I can’t believe that so many people are behind this OS when it has so many problems. It’s basically like time traveling back to the late-90′s and dealing with Windows 95/98 constantly crashing. My iPhone never crashed and rarely had to be rebooted. Android lovers can make fun of the iPhone all they want, but at least it WORKS and it’s not frustrating to use.

Besides all the crashing, my phone started overheating really bad and the battery was lasting only a couple of hours, even when I wasn’t using it. When me and the kids were in Seattle for Comicon, I decided to factory wipe the phone in hopes that whatever was causing the problem would stop, so I could keep in touch with the kids at Comicon without having to charge my phone up. I lost all my apps and information, but it fixed the problem. Within a week, though, the overheating and the battery draining was back, and I hadn’t even installed many apps yet so I have no idea what’s causing it. On Friday I mailed my phone to Samsung so they can hopefully fix or replace it. They’ll probably just factory reset it and claim that it’s fixed.

A few days ago I blew $450 on an Android tablet. After installing just a couple of basic, popular apps, CRASH. Various apps crashed throughout the evening and next day. I went to Amazon.com to look up some info on tablets and the entire thing locked up, I assume because of the Flash on the web page. I had to get on my computer to look up the magical button combination to soft-reset it. Within 24 hours I had 2 complete lockups. I used this as my excuse to return the device for a refund, and the AT&T store guy admitted that crashing was a common issue. I use friends Androids and they crash too, doing the most basic things. Why are we all putting up with this?

If anyone reading this is thinking about getting an Android, DON’T! Sure, they do more and look prettier and they’re made by a completely different giant evil corporation, but they suck! Another thing I started to do last week before I mailed my phone in to Samsung was root my phone with CyanogenMod. I’m told that rooting your phone gets rid of a lot of the bloat and makes it more stable, which I’m sure is true, but I was about 12 steps into the billion-step process and I quit, just for the principle of it all. Why should I be putting this much effort into making my cell phone not crash? Even if I didn’t want to deal with learning how to root the phone myself, I have local friends who could easily root my phone and keep it working for me, but screw that. It should just work! Why not just get an iPhone and never have to worry about retarded shit like this again?

Here’s what I did instead. I completely ditched my AT&T wireless plan. At first I attempted to keep the plan turned on by signing up for the $15/month Android tablet data plan, but not only did the Android tablet suck balls, I just couldn’t see the need for even having a tablet. It was neat to play with (all the crashing aside) but I just didn’t NEED it. And I was blowing $450 to keep from being charged the $275 early termination fee, when I’d still end up paying $270 over the next 18 months (plus all kinds of taxes and fees, I’m sure) for the $15/month data plan. When I returned the tablet, I had them just cancel my account. And then I bought a cheap, crappy prepaid phone for $50 and $25 of prepaid credit.

The phone looks like an old Blackberry and it’s capable of email, texting, taking pictures and making phone calls. And a lot more, I’m sure, but it’s all stuff I’ll never use. So now instead of paying $80/month for my Android with texting and unlimited data, I’m paying approximately $8.00 per month. I’m going to have an extra $72/month now to pay bills and have fun with. I never talk on the phone anyway and I was mainly just paying the $80/month so I could check my email or play on Facebook while I was out. Now when I’m standing in a long line at the post office, I’ll have to think of something else to do to avoid talking to people.

I still plan to keep a smartphone of some kind – I’m just not going to pay a subscription for it anymore. I’ll give my Android another try when it returns from Samsung and I really hope the overheating issues stop. It’s a fun little device and it does a lot, but really I don’t even leave the house that often so I can just use my home’s wireless connection to play games and listen to online radio stations.

I’m actually borrowing an iPhone from my friend Jessica this week, just so we can continue playing Drawsomething together while my phone is being repaired. (We’re both really addicted to that game.) She wants me to sell the phone on eBay for her when my phone gets back, but I’m kind of thinking I’ll just buy the iPhone from her. These past few days I’ve filled it up with all of my music and my old iPhone apps and it’s really nice to just have a device that works so flawlessly again.

I’m really loving the idea of not paying $80/month for a phone anymore. Prepaid plans have come a long way since I last looked at them. Prepaid wireless used to be kind of a ripoff, but now the rates actually seem better than a postpaid account. This card that I got with the phone says they have monthly plans for texting – $10/month for 1,000 texts or $20/month for unlimited. AT&T wireless forced me to pay around $40/month BEFORE my texting and data plans, for the 450 minutes that I never came close to using up. They even have a $50/month plan for unlimited talk/text and web. This makes so much more sense. If your cell phone bills are as nuts as mine was, look into some prepaid plans! See if you can save as much money as I am.

