» Sticking it to The Man

Purely psychological and totally petty.
A forum I frequent used to be dominated by a regular who was normally reasonable and intelligent; however, sometimes he would become a frothing egomaniac and take a completely irrational, vehement dislike to certain people. Anyone who tried to stand in his way (i.e. defuse the situation) was guaranteed to receive threatening private messages and/or a request for their immediate banning. Naturally, this created quite a sour atmosphere.

As time went on, he got more and more power-crazy. One of the things he liked to do was obsessively search for his own name, and have the last word with anyone who had mentioned him in a less than complimentary fashion. Often, these threads would be days old and so no-one would see his sparkling wit, but the important thing was that he'd had the last word. At some point, I heard about his ego-searching and decided to throw a (rather small) spanner in the works.

If you used the search engine on this forum, it would look through the entire message for the text you were searching for - including all the special tags (bold, underline, image embed etc.) that aren't normally visible. One of these tags allows you to create a hyperlink; on b3ta, which uses standard HTML, you insert such a tag by including <a href="link to website goes here"> text goes here </a> in the message. Like this. Now when you click "post", the tags in your message are reduced to a standard format before what you typed in actually gets posted. However, the hyperlink tag is left unaltered, and it is entirely up to the poster to make sure their link points to a valid website. And if there is no text in between <a href="..."> and </a>, the link will be completely invisible. Like the one at the end of this sentence.

So by copy/pasting <a href="this user's name"></a> into every single post I made, I mananged to fill his ego-searches with completely irrelevant results. I've no idea how effective it was, but the thought of him sitting at his desk, searching for his own name, clicking through page after page after page of rubbish, slowly getting angrier and angrier generated enough amusement to keep on doing it till he left.

By the way, if you know of any online egomaniacs/self-proclaimed authority figures like this, please feel free to try this on them.
(Sat 19th Jun 2010, 12:27, More)

» Good Advice

If you're about to work in a room that has a local exhaust ventilation system and a door with an airtight seal,
check BEFORE you shut the door that the fan's not cranked up to its highest setting, or else this will happen:

                        ^^^^ direction of air flow

                        |~ |

                        | ~| <- LEV drawing air through the grate at 70 mph

                        |~ |        and creating a vacuum

         OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO| ~|OOOOOO

         OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO|~ |OOOOOO <- Soundproof working area with 

         OOO you        | ~|   OOO    no way to turn off the LEV from inside

         OOO |          |~ |   OOO

   BLAM \||  v         /~ ~ \  OOO

  BLAM --||\ O        /~ ~ ~ \ OOO

   BLAM /|| \|        ~ ~ ~ ~  OOO

         ||  |       ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ OOO

 door -> ||  |      ~ ~ ~ ~ ~  OOO

         ##~/~\~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ OOO

grate -> ##/~ ~\~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~  OOO

         ##| ~ ~\~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ OOO

         OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

(Thu 20th May 2010, 19:37, More)

» Rock and Roll Stories

I nearly got fucked by James Blunt
I mean, £40 for a ticket?! You must be joking.
(Thu 29th Jun 2006, 20:01, More)

» Anonymous

I must thank the unknown person at the Heckmondwike bus depot
who altered one of the buses so instead of just listing the calling points, the scrolling text under the destination now displays an assortment of Yorkshire talk like "Well ah'll go to t'foot of ahr stairs", "See all, 'ear all, say nowt. Eat all, sup all, pay nowt" and "if tha' does owt for nowt, allus do it for thissen". The one on the back says "Ey up it's t'283". It never fails to make me grin, especially if I'm stuck in heavy traffic and see it inching down the other carriageway.
(Wed 20th Jan 2010, 21:21, More)

» The thing I've been most ashamed of doing with a penis

Giving it the gift of sentience,
allowing it to apply for the job of Head of Comedy at Channel 4, and allowing it to approve the hiring (and subsequent heavy rotation) of Justin Lee Collins, Alan Carr and Russell Brand.

For that I can do naught but apologise.
(Thu 12th Mar 2009, 21:53, More)