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Oops! The Silly Mistakes Thread

I can well believe it - I'm always doing mental arithmetic to try and keep up with numbers and it doesn't always succeed.

But I was making a jokette in that post - everyone forgets that PIN stands for "Personal Identification Number" so to say PIN Number means you're saying "number" twice. Hilarious, I know, right?

Hold on, did you think I'd put 'PIN number'? Because I didn't and don't, because it'd mean saying 'number number', as you say.
 
A mixed tale of good and bad fortune. Could have been so embarrassing.

I set of into town with the intention of purchasing some sheets of board for the kitchen ceiling renovation. But as the supplier is next door to Aldi I decided to nip in there first and collect a couple more items on my shopping list.

Picked out the items and went to check out.

Then found out that my wallet, with all cards and notes, was at home.

Fortunately I had my cash purse that had just enough for the items.

To cap it all, the security alarm went off as I walked out of the door; happens a lot at Aldi.

Had I gone to the builders merchants first I would have felt rather silly when I couldn't pay for the boards; £75.

The cause of the problem ? I had changed trousers as the pair with the wallet were covered in dust and the remains of dessicated rat from the ceiling rip down. Forgot to transship the pocket contents.

INT21
 
It seems zoo visitors in Blackpool mistook a stuffed monkey as an escaped animal ...
Escaped monkey at British zoo was a stuffed toy

The Blackpool Zoo in England said reports of an escaped animal inside the facility were the result of a planned drill involving a stuffed toy monkey.

The zoo said in a Facebook post Tuesday that there was no actual monkey on the loose the previous day.

"If you were in the zoo yesterday, you might have heard reports that we had an escaped animal. We can now confirm that the rumors are true and we did deal with a situation regarding an escaped monkey," the post said.

"Luckily in this case, the monkey was of the soft toy variety and the situation had been orchestrated by our health and safety manager. In the same way schools and businesses run regular fire drills, we run regular animal escape drills to test our response in the unlikely event one of our animals does escape its enclosure," officials wrote.

"We're delighted to report that the escapee was returned to its 'enclosure' swiftly and safely. We can also confirm that no staff, visitors or animals were harmed in the process (although the soft toy is a little grubby now)," the post reads.

SOURCE: https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2019/1...ish-zoo-was-a-stuffed-toy/2791574176350/?sl=7
 
So, I decided to get in some practice with my Suse Linux machine.

Fired it up, opened a terminal and started playing around with the instructions.

Decided to go for a coffee, and when I returned I was greeted with a blank screen (actually, it showed the time date) So pressed the appropriate key to get it going again and it required me to unlock it.

But I don't have the password. I remember writing it down on a piece of paper with the intent of putting it in the passwords book. But never did it.

And as I am the only user (hence the root) I can't do anything without the password.

Damnation, in all its varieties.

Fortunately this machine only has the operating system distribution (Suse 13.1) on it so far. So I will have to re-install from CD and make sure I write down the root user password this time.

Maybe time to take up knitting.
 
I hate it when that happens ...

Many years ago a similar screw-up caused me to implement a strict protocol where I record the new password in its final secure reference location (actually two locations) before I enter it into a system or service as my new login password.
 
I hoping I can complete the log-in process from the library computer tomorrow. If so I shouldn't need to re-instal the distro.

I
 
Having said that, Yes, I'll still have to do it to get back my root privilege. Or even to get back onto the machine at all.
 
I had a similar problem with a Windows 7 machine at work - we changed the password, but the keyboard was faulty and one of the characters didn't input correctly. Twice.

So on the next 'lock', we were completely unable to login - no password recovery in Windows 7.

Complete Windows reinstall.
 
I had a similar problem with a Windows 7 machine at work - we changed the password, but the keyboard was faulty and one of the characters didn't input correctly. Twice. So on the next 'lock', we were completely unable to login - no password recovery in Windows 7.Complete Windows reinstall.
I hit like in sympathy, not because I like this. That, my friend, is a cast iron bastard of a thing to happen.
 
The article on Egyptian Gothic in FT 386 reminded me of an embarrassing moment in my life. I used to work at the same University campus as Bob Brier, the Egyptologist who hosted a number of TV shows about Egypt, mummies, and pyramids, beginning with Mr. Mummy, in which he mummified a human body in the manner of ancient Egypt. He was at one time chair of the philosophy department, and I was involved in academic advising, so we occasionally spoke to each other about students.

In the mid-1990s Brier appeared on a segment of the show Unsolved Mysteries dealing with the death of Tutankhamun. He presented his theory - based on then-current evidence, but now disproved - that Tut was murdered by his advisor and successor, Ay. As was typical for the show, Brier was given some heavy Joan Crawford style lighting, and the darkened background showed what looked like the study of an Egyptian explorer in an old Universal monster movie: dusty-looking shelves lined with books and canopic jars, with statues and other Egyptian objects around the room. It all seemed very over-the-top.

A day or two later I was speaking to Brier on the phone, and mentioned the show. "That was some set they had you on!" I said.

