One of my cats sometimes does that. It’s because he had a dingleberry stuck in his rear end, and leaves a nice trail for me to scrub out with the Spotbot. :rolleyes:
OK, theres a guy in my apartment complex with a name similar to mine. I’ve started getting junk mail addressed to him, with my apartment number on the address. The, I get an email from a local car dealer surveying his service experience. It’s an email address I rarely use, but it’s the one associated with my cable internet service. I call the dealer, and they veriify that the customer furnished them that email address. How the hell did he get my email addy?
Then I start putting 2+2 together. In October, I got a warning from my ISP that I had hit 80% of my data limit, which is about ten times what I normally use. For three days, somebody has been running over 50gb a day, which must be 24-hour live screaming or something. They hacked my router. I change the password, all is immediately back to normal. Yesterday I went out with a tablet and stood by his front door, and at 150 yards, my cheapo WalMart router (Belkin d3d) is delivering a “good” signal strength. Even I don’t know my router password, I’d have to physically pick it up and turn it over and look at the bottom with a flashlight to see the password. How the hell did he get my password?
So I google the guy. He calls himself an electronic engineer, who has never been able to keep a job owing to bipolar disorder. Number one suspect. My office manager says they are decent people, good tenants, nominally above suspicion, older couple who wouldn’t characteristically download music around the clock. Maybe they got a big backlog now of Hulu movies.
Not something I’m going to do anything about, after all, Id probably grab somebody’s wifi if I could, too. Didn’t cost me anything because I got the wifi interrupted before there was a very pricey overage. But WTF? I don’t have very many Big WTF Moments.
This is my WTF moment today.
You’re welcome.
Maybe I’m assuming too much. Did you ever change the default password?
At my age, WTF moments are few and far between. But what do you know, I’ve just had a second one on back to back days.
On weekends, we get the proselytizers nagging us, when the rental office is closed and there is nobody to run them off. Today, a new approach. I open the door and see an attractive lady at eye level, and in the lower part of my field of view ia a little girl of about eight. Momma says, “She has a questin she would like to ask you.” If I didn’t know better, I’d have invited them both in for tea, and sat and answered questions all day. But I knew what was coming: “What do you think about Heaven”.
One of my thoughts was to say “I’ll make a deal with you. I am 70 years older than you are, and I’ve seen a few thins, and I will answer your question if you will listen to my answer and think about what I tell you.” But instead, I politely said “That is a matter of my own personal conscience.” Then Momma says “She would like to read to you from scriptures”, whereupon they were thanked for their trouble and bidden to have a nice day.
WTF. Another possible reply might hae been “Shame on you for exploiting your innocent children to go out and pave your own golden path to your hereafter.” Is this the latest strategy of the evangelists, that I am just hearing about for the first time?
My life is a constant series of WTF moments. I’m married, with a teen-aged kid.
How did the chicken-shit end up on the door handle?
Its winter. So shorts and a tee shirt are appropriate, so long as the house is kept at a constant 92 degrees.
Why are there 30 empty soda cans under the kid’s bed?
You bought what?
What is that smell?
Why is the electric bill 3x what it should be?
No one knows how my shit got broken.
And so on, and so on, and so on…
Here’s a good one I forgot:
How did the sheep shit get in the refrigerator?
<snipped>
Many router companies assign their router passwords in batches. Your router, IOW, has the same password as thousands of other units. Not hard to hack at all. Someone interested in hacking either had the same unit at one point or looked it up online. There are other ways to hack into a wi-fi signal that I won’t get into here.
It is a very, very good idea to change your router password to something unique.
Keep an eye on your data usage to make certain that it was hacked via the password method, not one of the others.
You mean if I had bought two routers that day off the shelf at WalMart,and opened both boxes, they would both have the same password key printed on the bottom?
If it was hacked by “one of the others” and didn’t run up my data usage, I wouldn’t care.
Cite for this?
Some things come with a placeholder “1111” or some such that isn’t really a password, and obviously needs to be set if you want security.
But every router that I can remember buying came set up with a strong password of pseudo-random numbers and letters. I can’t imagine why they would bother to do this, then give a whole batch exactly the same password.
