Michael R. Barrick

I had to replace he old computer I was using (a PII-350 purchased in 1998) as a spam filter. It had become too slow to deal with the volume of crap I get. Not only do I get the usual barrage of spam that everyone gets, but for nearly a year now I have been getting a heinous amount of backsplatter from spam-zombies using spoofed @gothic.bc.ca return addresses. The latest crudtastic tactic of putting the advertising message in an image is what put the poor little box over the edge after nine years of valiant service. Adding OCR slowed the processing down enough that messages were coming in faster than they could be processed. Time for a new spam-pig.

Given that I was replacing a PII-350 even the most bottom of the line machine out there now would be orders of magnitude more powerful, so I went looking for just that - bargain-basement last-year's clearance models. The clearance model I went with was configured for Canadian French. Not needing the keyboard nor giving a rat's ass about whatever OS was preinstalled since I'd be wiping it off anyway, French was not a problem.

I couldn't resist firing it up as-is though, and I was greeted by this très amusant welcome:

( Welcome to this Microsoft System of Exploitation )

And now that I have it and since I have an e-acute in my middle name, I'm now really tempted to use the French keyboard.