April 29th Update: After two weeks, I’m not regretting the decision to ditch my smart phone plan. I’ve been using the iPhone at home just as much as ever and I don’t miss it while I’m away. It’s a little inconvenient sometimes, like today when me and the kids were out and wanted to check movie times, we had to go drive by the theater to see when our movie started. Evie gave me her old GPS unit for her car since she’s got a car with it built in now, so that takes care of that. A lot of times I leave the house now and I don’t even take my cheap prepaid phone with me.

Samsung sent me an email to let me know that the phone was broken and they’re replacing it and it’s been shipped back to me. So maybe I was a bit harsh about my hatred for Android, but I’m still probably going to sell it to help recoup my early termination fee. This prepaid phone of mine lasts about a week without being charged. It’s like magic! I think I might buy a watch soon, so I can be amazed at the batteries that last 7 years.

I ended up shutting down the group because a friend of mine set up her own hiking meetup and I was getting kind of bored with it since I’d already explored all of the woods and we were just going on the same hikes we’d already been on. I introduced a lot of new people to the game of Geocaching. Soon after I killed my hiking group, my friend killed HER hiking group (damn her) so the whole hiking thing just died.

I miss all the weirdos I met there, though. My favorites were Dan, who had this stereotypical Canadian way of speaking (he sounded just like one of the Moose in Brother Bear) and he spent an insane amount of time biking places. And this really old couple, George and Shirley, were a lot of fun to talk to. I usually don’t click well with old people, but those two were awesome. And a bunch of other ones that I’ve completely forgotten by now. I don’t miss hiking at all, but just the odd assortment of people that I met during the hikes and the few strange things that happened during some of them that I don’t even know how to explain here. And it was kind of cool, causing lots of people to wake up early on Saturdays and Sundays just to hang out in the woods.

Last weekend, Evie and I drove around Mount St. Helens which was the first time I’ve seen real snow in several years now. I don’t miss the midwest, but I really miss the awesome snows and the sledding. I need to visit Illinois one of these Christmases and hope they have snow.

Today I went skating for the first time in awhile. Me and the kids drove to Eugene, where my friend Kate told me about the skating rink there a few days earlier. It was lots of fun. Each of us wiped out a few times. I’m good at roller blading until I need to slow down or stop, then things turn bad. Some little kid cut me off and I crashed. Before that, we went to a flea market and I ended up buying a mid-1990′s Motorola flip phone, hoping to use it for nefarious purposes, but instead making this video:

Speaking of videos, I’ve put a lot of them on PLA’s YouTube channel lately. Just this past week, I’ve uploaded one of our pizza shenanigans, where we demonstrated how easy it is to talk pizza employees out of customer data, and another of mine and Evie’s adventures at Target this past Black Friday, where we tricked Target employees into registering our own telephone on their phone network. Both of these videos also demonstrate that I’m a huge jerk. There’s also this video of a lady who hates PLA. I hired her from fiverr.com, which is a site I’ve been completely addicted to for a few weeks now that lets you blow $5 to get people to do ridiculous things. Like this girl who danced around in a dinosaur costume for me.

I went to an improv comedy show on Friday with Kate and Cameron at the Reed Opera House in Salem. I’m only mentioning this so I’ll remember to go back there one of these days and explore the stores and restaurants inside there. The comedy was standard improv stuff and they were really good.

My car stereo got stolen again a couple weeks ago, so I’ve been driving around with a giant glob of duct tape over my back window that was broken out. So far the cheapest replacement window I’ve found is $65, and that’s without the rubber/adhesive stuff that goes under it. I’ve never replaced that type of window before and I’m having a hard time finding YouTube videos or other information on how to do it, so I might end up paying over $200 to just have a shop do it. If anyone reading this has any advice on that, please share! It’s a 2000 Ford Focus hatchback non-door window – it’s just triangle-shaped part in the back. No idea why they broke THAT window since it seems like it’d be hard to reach through that one and get the door unlocked. At least with the door windows those are easy to replace since I’ve done it several times before. So car thieves, please be nice and do that next time. I’m officially giving up on owning a nice stereo.

In other exciting news, our house almost burned down! When the kids and I got home that afternoon, we smelled something burning. I was super proud of both of them for immediately knowing that it smelled exactly like a soldering gun. (I bought them both electronics kits for Christmas.) I Googled the smell and read about how that’s usually what people smell right before their houses burn down. It was less than an hour before smoke started coming out of our electric wall heater and we could see fire behind it. Luckily, it’s all enclosed in metal, so after the rubber insulation burned off the wires, it stopped.

