Live from Austin!

I got some curious e-mail from someone:

THis is an amazing archive but I haven’t been able to edit it. Everytime I download and mpg and lod it into premiere it crashes when I try to adit it. Do you know what I can do to fix this? Thanks for the help, nando.

Lacking any context whatsoever, I wrote back asking what archive he was talking about and why he was e-mailing me about it.

He replied, explaining that he had been wandering around the Alexa Internet Archive, and that one of the pages of movies had linked to another web site, and that site had included some e-mail copied from a mailing list, including a message I had sent containing my e-mail address.

From this, he had apparently deduced that I was some kind of technical support for the Alexa Internet archives.

Obviously he was a bit of a fuckwit, but I decided to be nice. Maybe I could make him understand the idea that just because web site A links to web site B, that doesn’t mean that people mentioned on web site B even know of the existence of web site A. I wrote back explaining that his reasoning was “a bit tenuous”. That it was like “e-mailing me and asking about Yahoo because Yahoo links to Deja, and Deja has Usenet archives which include my e-mail address”.

Naturally, he responded with abuse—so I gave in and just told him he was a fuckwit. Why do I bother?

From the Telegraph:

A zoo keeper was held captive inside an enclosure for half an hour after a pair of otters made off with his keys. Warren Crutchley, 38, had to call for help when Filly and Smudge disappeared into their pool with the makeshift toy. He had left the bunch of keys behind him in the door of the compound at the Aquarium of the Lakes, in Windermere, Cumbria, when the animals struck.

As soon as he realised what was happening he tried to lure Smudge into dropping them by offering her food but she started jumping in and out of the water away from his reach. “I stopped trying to catch her and ended up yelling for help,” Mr Crutchley added. “My colleagues eventually let me out with a spare set of keys. I felt a proper fool.”

As one of the keepers at Seattle Aquarium explained to me, they have to keep the otters under lock and key, because the little furry rascals easily work out how to slide a bolt…

Furby’s new friend is a robotic bearded clam. Umm…