So That's Why It Took So Long...
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I'm sad to report that my attempts to obtain photographic evidence of the following were thwarted by the only thing available for taking pictures with being a cheap webcam, and I don't have a wooden table handy or the time to knock up a GUI interface in Visual Basic to enhance it enough to be recognisable (and can't be bothered with starting a Photobucket account when I don't even own a camera anyway), you're just going to have to take my word for it.
Anyway, my CompTIA A+ certificate and ID card arrived in the mail yesterday. The first thing I noticed was that it had been bent in half and stuffed awkwardly into the mailbox, despite the words 'Do Not Bend' being printed on the front in a typeface that could be read three feet away. This pissed me off mightily but isn't really important to our story. The second thing I noticed was that it bore a stamp saying, INTERNATIONAL. PRIORITY MAIL. US POSTAGE PAID.' Emphasis mine. Closer inspection revealed a return address for a company I've never heard of in Batavia, Illinois, presumably a contractor of some sort; I'm not sure what their role is in all this, because the certificate itself has no elaborate anti-forgery precautions and could have come from any high-quality colour printer.
I live over four thousand miles from Illinois, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. You'd kind of think an organisation with the worldwide presence and influence of CompTIA would have thought to hire more than contractor and/or staff more than one printing department. Like, say, one per continent.
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Pics or it didn't happen?
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Looks like NCSA possibly...
[url]http://www.ncsacademy.com/certification-testing/IL-Illinois/Batavia-certification.cfm[/url]
Are you in Britain? I have some other friends over there who have often complained about the wanton folding of non-foldables, seems to be epidemic... hope the certificate wasn't in a glass frame.
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@BlueKnot said:
Looks like NCSA possibly...
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do
I'm half crazy all for the love of you
It won't be a stylish marriage
I can't afford a carriage
But you'll look sweet upon the seat
Of a bicycle built for two
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Microsoft ships theirs from 2 Woodlands Place, Hong Kong; the only antiforgery on the certificate is that it needs to be print with an offset printer as opposed to some random Canepsmark BubbleJet.
Cisco ships theirs from the bowels of hell. Again, no antiforgery except requiring a publishing printer.
To each company their own, I guess.
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@TwelveBaud said:
For it to make economic sense to add anti-forgery devices to the certificates, they'd first have to actually be worth forging.Microsoft ships theirs from 2 Woodlands Place, Hong Kong; the only antiforgery on the certificate is that it needs to be print with an offset printer as opposed to some random Canepsmark BubbleJet.
Cisco ships theirs from the bowels of hell. Again, no antiforgery except requiring a publishing printer.
To each company their own, I guess.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do
I'm half crazy all for the love of you
It won't be a stylish marriage
I can't afford a carriage
But you'll look sweet upon the seat
Of a bicycle built for twoThe posts morbiuswilters was making on those last few threads just screamed "my mind is going". Looks like someone finally pulled the last module and he's resetting at last.
Hey, maybe morbiuswilters is actually in charge of the forum server, and all the bugs are just his way of saying "I'm afraid I can't let you do that".
That just leaves the question of what "morbiuswilters" stands for. I'm guessing the last four letters are "Troll-Emulating Response System", but I can't figure out the rest.
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@BlueKnot said:
Looks like NCSA possibly...
The sender's address on the outside of the envelope actually reads: C/O BFC, 1051 N. Kirk Road, Batavia IL 60510. They might be a contractor for the NCSA, I suppose.
And yes, I'm British. And I've definitely noticed a certain reluctance to use the 'Sorry But We Couldn't Deliver' cards on the part of our postmen lately; large packages tend to get left on the front porch if nobody answers the door, for example. I suspect some REMF in Management has decided to dock their pay or something if they write out too many in one shift.
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@The Vicar said:
@morbiuswilters said:
Made perfect sense to me. According to HAL's little speech:Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do
I'm half crazy all for the love of you
It won't be a stylish marriage
I can't afford a carriage
But you'll look sweet upon the seat
Of a bicycle built for twoThe posts morbiuswilters was making on those last few threads just screamed "my mind is going". Looks like someone finally pulled the last module and he's resetting at last.
[i]I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a... fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you...[/i]
Granted, Urbana is a different NCSA location in Illinois than Batavia, but it's a minor mistake.