We were at Goodwill a few weeks ago and I spotted the tape recorder in that video. I bought it for $3.00, just to use for making this video, then returned it for a refund. Before you yell at me for being a bad person, you should know that it was broken when I brought it home, so I had to take it apart and fix it. (The belt had slipped off the motor.) So really, Goodwill should be paying me whenever I buy stuff from them just to play with for a few days before I get a refund.

That’s the exact same model of tape recorder my parents bought me one Christmas in the late 70′s or early 80′s. I would assume that I’d somehow come across the actual same tape recorder that I owned as a kid, but my old tape recorder ended up like most electronic items I owned back then – in pieces because I needed to salvage some random part from it. I remember being stealthy about throwing the casing of the tape recorder away because my parents wouldn’t have been happy to see it in pieces. To bring things full circle, the red tape from the video was used in my original tape recorder in the 80′s and still has some 80′s weirdness of mine on it, including a mid-80′s version of What’s Your Bid? and other live radio pranks, and a 1986 recording of me and a girl I babysat for programming my TRS-80 to make prank calls to Dominos and then dancing to hits of the 80′s.

It’s 1:12am and I have to wake up at 7:30 to take the kids to school. I can’t sleep, which is why this post is so long.

“Well if you have a business account, then you can claim expenses for your business!” he tells me, as if this is revolutionary advice that I’d never have thought of myself.

“I already claim expenses for my business,” I tell him. “I don’t need a business name or a business account to do that.” Then he really starts getting into arguing with me, telling me how I should claim fake expenses and how I should buy an entire car and claim it on my tax return, all while taking FOREVER to give me my money so I can leave. He constantly uses “air quotes” as he tells me about all the things I should be claiming on my return and tells me about how his uncle has his own business and does this stuff all the time.

I tell him that I really don’t think it’s a good idea to cheat the IRS. This, of course, starts another argument where he says it’s not cheating, but it’s “getting creative!” or something like that. It was another air quotes term. I couldn’t believe a bank teller was insisting that I cheat on my taxes, though. Sadly, none of the other tellers or employees were nearby, so they didn’t get to witness this weirdo giving me the worst advice ever.

A day or two later I was back in the bank and once again he was the only teller there. He was just as enthusiastic about cheating the IRS this time, but I managed to escape quickly. All I can remember from this conversation is that I should buy 30 flatscreen computer monitors to claim as expenses, or something like that. THIS IS THE GUY THAT HAS ACCESS TO MY MONEY!

I went home and looked up his name on Facebook, finding him easily. If he’d had his uncle listed under the Family section, I probably would have called him up to ask him about all the tax cheating advice that he gives his nephew, but he didn’t so I didn’t look into it further.

Between that and the other tellers trying to hard-sell me stuff every time I go in there, I’ve mostly stopped going inside the bank anymore. At least in the drive-thru I can avoid eye contact and ignore their sales pitches by turning up the radio. Thanks for making an asocial person like me even more asocial, bank!

I tell her no and run back upstairs for my cell phone. I make the call for her, we say our goodbyes and she walks to the business next door. At this point going back to sleep is impossible. Once I’m up, I rarely go back to sleep, so I’ve been quietly hating that lady today as I drink Pepsi to stay awake.

The only reason I’m posting this boring story is because a few hours later, as me and the kids left the house to go to lunch, the blanket is gone. I guess the lady came back and took it. I was too asleep this morning to even wonder why she would ask me if a blanket sitting in my chair was mine. Why would she ask me that? It makes no sense. She knew something about this blanket that I didn’t! I told the kids about it as we walked to lunch and we concluded that the old lady was actually a ghost.

A couple days earlier, in the afternoon, the doorbell rang and I went downstairs to answer it. To get to the door, I have to walk down two flights of stairs and across the house, but I don’t think it really takes me that long to get there. I wasn’t fast enough for these old church people, though, because they were nearly out of the driveway by the time I opened the door. I stood there and watched them as they climbed into their car. When the man looked up and saw me, he waved so I slammed the door and went back upstairs.

Five minutes later, they come back and ring the bell again. Five minutes! What were they doing for five minutes? I sure don’t know. I opened the attic window, leaned out and yelled, “Hey, stop ringing my doorbell and running away!” Both of them looked around in confusion, but didn’t look up and see me. I yelled at them “Satan rules!” and the old lady gave an irritated “Okay” and began walking away. I felt bad so I yelled “I love you!” before shutting the window.