Guy asks his buddy out for a drink, but the dude says, “Okay, but you gotta pay. Someone stole my wallet and credit cards”.
Guy asks if he has reported it yet.
Dude says, “No. Whoever stole it spends less than my wife!”
My husband calls it the Curly Shuffle. Not sure why…Three Stooges maybe?
This is a fairly mild WTF moment, but still.
I live in Kansas, smack dab in the middle of the US. When I pulled into the parking lot at church this morning I happened to glance at the license plates of the two cars in front of me. One was from Alaska and the other Washington state.
Now we are well pleased to have visitors, but it’s not every days we see tags from that far away! I don’t know who the vehicles belonged to, but we’re glad they stopped by.
In PetSmart the other day I found some mini-bales of alfalfa meant for bunnies. Multiplying the weight by the price it came to just under $3.5-million a ton. Last time I bought a ton of hay some years ago when we had horses, I grumbled when it had jumped to $120
I have put nail polish on cats in the past. For the most part, they did not approve of the process.
My happy WTF moment: I have a Cthulhu fishmagnet on my trunk, where people like to put those Jesus fishes.
Coming out of the library, car parked two places to the left of me had a Jesus fish, the one next to me had an evolve fishand then there was Cthulhu 
I made an interesting observation about sound. Sitting up rading in bed last night with the window open, I reached up to scratch my head, and heard a chorus of toads singing in my hand. I took my hand away from the side of my head, and heard nothing except the faint drone of city night. Put my hand back up, cupped next to my ear, Coastal Plains Toads (Incilius nebulifer) in full chorus. I walked over the window, and as I expected, I still heard nothing, because near the window, I am exposed to a much wider cone of sound sources competing with the toads. The toads were in a narrow cone that happened, by chance to be in perfect alignment with the line from window to my ears. Even standing in another part of my bedroom I could not hear them. Slumping down in bed, my head a foot lower, I could no longer hear them.
Which led me to formulate a theory. Amphibian vocalizations evolved to utilize frequencies that are best resonated by living tissue, such as the palm of a human hand, which is analogous to the physical auditory apparatus of the toad. So my hand surface characteristics and the substance of my hand made a perfect sounding board, ideal to resonate with the calls of the toads, just like the ears of their prospective mates. So my hand reflected the trills of the toads, but muffled most other ambient sounds.
I’ve been, before, in sound pockets of a similar nature. In Northern Michigan, I lived two blocks from a little frog habitat. Some nights I’d arrive home and get out of my car, and hear no frogs, and at my front door, I’d also hear none, but in between, I could hear the chorus of frogs. Because the arrangement of the apartment buildings, there were funnels that the sound would pass through between buildings, and then echo off other buildings. So the sound was traveling like a pinball among the buildings, audible in some pockets, but not others.
ISTM that more likely, when you put your hand up to your head, the palm was curved in a manner that approximated that of an elliptical reflector, with your ear canal at the near focal point. If somewhere out there in the night air, some toads were peeping in the other focal point, with the greenery forming a similar elliptical reflector, it could meet the conditions for “amplification.”
I had a WTF moment with this phenomenon a few decades back, standing in a choir loft with an elliptical arch. I heard the sotto voce murmurings of a guy in the tenor section on the other side of the loft, as though he were right beside me.
But that would have amplified all the sounds equally, so the background or ambient noise would have still been louder than the toads.
I just went into the bedroom, the toads are singing again tonight (it rained all day), and they are barely audible without the cupped hand, with the usual sound of AC compressors and street noise. Without cupped hands, there is a conspicuous noise of rain falling in gutters of a nearby building, with the toad calls barely noticeable. But cupping my ears, the toad song becomes by far the dominant sound, drowning out the water dripping.
But you are right about the capacity of acoustical engineering being able to gather sound to a single focal point. A carefully defined “pocket” of sound, like the one I described that accidentally occurred near my Michigan apartment buildings.
Only the sounds that originated at the other focal point.
Perhaps I’m getting a wrong picture. Does it happen when you cup your ear no matter where you are in the room, or is it only in that one spot on your bed?