Paul Murray's weblog, with news you may have missed and my $0.02 worth on a number of topics.

"You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it."
- Art Buchwald

I bet you don't have a friend who's an acupuncturist

E-mail me: pmurray63 [at] hotmail.com (Be patient, I don't check it often.)

Socially useful mischief. I had a unique opportunity today to be mischievous and socially good at the same time.

Once a week, I find myself in a situation where I'm using semi-public computers to surf the net. While doing this today, I went to my large, popular Web-based mail provider to read my mail. Except I was immediately taken to someone else's mailbox at the same service, because whoever was on the machine earlier didn't log out.

This has happened to me before in the same location, and I simply shook my head and logged out so I could log in. Not today.

Instead, I sent this person a message from his own account that went something like this:

Dear [name],

You really should log out of your e-mail account when using a public computer, so that bad people can't snoop or do other things that you might regret.

Sincerely,

A fellow [title]

I'll never know what if any effect it may have had, but I hope it caught his attention.

Labels: good deeds, mischief, security

posted by Paul Murray at 9:37 PM | permanent link |

"What If Everybody in Canada Flushed At Once?" Well, this graph only shows water use in Edmonton, but I suspect it's a fair proxy for the entire country. And it's too good a headline to spoil with technicalities. More details in the Globe and Mail. Found here via Metafilter.
posted by Paul Murray at 6:54 PM | permanent link |