Last year, kids items started showing up on the table by my chairs. One day it was a purple stuffed dragon. About a week later a pair of shoes and toy gun was out there. I left the stuff out there for more than a week, hoping whoever mistakingly brought them by would come back and take them. I ended up giving the dragon to Emily and the shoes to Goodwill. I’m pretty sure a homeless man stole the gun. A neighbor of mine yelled at a homeless man one day because he was at their door, stealing cigarette butts from the ashtray. That’s the day that the gun was missing. This was one of those old toy guns made out of metal and could possibly be mistaken for a real gun since there was no giant orange tip on it. So if a 7-Eleven gets robbed by a homeless person, it might be my fault.

The last weird thing at my door was a sandwich in a ziplock bag, along with an unsigned note telling me that if I didn’t post a picture of myself eating it on Facebook, they would kill my children. This was last week and I’m pretty sure it was a drunken Lisa (friend of mine) and her sister leaving it. I threw it away without eating it and so far my kids are still alive.

The first one was in French and didn’t have a name on it, so I addressed it to “Someone” on the envelope. I was too lazy to paste their short letter into a translator, so I have no idea what I wrote.

The next one I did on post-it notes and faked the lipstick kiss that they requested since I don’t own any lipstick.

And finally, I transcribed some guy’s girly letter to a girl he obviously has the hots for. He requested a unicorn near some trees and mountains. He failed to specify the type of unicorn, though, so I decided to draw a homicidal unicorn who’d just killed a bear.

The project at snailmailmyemail.org seems to be over now, but you can visit their site to look at some of the letters that other people did. It’s too bad because I would have enjoyed doing this kind of thing maybe once or twice a week for the rest of the year.

Yes, in the early 70′s / late 80′s, it was completely acceptable for your teacher to suggest that you give babies GLASS to play with. Of course, it was completely safe, being wrapped up in PAPER. What could possibly go wrong?

So that I wouldn’t have to spend any extra money on a single piece of pipe of perfect length, I bought a coupling and joined two of my old pieces together. I think those are 10″ and 4″ pieces. I also had to buy the 90 degree coupling. Fourteen inches is pretty high for a monitor, but I wanted it to be high enough so that my laptop could sit in front of it. I drilled 4 holes into my desk and tightly secured the pipes.

The plexiglass is looking pretty beat up and I didn’t even bother taking the piece of metal from the top of it. It’s all behind the monitor, so who cares. I had to drill 4 new holes into the plexiglass to mount the monitor on. Most monitors have mounting holes in the back.

Here are a couple shots of the completed project…

It’s the perfect height to have my laptop in front of now, and I have a ton of extra space on my desk. Using a “T” connector for the pipes, it would be easy to add a second monitor on top of the first or beside it. The pipe is strong enough to hold two monitors and I think my pressboard desk would be strong enough to support them both. I could have saved even more space by buying a 4′ or 5′ pipe and mounting it to a stand on the floor. This way is better for me, though, and now I can’t knock over my monitor in drunken accidents. I lose so many monitors that way.

The monitor easily swivels back and forth and I could even turn it vertical if I wanted to. The only downside is that it doesn’t swivel up and down. This isn’t a problem, though, since it’s nearly eye-level for me. If I do add a second monitor on top of it someday, I will probably use a 45 degree connector so that it’s facing down at me.

UPDATE! A few months after building this monitor stand, I added another one next to it. Instead of attaching a 2nd monitor onto a single stand, I just built a second stand next to it, mounted on the desk. Since I’m stupid, the new stand is about an inch lower than the first. It’ll be easy to fix that, someday when I decide not to be lazy anymore.

There’s a rating system, similar to eBay, so you can rate both drivers and passengers with things like “10 STARS, he took me directly to my destination!” or “1 STAR, he drove me into a back alley and molested me!” You’ll be able to set up your account so that you’re only picked up by people who have “x” amount of stars. On a normal day you could stick with 8+ star drivers, but when you’re desperate, you make an exception for any driver available. Same thing with passengers, you can set it up so you’re only alerted to 8+ star passengers so that you don’t get mugged or driven into the middle of a drug deal.

