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/nyregion/10laptop.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

 

[AMPHIARAUS]

There's stories of the dead coming through on computers, but some are fairly ancient like Kenneth Websters "The Vertical Plane" where people started getting messages from some Tudor character who IIRC wasn't sure that he was dead.

A tale I love.

Anything 'random' in a numerically controlled machine is hard to achieve. If the mind has any influence over a PC then 'randomness' will be the type of thing effected.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

FATE magazine ran a feature article around 1995 or 1996 (three or four years before I came online) claiming that there'd been a veritable explosion of Paranormal events since the development of the Internet.

 

[LaurenChurchill]

I opened the Search panel in a new tab, and when I moved the cursor down over the page, it turned into a red circle with a diagonal bar (like a UK 'No Waiting' traffic sign, but without the blue background). I've never seen that before! :shock: And I couldn't type anything, so I swapped tabs back and forth, whereupon the cursor returned to normal...

Spooky, eh?

I was about to say that that happens to me every single time I use this computer and then I realised it hasn't happened today.

Also spooky :shock:

 

[nyarlathotepsub2]

You use Macs, then?

 

[rynner2]

You use Macs, then?

Not me - the dreaded M$ stuff on a PC.

But I had a minor weirdness just the other day. Now, computers are machines, and (barring breakdowns) should always behave in the same way. I click something, the computer follows the instruction, as night follows day.... or not.

My usual routine after switch-on is to check my email. So the first prog to appear on the Task bar (bottom of the screen) is Outlook Express. Some of the mail will be FTMB notifs, so I'll check those out: thus the next prog to open on the task bar is FTMB. When I finish there, I open a new internet window to browse the news sites, and that's the third prog on the task bar.

But yesterday, for no reason I could think of (because I followed the usual routine), the progs aligned themselves (from L to R on the Task bar) as FTMB, News, Mailbox. This was somewhat confusing when I tried posting news stories here, as I kept moving the cursor to the wrong position when I wanted to switch progs!

Another little mystery happens more often. To get my mail, I'm obviously connected to the internet. But when I try to get FTMB, I am sometimes (not always) asked to connect again. And the same can happen when I try for the internet news site! So sometimes I have to click Connect two or three times, while other days just the one will do. I can't see any rhyme or reason in it! :shock:

 

[OldTimeRadio]

And maybe it just depends upon who you ask.

Just recently on a private Fortean list the guy who sings Believe-Nothing Skeptic in the choir claimed that since the invention of the camera phone and other easily-portable recording devices videos of ghostly and paranormal happenings had entirely dried up, and thus here was additional evidence that the Paranormal simply doesn't exist.

So help me, just the previous evening I found myself bemoaning the fact that there are currently so many such videos being posted to the Web that it's becoming almost impossible to keep track of more than a fraction of them.

 

[LaurenChurchill]

You use Macs, then?

Ew! No! :lol:

MS for me too :x

 

[lupinwick]

Sadly I have to work with computers on a daily basis and it would appear that Fortean phenomena related to computers are quite rare. There are a number of myths/legends from the early days (dead mice/sandwiches inside cases, computers bricked up because somebody thought it was an air conditioning unit etc. etc.).

The only really odd incidents I can think of are based on the "computers work fine for me" phenomena. I regularly get asked to look into a problem (often its been plaguing an engineer for a couple of days) which go away when I turn up. Happens at home too, really annoys my wife.

 

[PeniG]

Lupinwick's a psi-hitter! I think most techs are (it would explain a lot). You know those random-number-generator tests that depend on radioactive decay, where they get people to focus on a particular result, and some people consistently score high and some people consistently score low? Engineers hate this result, but the implication is that we can mentally influence the world at a submicroscopic level - but some people get the opposite result from what they consciously want. Psi-missers in the tests are also people who don't like machines because they don't work well for them; psi-hitters are often techies! (I ought to source this - I think I may even own a book that describes the experiment - but I could spend all day looking for it and then it would turn out that I've only read it from the library, so screw it.) So these two telekinetic extremes are influencing the machines, but in such a subtle way - a single electronic impulse, the vibration of a single circuit, something like that - as to elude detection.

I do not pretend to be able to evaluate this or any other experiment involving submicroscopic particles and statistics, but this particular one stuck in my mind because it has such an elegant explanatory force for all those times the user follows all the proper procedures and can't get the machine to work, but the tech (electrical, computer, mechanical) comes along and it works right off. You start off psi-missing and creating minor glitches; then you get tense about it, especially when the psi-hitter comes in and sneers at you for thinking user error was a hardware problem; then your agitated psychic energy causes more and more glitches, until you're the office jinx.