"What do you mean?" was the reply.

I said "That background with all the books and artifacts!"

There was a moment's pause before he responded. "That's my house."
 
Booby traps: Man in Maine killed by own device

A 65-year-old American man who rigged his home with a booby trap to keep out intruders has been killed by the device.

Ronald Cyr called police in the town of Van Buren in the state of Maine to say he had been shot.

Police found a door had been designed to fire a handgun should anyone attempt to enter. Mr Cyr was taken to hospital but died of his injuries.
There have been other cases of booby-trapped homes in the US.

In February, a team of real estate investors walking through a home they had bought in Philadelphia discovered that a staircase had been rigged with string which, if tripped, would have triggered a swinging knife.

In September last year, a man in Illinois was killed when he opened a neighbour's shed that had been rigged to fire a shotgun. William Wasmund, 48, was found guilty this September of first-degree murder and aggravated battery.

And in October last year a man in Oregon was charged after fortifying his home "like a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark".

FBI agents found a circular hot tub linked up to a tripwire, a fortified front door, animal traps and a wheelchair rigged with a shotgun that went off, hitting an agent in the leg.
 
A typo - quite possibly caused by a simple dumb-ass accident - resulted in a county revenue shortfall that taxpayers will end up paying for ...
‘Typo’ may have overvalued Utah home at nearly $1B

Utah officials say a possible dropped phone resulted in a typo that overvalued a home for almost $1 billion.

And taxpayers may have to pay for the mistake.

The Deseret News reports a house built in 1978 in an unincorporated area of the county was recorded in 2019 tax rolls with a value of more than $987 million. That’s an overestimate of about $543 million in taxable value.

Wasatch County Assessor Maureen “Buff” Griffiths told officials last month a staff member may have dropped a phone on a keyboard. Griffiths said the accident has resulted in a countywide overvaluation of more than $6 million.

Griffiths added that the blunder also produced revenue shortfalls in five taxing entities.

Wasatch County officials say residents will likely see an increased tax rate over the next three years to make up for the lower amount collected in 2019.
SOURCE: https://apnews.com/8fa931e5c0a4951cf34fecee7a865de8
 
A typo - quite possibly caused by a simple dumb-ass accident - resulted in a county revenue shortfall that taxpayers will end up paying for ...

SOURCE: https://apnews.com/8fa931e5c0a4951cf34fecee7a865de8
Yikes. To the untutored eye - and I am sure that there are many subtle nuances in Utah tax legislation that keep legions of accountants gainfully if not gleefully occupied - that suggests that the correct value would have been a mere $444 million. What kind of houses do they have in Utah?
 
Yikes. To the untutored eye - and I am sure that there are many subtle nuances in Utah tax legislation that keep legions of accountants gainfully if not gleefully occupied - that suggests that the correct value would have been a mere $444 million. What kind of houses do they have in Utah?

From the linked source article -

The 1,570-square-foot house built in 1978 on 2 acres in an unincorporated area of the county was recorded in 2019 tax rolls with a market rate value of more than $987 million and an overestimate of about $543 million in taxable value. In reality, the property should have only had a 2019 taxable value of $302,000, according to county property records.

So about 146 sq m in proper measurements. Not sure what that "overestimate" means.
 
So, I decided to get in some practice with my Suse Linux machine. And as I am the only user (hence the root) I can't do anything without the password.

Since we've entered nerd territory, I might just as well share my silly mistake from this weekend. I installed a honeypot (a lure to catch hackers) on the internet in Microsoft Azure. Then I tried to log into it. It didn't recognize my account and password. After despairing for some time, I realized that this login was part of the lure, to catch a hacker trying to log in. The real login was hidden somewhere else. And indeed, my own login attempts were flagged as enemy action :)
 
Since we've entered nerd territory, I might just as well share my silly mistake from this weekend. I installed a honeypot (a lure to catch hackers) on the internet in Microsoft Azure. Then I tried to log into it. It didn't recognize my account and password. After despairing for some time, I realized that this login was part of the lure, to catch a hacker trying to log in. The real login was hidden somewhere else. And indeed, my own login attempts were flagged as enemy action :)

Sounds like a success! A honeypot so convincing even you fell for it!
 
Trade War now looms between the US and Wakanda.

The US Department of Agriculture listed Wakanda as a free-trade partner - despite it being a fictional country.

A USDA spokesperson said the Kingdom of Wakanda was added to the list by accident during a staff test. The department's online tariff tracker hosted a detailed list of goods the two nations apparently traded, including ducks, donkeys and dairy cows. In the Marvel universe, Wakanda is the fictional East African home country of superhero Black Panther.

The fictional country was removed soon from the list after US media first queried it, prompting jokes that the countries had started a trade war. Wakanda first appeared in the Fantastic Four comic in 1966, and made a reappearance when Black Panther was adapted into an Oscar-winning film last year. The unusual listing was spotted by Francis Tseng, a New York-based software engineer who was looking up agricultural tariffs for a fellowship he was applying for.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50849559
 
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