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This is a continuation of the the first part of my Medicus Incognitus story which you can find here. Be aware that this is a true story that didn’t happen too long ago. As of right now, it isn’t even over, yet.

It’s winter on this side of the planet. Winter is normally a relatively short and uneventful period, here. Lower temperatures that make visiting Canadians walk around in shorts, winds that make hardened windsufers around the world yawn with boredom and snowfall only in the most northern regions. It never rains for longer than ten minutes, then the rain stops and may start again for around ten minutes if we’re lucky.

This time around, however, we’re plagued with a freak season. It’s really cold - really. Umbrellas are giving their lives to merciless winds and half of our northern support group at work couldn’t come to the office - they are snowed in.

So we go back to the night where we called a doctor to our home to inspect my sick girlfriend. The doorbell rings and I walk up to the door. I press my eye against the judas and gain view on the wonderfully convex image of a pair of thick spectacles placed on a pudgy, old face. That has to be the doc. I have a TV blanket wrapped around my shoulders. Sometimes we don’t use the AC for heating because it dries out the air and thats the last thing a sick person needs when plagued by hard coughs.

I open the door and stared unbelieving at the odd figure before me. Very short, very obese, wearing horn rimmed spectacles with a horrifying focal point she grinned at me. I didn’t know what to be afraid of primarily. The huge eyes enlargened by the glasses, the yellow man-eater teeth in her mouth or the short sleeved hawaii shirt that she was wearing. My TV blanket has little horsies stiched on it and I looked very smug compared to her.

“Hello! Who is sick one?” she croaks in a thick Russian accent.

“Uh … there.” I make way for her to see the inside of the living room and point at my girlfriend on the couch.

Without waiting for a formal invitation she hobbles in (yes she hobbles) and places her doctor’s bag on my freshly polished and squeaky clean, glass topped living room table. I take a brief glance outside the door as if trying to get confirmation from my neighbors that this gnomish doctor actually exists. Nobody else in sight. I close the door and join the doc in the living room.

“What have you, girl?” she inquires from Dee. She tries to explain her symptoms and past visits to the hospital but can’t really articulate herself properly. The swollen infection in her mouth has gotten bigger, making it very painful to even move the jaw the slightest bit. I decide that it may be useful if I continued with the explanation and get rudely interrupted.

“You…” she regards me and throws a glance to her right side where my laptop is sitting on a small computer table from IKEA. It’s one of those solid wooden blocks that came in off-white, black or dark red. My Dell XPS sits silently on it, emitting an eerie red glow from its air intakes. Trying to remember the events of that night, I think she sneered at it.

“You go to other rrrroom.” the ‘r’ rolls off her tongue like a machine gun.

Suspecting that she may want to inspect Dee properly and in private, I move off to our bedroom. I am currently reading Brother Odd by Dean Koontz. I loved Odd Thomas and hated it when the book ended. When I discovered the existence of two follow-up stories on Odd, I was more than just delighted. Content with my exile, I throw myself on the bed and begin reading.

I finish two chapters before I roll off the bed and decide to check up on things in the living room. My slipers scrape the floor as I sidle back into the odd scene, my horsey TV blanket still wrapped around me.

“So I don’t need the other medication, anymore?” Dee asks, readjusting her sweater.

“No! This no good. You take other instead. Like on paper!” she croaks back, nodding and shaking her head vigorously. What this did to her wobbly chin, I’d rather not explain to you in detail. She finishes a few notes, writes out a prescription, slams a few stamps on the paper and rips off a copy for my girlfriend.

Before we know it, the weird apparition in hawaii shirt is out the door. Silence follows.

“That was weird!” Dee gasps, breaking the silence that lastet for a few moments.

“Uh huh.” is the only thing I can come up with. More silence for a few moments and then,

“Shit! She forgot something.” Dee points at a small pouch next to my laptop - a good 10 feet away from the living room table that they had been sitting at just moments ago.

I grab the pouch, speed out the door and down a flight of stairs, trying to catch up to her. With my horsie cape still adorning my shoulders I step out into the cold, windy winter night. Outside I can see her getting into a car and I put up a heroic sprint holding the pouch out in front of me. When she sees me coming her face contorts in an expression that I fail to interpret.

“You forgot this.” I say.

Reluctantly she takes it back and I get a chance to cast a glance inside the car. She’s not the driver. The man behind the steering wheel could be her son. What’s more interesting is that the car is filled with a treasure load of computer parts.

“Thank you.” and with that she yanks the door shut and they drive off.