Techies tend to assume that the users are stupid (and there's no denying, some of us are), which is why I now always wait until a malfunction happens consistently enough that I can let the tech go through the motions while I turn my back and describe what's happening. I cannot count the number of times I've had to describe a problem that the tech declared to be "impossible," yet it was very real, and they won't work on the problem until they see it for themselves. This procedure also reveals those occasions when I really am doing something wrong. I think it happened once, when I'd been given bad information or misunderstood an instruction. Every other time, I had the "impossible" malfunction as described and nobody ever apologized for being rude to me about it, either.

Yes, I am a psi-misser. I find the best thing to do is, when I've gotten worked up and frustrated, to walk away and do something else. Often the problem "fixes itself" while I'm gone. I've had problems of this sort every job I've ever been in, but I've had practically no computer problems since I quit the stupid day job. Coincidence? Who the heck knows?

Oh, and Rynner - I get the opposite problem with net access. I can go anywhere on the net, but I can't get my e-mail. Or sometimes a legitimate address suddenly gets rejected as non-existent if I send a message straight to it, but will be sent if I forward the message. I think that's a yahoo glitch, though. It never happens except with yahoo groups.

 

[danny_cogdon]

This is computer related

About two weeks ago the dinky little remote that came with my new laptop vanished from its slot in the side of the laptop. I turned the place upside down trying to find it for about a week before giving up and assuming I must have accidentally picked it up with a magazine or newspaper and chucked it in the bin. Every time I picked up my laptop I was acutely aware of the gaping void in the side of the laptop where it used to be and cursed my stupidity for losing it.

Then, last week, I remembered stories in Fortean Times from people who had 'lost' items and had miraculously found them after a short while in places they had checked multiple times previously. Their method was to politely ask out loud for the item to be returned. So I did just that.

Last night I picked up my laptop and to my utter shock found the remote back in its slot! I'm not making this up - my hair literally stood on end!

I should point out that no-one bar me has been in this flat since I 'lost' the remote.

 

[Vardoger]

Re: This is computer related

About two weeks ago the dinky little remote that came with my new laptop vanished from its slot in the side of the laptop. I turned the place upside down trying to find it for about a week before giving up and assuming I must have accidentally picked it up with a magazine or newspaper and chucked it in the bin. Every time I picked up my laptop I was acutely aware of the gaping void in the side of the laptop where it used to be and cursed my stupidity for losing it.

Then, last week, I remembered stories in Fortean Times from people who had 'lost' items and had miraculously found them after a short while in places they had checked multiple times previously. Their method was to politely ask out loud for the item to be returned. So I did just that.

Last night I picked up my laptop and to my utter shock found the remote back in its slot! I'm not making this up - my hair literally stood on end!

I should point out that no-one bar me has been in this flat since I 'lost' the remote.

A stickman from another dimension found out your remote didn't work on his computer and decided to give it back to you.

 

[gattino]

Here's a link that provides a summary of the events in the vertical plane by the man himself.

http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/fo ... t9878.html

 

[lupinwick]

It may be a problem of complexity. After all the steps needed to doctor a file on disk are (in detail) long and convoluted and best left to the computer. Whereas a tape recorder setup for EVP is far simpler and its usage could in theory be worked out by observation (assuming of course there are spirits about observing the world who wish to communicate).

Perhaps when more techy types shuffle off their mortal coils?

 

[Pietro_Mercurios]

Several threads merged.

P_M

 

[special_farces]

I read this thread the other day and there I was, thinking nothing odd has happened in years to any computer I've used...

Today I had to edit a trade catalog. The client had taken my proof pdf, printed it out, amended it with biro notes, then scanned it back in and emailed it to me as a pdf. I had that pdf open in Preview as well as my InDesign* document. A few pages in, I noticed a couple of items had been marked in blue highlighter. There was no other note, so thinking there was a major typo I went and got the clients previous printed catalog I was working from, went back to the computer... and the highlighted colour had gone.

Thinking I'd somehow moved to another page I went backwards and forwards through the pdf. Nothing. Although it was 'impossible' for this to be something I'd deleted, I checked the edit menu to see if undo was available. Nope. I even went back to the email and got another copy, and that had no highlighted text.

I suppose it was a visual hallucination, but a pretty weird one.

* InDesign is a 'DTP' application.

 

[SHAYBARSABE]

I suppose it was a visual hallucination, but a pretty weird one.

* InDesign is a 'DTP' application.

I use InDesign extensively, and I can tell you that oddities happen all the time.

 

[Mythopoeika]

I suppose it was a visual hallucination, but a pretty weird one.

* InDesign is a 'DTP' application.

I use InDesign extensively, and I can tell you that oddities happen all the time.

Yes, some software is simply riddled with bugs.

 

[special_farces]

I've had no problems with recent versions of InDesign but Photoshop can get a bit cranky. For instance, new documents are always created 'squared' but one evening Photoshop put a new spin on things..

* edited the url

 

[SHAYBARSABE]

I've had no problems with recent versions of InDesign but Photoshop can get a bit cranky. For instance, new documents are always created 'squared' but one evening Photoshop put a new spin on things..

* edited the url

Your computer is pubcrawling?