The sad story of the lonely boy who "shook the foundation of the system."

Technology News: Security: Innocents in Spam War: "John Vincenzo, a Verizon spokesman, pointed to the anonymity of the complaints and went so far as to suggest they could be coming from spammers themselves masquerading as legitimate customers. 'When their spam is blocked, that cuts off significant income for them,' Vincenzo said, explaining a possible motivation."

IOL cannot send email to Verizon, and this dude just called me a spammer.

An amazing thing happened today.

Regular readers know I'm not a big fan of customer service hotlines in the Czech Republic. (Indeed, I'm generally not a fan of any situation in this country where you have to ask somebody you don't know for help.)

I happen to own a Dell Inspiron laptop, which I bought from a U.S. dealer with a three-year international warrantee. While I was packing to go the U.S. for Christmas, the CD-Rom drive fell out. Clunk. Hit the ground and broke. And stopped working entirely.

Yesterday I got around to calling the Dell service folks in Prague. They asked me for the number on the bottom of my laptop, along with my address and phone number. We'll call you back, they said. Yeah, right, I thought. And hung up.

This morning a dude called from Dell and asked me if he could come in ten minutes. I'm like, whuh? Come where? Here? To my apartment? Um, okay.

Five minutes later I greeted him at the door of my apartment with the broken CD-Rom. With nary a word, he took the broken one and handed me a brand new one and asked me to sign a piece of paper. I say that's all? And he says yes that's all. End of story.

Great nerdy game via Fistful, where you gotta pin the capital on the European country. Not as easy as it sounds -- I was frightfully off in many cases. I got Dublin within 14 km, though. Belgrade and Lisbon are also easy because they're marked by bays and confluences of rivers.