Somewhat confused and increasingly cold, I make my way back into the house. We settle back into the mundane and prepare ourselves for an hour of Survivor: China. I am amazed with the black guy’s physique and I’m hardly surprised when Chicken is sent home on the very first tribal meeting. Eventually I run out of beer and I have to get up early for work tomorrow so I peel myself off of the recliner and sit down in front of my laptop. Just checking mail before going to bed.

I open up the mail client. Ding. Mail.

As far as I was told by a Russian colleague the next day, it means: “You work for us now.”

–to be continued–

Sometimes life for a fully ordained user can be quite comfortable. Not everyone can be a user. Not everyone can reap the fruit of technology and find it to their tasting. And sometimes a user can get himself into the weirdest situations because of his aptitude.

Even though we live in the age of Google, the age of search and find, the age of “Google it!”, we still live in the age of people who use the engine search field to look for “myspace.com” in order to get to the Myspace webpage. Somehow the address bar eluded these people. Somehow after over 11 years of browsable internet, some people haven’t yet figured out the http://www concept of directly navigating to a webpage. Instead of using the address bar to directly navigate http://www.myspace.com (which will work just as well if you type myspace.com since http:// is automatically prefixed and www is merely the root folder for all common webpages), they type myspace into the search engines’s search field and then click on the first link presented to them on the results page.

My girlfriend does this as well. As I am writing this article, I just paused for a moment to ask her how she navigates to her Facebook page. She confirmed my suspicion. She still does it. She types “facebook” into Google’s search field and then clicks on the first result. As annoying as that may be to my anal retentive nature, it may have saved her a lot of trouble today. Instinctively using the search field for just about any search query is a good habit which I can only condone. Even if the method may be inefficient in most cases, it prevents her from drifting into the wrong mindset of not knowing where to start. If she were set on using fixed addresses through the address bar, she may start underestimating the power of a good search engine. She may be too fixed on finding a specific URL rather than finding matches to well placed search terms, regardless of the resulting URL. You never know where you end up finding the answers you need. Being oblivious to the address bar may just be a catalyst for imagination.

Only a few days ago, I somehow managed to infect myself with a mean little virus that caused my left side of the neck to swell up, which made eating almost impossible unless I took some heavy duty pain killers. Somehow one of my glands got infected, which was so close to my jaw muslces that each time I chewed on something, it would press against the infected area and my neck would swell up. The pain was extraodinary. I went to see the a doctor and he recommended to let it pass as it was most likely only a minor virus. Before long the infection did pass and no harm was done. Can you imagine the joy I felt when I was once again able to eat a proper burger without pumping myself full of pain killers? If you’re a vegan, spare me the answer.

Lo and behold, two days later my girlfriend gets sick. And when she gets sick, she goes the full monty. No half assed coughs and a bit of a sniffle. Within a timespan of a few hours from waking up, she came up with a heavy bronchitis, a well spiced sinusitis, a migrane so intense it made the LCD TV flicker in fear and retaliation and one hell of a bad temper. It was a Sunday. My day off. My gaming day. My Call of Duty 4 day. On Sundays I don’t move much. I walk to the fridge to get a beer. I rest my hand on the mouse, the fingers of my other hand dance over the WASD Shift and C buttons on the keyboard and I kill virtual people with an M4. I do this for many hours. This Sunday, however, I went with my girlfriend to the hospital. No squad leader awaited me at the entrance. Nobody offered me an arsenal of weapons and there wasn’t a Javelin available to take out the huge receptionist. Time to run for cover. But ALAS! No cover in sight!

She was diagnosed with all of the above and received a prescription for a monstrous drug coctail. Antibiotics, Probiotics, Codein, Iron, Migraine pain killers and Coldex-A. Blissfull numbness was ensured.

The condition seemed to get better over the weekend and the next day I went back to work. At least the migraine subsided and the TV was safe again. Six hours into work and I was happily procrastinating when my cellphone rang.

Dee: Ow!
Me: Whats up?
Dee: Feeling bad!
Me: How’s the migrane?
Dee: Gone.
Me: So?
Dee: Something’s growing in my mouth.
Me: What?
Dee: It hurts, its swollen. Can’t talk.
Me: I hear that.
Dee: What should I do?
Me: Call the doctor.
Dee: But what could I have?
Me: Sorry. Forgot to pick up my PhD last week.
Dee: Fine. Be that way. I’ll google it.

*Click*

Half an hour later, I’m in a video conference with our Santa Clara HQ, my phone rings. For the third time in the last 10 minutes. I mute the computer and pick up. She really Googled her symptoms and it turns out that the swollen thing in her mouth may be an allergic reaction to the antibiotics. The internet wins. Great success. Even though I usually swear by a thorough “Google RTFM”, this didn’t convince me. I didn’t want sharp teethed monsters growing out of her mouth while I am sound asleep at night. I convince her to call a doctor to our house and have herself checked.

