It has been a little while since I’ve posted some good evil ideas for you conniving little extortionists and I think you are about due. Why do I do this you ask? Well, two reasons. One, I think that the evil needs to be distributed to the masses to prevent one sect from getting too much evil dealt to them or dealing out too much evil unduly. Two, I know how hard it is for people who aren’t naturally evil to come up with good, cheap, effective evil ideas. As a public service, I present to you my most recent evil ideas. If you have anything that you think would be a good evil idea, feel free to submit it to one of my many email addresses and I’ll give you all the credit and it will be immortalized for awhile on my site (traffic is increasing oddly enough). Oh yeah, I’m not responsible, you’re an idiot and blah blah blah.
1. Evil Marketing
If you know me, you know my hero and idol is Dogbert. I think today that I really found a way to exceed his expectations and get into his contact list as a worthy competitor. Even though I know he would crush me in a matter of days, it would be worth it. Anyway, the idea is simple. Standard Ethernet uses 2 pairs of wires in the cable. That leaves 2 pairs unused. so you could split the other 2 pair out of each end cable them off. So now you have a cable that can support a dual NIC systems. The best part is that it can be marketed out as a solution to help with cutting down on the amount of cable used in data centers. It doesn’t matter if one pair goes down, you still have the other pair to keep you running. It doesn’t matter if they can’t replace it, they should have though of that before they bought 1.6 miles of cables. Dogbert would be proud.
2. Wallets
This one is mainly for the girls, but guy can take advantage of it too, though it would be crossing some lines guys weren’t meant to cross. If you are a girl and you don’t know how particular guys are about their wallets, you must have never had a date in your life. So to get the point across, guys are particular about their wallets. Now I know if you are a guy you are saying “No, no no.” But inside your really saying “God no! No! No! No!” cause you know how right I am. Seriously, when is the last time you got a new wallet? And if it was recently, how long had you had your previous wallet? Twelve years for me personally. Now the evil part. Take the wallet (no, don’t keep it) and rearrange everything it it. Move all the credit cards and change the bills around and all kinds of other crazy things. Put in out of date cards and information, old receipts and stuff like that. Be warned though, it is a good chance the guy will either cry or kill. Update: Apparently this will only work on me.
3. A Bad Tip
Credit where credit is due. This idea was sent in by Steve “something or other.” He’s the guy that was at Dave’s birthday part with the wonderful cop stories. Anyway, the setup. You’ve gone to a resturant, you’ve had a horrible experience with your server(s) and you want a little retaliation. Obtain a glass of liquid approximately 1/3 full. Drop in your tip. Cover the glass with a piece of paper or the drink menu or something similar. Flip the whole thing upside onto the tableand pull out the paper/menu and let surface tension do the rest.
That’s all for now. Remember, I am not responsible if you try any of these things and a person in a black robe with a small novelty hammer will inform you of how personal responsiblity works if you get caught.
Mike says:
Dude, we actually had someone here DO that thing with the ethernet. It violates cat 5, can’t get reliable signal over it.
Each of the pairs has a different degree of twist to it, coinciding with their original purposes: one pair for network, one pair for phone, and the rest for serial I think. Yes, SERIAL. This standard comes from an age when people were as likely to have a dumb serial terminal on their desk as they were a phone and typewriter.
That was the origin of the standard ethernet jack. It sucked.
21 November 2005, 10:59 amWyatt says:
I know that it violates it … but as your example shows, there are idiots out there who won’t understand this fact and they don’t deserve their money
21 November 2005, 1:30 pmJoe Rocklin says:
I think the wallet thing would drive me crazy…
22 November 2005, 11:14 amRick says:
Actually, it doesn’t have anything to do with the degree of twist in the cable. Cat 5 level 7 (commonly called Cat 7) varies the rate of twist on the pairs to decrease the likelihood of crosstalk among the pairs. Normal Cat 5 doesn’t do this and suffers from crosstalk more easily.
Technically, it would work, but since you are running 100BaseT on both sets, the amount of crosstalk is increased (also partially why the 2 pairs used for ethernet aren’t right next to each other in the connector). Interestingly, GigE uses all 4 pairs, but uses signalling that is less likely to cause crosstalk.
The fun part is that in theory, you could run 2 sets of ethernet at 10BaseT perfectly fine. At those speeds, the crosstalk should be minimal and the tolerances are much larger.
Another fun fact: There are many Cat levels for cable; another common one is Cat 3 which is only qualified for phone cabling, but happens to get used for ethernet frequently when the morons are being cheap.
And last but not least, if you want to drive an IT person nuts, sell them a Cisco 10/100 autonegotiating full-duplex switch and an Xserve G5. The NICs in Xserve G5s can’t negotiate correctly with the switch and will sporadically fail to get IP addresses or have other fits, especially during bootup. Netbooting is nearly impossible.
23 November 2005, 4:19 amWyatt says:
So I guess the idea that you would like to submit is sell people things that you know don’t work? That’s what we’ve been doing at work for sometime. Brilliant!
23 November 2005, 10:49 am