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@BlueKnot said:
@The Vicar said:
@morbiuswilters said:
Made perfect sense to me. According to HAL's little speech:Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do
I'm half crazy all for the love of you
It won't be a stylish marriage
I can't afford a carriage
But you'll look sweet upon the seat
Of a bicycle built for twoThe posts morbiuswilters was making on those last few threads just screamed "my mind is going". Looks like someone finally pulled the last module and he's resetting at last.
I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a... fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you...
Granted, Urbana is a different NCSA location in Illinois than Batavia, but it's a minor mistake.
Yyes, I was aware of that. I just found it funny that the resident troll, who has become particularly nasty and prolific recently, posted the song.
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I wouldn't go so far as to call him a troll. Bit of a smartarse sometimes and limited patience with those he feels aren't as smart as he is, maybe, but I suspect he's not such a bad guy when you get to know him.
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@Jake Grey said:
I wouldn't go so far as to call him a troll. Bit of a smartarse sometimes and limited patience with those he feels aren't as smart as he is, maybe, but I suspect he's not such a bad guy when you get to know him.
I would have to agree.
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@dhromed said:
@Jake Grey said:
I don't. Whatever he's like in real life doesn't change the fact that in the months I've known him he's had nothing to offer this forum but juvenile attempts at asserting his presumed superiority. When was the last time we heard something even remotely interesting from him? How about an OP? Or a story from personal experience?I wouldn't go so far as to call him a troll. Bit of a smartarse sometimes and limited patience with those he feels aren't as smart as he is, maybe, but I suspect he's not such a bad guy when you get to know him.
I would have to agree.
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@DOA said:
I don't. Whatever he's like in real life doesn't change the fact that in the months I've known him he's had nothing to offer this forum but juvenile attempts at asserting his presumed superiority.
What in the world are you talking about?
In the short time you have been here you have only spewed completely ignorant crap on the forums. Your negative impression of morb and others is only based on their treatment of you due to your insufferably ignorant mouth.
@DOA said:
When was the last time we heard something even remotely interesting from him?
Sure looks like he struck up a great discussion in the conservation thread to me.
@DOA said:
How about an OP? Or a story from personal experience?
Not everyone posts OPs. You see, if you don't have something worthy of posting you shouldn't post it. It is certainly not a requirement for being involved in the forums despite what the flood of "zOMG look! An error!" posters think.
I know you don't suscribe to this idea, but I would rather someone have no OPs than the numerous OPs you have posted that are pretty much complete crap.
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@DOA said:
I don't. Whatever [morbius]'s like in real life doesn't change the fact that in the months I've known him he's had nothing to offer this forum but juvenile attempts at asserting his presumed superiority.
While his posts are usually clad in broken glass and white-hot flak then tossed forcefully into the receiver's face, there is solid content there. Try to look past the tone.
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And some of you wonder why I think you are complete shit-for-brains retards with nothing useful to contribute to this forum or to the world at-large. Perhaps it has something to do with people turning damn near everything I say into a flamefest? In fact, it might do well for you to actually read the threads once in a awhile. More often than not, I am not the one to lob the first insult or adopt a caustic tone.
Meanwhile, the song was a reference to HAL 9000, as some of you noticed. HAL was built in Champaign-Urbana but there is no major industry there, only the University of Illinois which has a very excellent Computer Science program. The NCSA is headquartered at U of I, and hence the connection to the NCSA of Batavia (which was really only a supposition). The joke was that HAL computers were losing their minds and mailing out certificates from illogical sources, just to fuck with peoples' heads. I'm truly sorry that this had to spark a flamewar. Not to the morons who started it, but to the rest of TDWTF community, to the friends and family of the instigators who must struggle with their loved ones' conditions on a daily basis, and most of all to the foul, diseased vaginas that these fine gentlemen clawed their ways out of.
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Given the numbers of offers in my inbox for "free batcheelors, maasters and doctoraates", perhaps the real WTF is someone paying money to CompTIA for a certificate...
Looking at some of my certificates, I suspect forgery is not going to be hard because they look like they were created in Microsoft Publisher by a nine year old.
B
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FYI, there's nothing wrong with " INTERNATIONAL. PRIORITY MAIL. US POSTAGE PAID"
It merely states that this was sent via International Priority Mail, and that the postage was paid in US currency.
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@TwelveBaud said:
Microsoft ships theirs from 2 Woodlands Place, Hong Kong; the only antiforgery on the certificate is that it needs to be print with an offset printer as opposed to some random Canepsmark BubbleJet.
Really? When I passed my MCTS, Microsoft didn't actually ship me a certificate, they told me to print it myself.
