10) Believes the Linux penguin is after him

9) Lapses into Klingon whenever he gets excited

8) Spends hours trying to get to the end of recursive "GNU's Not Unix!"

7) Wears funny jumpsuits, refers to parts of his body as Captain Kirk or Scotty

6) Walks around chanting, "All your base are belong to us," even though this is no longer hip nor cool

5) Swears his laptop is infected by the SARS virus

4) Suggests a wholesale network transition to ArcNet

3) Changes home page to a page that just says <META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="0;URL=die.htm">

2) Really wanted to be one of the Dell interns in the TV commercials

1) Keeps a pair of oven mittens in his toolbox so he can change hot-swappable drives on the fly

[We invite you to check out our list of completely certifiable Top 11 submissions]

Thanks to Tim Barrett, Neil Brown, Jody Marc Cohn, Gary Feeney, Hector Fernandez, Nick Nielsen, Stefano Papayannis, Rich Pilcher and Tom Przybylski for their submissions.



The BOFH
It's 6:45 a.m. and I'm about to leave for work when the phone rings. A user's computer is typing gibberish by itself in Excel: "Askjf is buy j;lsdfj running sdk the as;lkf sad bad epe sdfpdsf from lskdf making yousjj," the user recites to me. "Do you think I have a virus?" he asks. Then, panicked, he adds, "The word 'Hamas' just came up on my screen! Could it be a terrorist virus?" After a moment of deep computer-geek concentration I ask, "Is the microphone still hooked up to your PC?" "Yes," he replies. "Is your text-to-speech on?" After a long pause I hear, "Click, click."

Luckily I remembered setting him up with the microphone and Microsoft Text to Speech software a month earlier. But I almost wrecked my car getting to work because I was laughing so hard.

Thanks to Paul Talbert for his submission.



Our Favorite 404 Page

404 error screenshot click to enlarge

The photo connoisseurs at the Lomographic Society International (www.lomography.com) have created a 404 error page that speaks to the real problem behind broken links, saving the rest of us countless hours of therapy.

Thanks, Lomo guys!



Find more Last Mile items and submit your entries for upcoming issues at www.nwc.com/go/lmile.html.