There would be minimal cost to passengers since drivers would already be out on the road, doing whatever it is they do. Maybe drivers could even set their own prices, but ideally this could all be based on some kind of credits system, where you earn credits for picking up passengers and you spend credits for getting rides. That way if you’re both a regular driver and a regular passenger, you might be able to get away with never having to spend any money. For those that only take rides, they could buy credits. Credits could be exchanged with other members of the service, so you could barter credits for goods or services. People would start listing their stuff on Craigslist or eBay with things like, “Dining table for sale. Price: 50 ride credits, or best offer.” Kind of like those existing online bartering services, where you trade stuff/services for stuff/services.

Since this would rely on existing smart phones that everyone already has, there would be no new infrastructure to build. All it would take would be an app on your iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc. And I’m sure we’d work out a system for non-smart phones so that it could all be done via texting or by regular phone calls, like, “Press 1 if your GPS location is ________…”

This could become huge without government approval if an app were made for it for all the major smart phones. By the time government got around to whining that they’re not making any money from it, it would already be such a popular service that they’d have to accommodate the people who use it. Maybe they’d enforce some kind of tax on it, but it’d still be an awesomely cheap way to travel and run errands. Smaller cities would probably love an excuse to ditch their city buses since nobody ever uses them. Enterprising individuals could buy their own vans and make a living from going around and picking people up. Taxi companies would hate all of this and lobby for an end to it, but they would still have a few decades of life left from senior citizens that don’t know how to operate a cell phone.

If something like this existed, I would be both a driver and a rider. I like picking up hitchhikers anyway, and it’d be fun to have random strangers in my car as I drive to the grocery store or up to Salem. And I’d definitely use the service for my regular trips to Portland. That’s a 90 minute drive for me and at current gas prices, it costs me $15 – $20 just to drive to Portland and back. I usually park my car as soon as I get there so I can take the train everywhere. If I could “pay” half of that in credits, that would be awesome. And it would basically be free if I was giving people rides around town all the time. Eventually I would ditch my car if a service like this really took off.

And imagine having the ability to electronically hitch a ride with someone to take you across the country. The app would find people who’ve scheduled a trip to Florida and you could contact them to drop you off in Texas along the way. You wouldn’t have to worry about their car breaking down halfway there, because you’d just use your app to find a ride the rest of the way there from Arizona. You could also ditch that person halfway through the trip because they were annoying or listened to country music. I know people do this already on Craigslist, but this would even better.

In the end, a fairly large chunk of any given city’s population would ditch their cars because the service is so reliable. Even if a tiny percentage of the drivers on the road offered the service from their cars, that would still be a faster way to travel than by bus. Albany’s population is about 50,000 people. What if just 1% of the people offered the service? That’d be 500 rides available throughout the day. Compare that to the half dozen buses we’ve got in Albany, if we even have that many. Even 1/4th of a percent would be huge, compared to current public transportation. And the service could become so popular that we’d end up with a lot more than just 500 cars a day on the road. The government might end up loving the idea so much that they’d offer some kind of incentive for people to utilize the service.

It could go the other way too, though. The government might hate that people suddenly aren’t buying as much gas or paying taxes on their costly car repairs and they’d ban the service. Insurance companies might have issues with people using their cars “commercially.” Taxi companies would surely hate the entire idea and bus companies in big cities would too. But screw all of them! Somebody steal this idea ASAP and make it happen. And when you become rich from the idea, fly to Oregon and buy me a steak dinner.

I’ve posted before about how much I hate being such a slave to my car. Car payments, car repairs, oil changes, GAS, insurance, having to trade in for a new car every 5 – 10 years. That stuff really adds up. I would love having the option to ditch my car forever, and I probably will once my kids are grown up. Ditching your car isn’t an easy thing to do in a medium-sized town like this, though. Maybe by the time I’m ready to do that, someone will steal this idea of mine and we’ll have freelance bus drivers all over the road. Or maybe something like this already exists and I’ve just never heard of it. Hrmmmm, time to go look at my phone’s app store…

Sub7 was amazing. Not only did it have a nice, clean interface, it allowed me to do amazing things to random computer users, like see whatever their webcam could see, listen to their room through their microphone, watch their screen, control their mouse, type on their keyboard, change their Windows themes, open and close their CD tray, make official-looking alert boxes pop up on their screens, play sounds for them to hear, flip their screen upside down, reboot their computer, and so much more. I had a blast with this program for a year or two. I never infected a computer with the server software myself – I just scanned IP ranges that I found from users on IRC and from email headers. Nearly every IP range I scanned would find at least 1 computer to “hack” into.