Fast forward to 20:00 that same night.

I’m at home. The door bell rings. I open the door and I was greeted in a way entirely unexpected.

–to be continued–

Google maps can be useful. Specifically when you are looking for a detailed view on an area that has been mapped with a camera. Its lets you zoom down onto street level where you are able to move up and down the mapped area and see the actual street in photo format instead of a simple map. But are those areas mapped solely with the help of camera equipped cars or some other static apparatus?

Looks like a Google bot can do more than just index your webpage.

Remember last time when I asked you if anyone remembered Max Headroom?

While Max may have been one of the most lovable phenomena of the 80’s cyberpunk movement, a certain incident that occurred in 1987 may have made Max Headroom into an immortal legend. The Wikipedia holds a neat digest of that day.

The Max Headroom character originated in 1985 as an announcer for a music video programme on the British television channel, Channel 4, called The Max Talking Headroom Show. The intent was to portray a futuristic computer-generated character. Max Headroom appeared as a stylized head on TV against harsh primary color rotating-line backgrounds, and he became well known for his jerky techno-stuttering speech, wisecracks, and malapropisms (”Like they say when you’re buying suppositories, ‘With friends like that, who needs enemas?’”).

The incident of which I would like to remind you of (or educate you with if you weren’t around to witness it yourself), is the Max Headroom Pirating Incident. For convenience I’ll quote the wikipedia article as it neatly summarizes the events of that day.

The first occurrence of the signal hijack took place during WGN-TV’s News at Nine. During Bears highlights in the sports report, the station’s signal was interrupted by a video of a person wearing a Max Headroom mask, standing or sitting in front of a swaying sheet of corrugated metal imitating the background effect in the Max Headroom New Coke commercial. There was no audio. The hijack was stopped after 20 seconds when WGN switched the modulation of their studio link to the John Hancock Center transmitter.

The incident left sports reporter Dan Roan flustered, saying, “Well, if you’re wondering what happened, so am I.”

Later that night, around 11:15 p.m., during a broadcast of the Doctor Who episode “Horror of Fang Rock“, PBS station WTTW’s signal was hijacked using the same video that was broadcast during the WGN-TV hijack, this time with garbled audio. The person in the Max Headroom mask appeared, as before, this time saying, “That does it. He’s a freakin’ nerd,” before laughing and jeering, “Yeah, I think I’m better than Chuck Swirsky. Freakin’ liberal.”

The pirate continued to utter random phrases, including New Coke’s advertising slogan “Catch the Wave” while holding a Pepsi can (Max Headroom was a Coke spokesperson at the time), saying “Your love is fading”, humming the theme song to Clutch Cargo, and stating that he had “made a giant masterpiece for all the greatest world newspaper nerds” (the call letters WGN are an abbreviation for “World’s Greatest Newspaper”, in reference to the Tribune Company’s Chicago Tribune). He then held up a glove, said “my brother is wearing the other one”, and put the glove on. He then took the glove off, adding that it was “dirty.”

The picture suddenly cut over to a shot of the hijacker with his buttocks exposed, being spanked with a flyswatter by an unidentified accomplice wearing a dress. The hijacker screamed and exclaimed, “They’re coming to get me!” and “Come get me, bitch!”

The transmission then blacked out and cut off, and the hijack was over after about 90 seconds.

WTTW, which maintains its transmitter atop the Sears Tower, found that its engineers were unable to stop the hijacker because at the time there were no engineers on duty at the Sears Tower. Also, the station’s master control center was unable to contact its transmitting equipment remotely to switch the studio-transmitter link, unlike their counterparts at WGN-TV, who were able to thwart the intruder by switching their John Hancock Center studio/transmitter link remotely within seconds. According to a WBBM-TV employee, the video pirate had attempted to break in on several other Chicago TV stations, however these attempts were unsuccessful.

The Max Headroom incident made national headlines and was reported on the CBS Evening News the next day.

WTTW and WGN-TV join HBO as victims of broadcast signal intrusion. There has not been a verified broadcast intrusion incident of this kind in America since, although almost twenty years after this incident, Australia and the Czech Republic had similar occurrences of broadcast intrusion.

Below you can find two videos of the incident. The first one shows the new report of the hijacking and the second one shows the actual hijacking in original format.

Another nice source for this story can be found here. The site shows a few articles that originally reported on the incident and digs a bit into the events that happened that day. The article is from 1987. I always find it strangely nostalgic to read stuff like that. Almost as nice as watching old Computer Chronicle recordings.