I was surprised one day when my redneck neighbor Tom told me that he had been doing the exact same thing, finding infected computers and spying on them with Sub7. We became pretty good friends after that and regularly exchanged lists of infected computers with each other. I taught Tom to do more than just spy on users by actually having some FUN with them.

At the time, everyone used either Windows 95 or Windows 98. I created several kinds of “theme” packs for each system and uploaded files whenever I got into a new system. It would change a few of their key system sounds to silly things like farts or other annoying noises. It also changed their startup screen and their shutdown screen. Instead of seeing only the words “Windows 95″ on bootup, they would see added text which made it say something like, “A hacker has infected your Windows 95 machine and has complete control over everything you do! Have a nice day!” The shutdown screen displayed something similar. I had other screens that were a little more subtle, but I can’t remember what many of them said. I made at least one set of them that advertised phonelosers.org, thinking it would be great if people started emailing me because phonelosers.org hacked their computer. Surprisingly, these systems wouldn’t usually disappear from my list of infected machines immediately after I uploaded these images. Either they didn’t care or they just didn’t know what to do about it.

I built my collection of mp3 music with Sub7. I think at the time the only way to get pirated music was from Usenet. We didn’t have Napster or Limewire or torrents back then. There were FTP sites and IRC channels to get music from, but I just wasn’t into piracy enough to bother with all that. But when I started finding mp3 files of popular music on peoples’ computers, I began slowly downloading them on my speedy 56k modem. This, of course, slowed down their internet connection to unbearable speeds. Sometimes they would log off in the middle of my download and I would end up with an incomplete song, something I wouldn’t notice until I was listening to music and it would stop playing before the song finished. It was a fun way to build up a music collection though. And it was a really sad thing when I’d find a computer full of mp3 tunes that I really wanted, but they would log off before I could take it all and I’d never find them again.

I won’t even get into all of the personal data I found on peoples computers, but there was a ton of it. I read financial documents, letters to friends and family, diaries and telephone books. I remember reading this incredibly long journal that a guy was writing in Microsoft Word, detailing his sadness and feelings over the divorce he was going through. I popped up a window on his screen one night that looked like a standard Windows alert box, telling him to hang in there and it would all get better soon. I bet he was confused to have his computer try and console him.

I did something to about 10 users in Bend, Oregon that I’m not too proud of. I deleted all of their files. At the time I was involved in a battle with Tannest and she worked at her brother’s Internet Service Provider in Bend. So I would regularly scan the IP ranges for her ISP (BendNet) and when I found an infected one, I would log in and delete pretty much the entire hard drive. I would leave most of the Windows directory intact so that their system wouldn’t actually crash. Then I would pop up an alert box titled BendNet Services. It would read, “You are currently more than 30 days past due on your internet bill. We have removed all of your computer files and will not return them until your bill is paid in full. Thank you for using BendNet internet. -Tannest.” I used her real name, of course. I’m sure she had a tough time convincing the angry users that stormed into her office that they weren’t the ones responsible for deleting all of their files. I seriously felt bad about doing this to people, but the hilarity of pissing off Tannest outweighed the guilt so I kept doing it. After awhile I could never find infected BendNet users anymore, so I always wondered if Tannest started scanning for them herself so she could contact them and fix their machines before I got to them.

I also helped a lot of infected people in my local area. After going through their files and figuring out what their ICQ member number was (Remember when we all used ICQ? Ugh, past, I don’t miss you at all.) I would send them a message on ICQ, using my real account, and explain to them that their machine was infected. I’d direct them to a website that contained a program that would remove Sub7 from their computer so that nobody else could hack them. I made a few local friends by doing this, people that I kept in touch with for years afterward and even met some of them in real life.

I could make a user’s modem dial phone numbers by adding standard modem commands to certain files. A few times I would want to know the identity of a computer that I had access to, but I couldn’t figure it out from their files, so I’d command their modem to hang up from their internet connection and call my home. A look on my caller ID box would give me their identity. Once they logged back on, I would remove my phone number. I could set up their systems to automatically dial any phone number I wanted each time they turned on their computer. It sure was tempting to buy a 1-900 number and make computers all over the country dial my number.

It was fun era of pretending to be a hax0r in the late 90′s and early 00′s and I doubt it’ll ever be so easy again. It’s just too bad that I never used Sub7 to pull any truly epic pranks on anyone. I saw other people post webcam shots of computer users looking thoroughly confused at the weird messages popping up on their computer, but I rarely found computers with webcams attached to them. That’d sure be a fun thing to do today with everyone owning laptops that have built-in webcams and microphones in them.