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Tell us your naughty stories

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361–370 of 379 posts

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#361

Saturday, October 26th 1996. World Series Game 6 Yankees vs Braves in New York. I'm from NYC but had just started Fall semester away at Michigan State University. I had never had the experience of going to a World Series game and was not going to miss an opportunity to see one at home. I have no money, no ticket and no connection but hey, you never know. So with the Yankees up 3 games to 2, I decide to hop an Amtrak…

I wonder if the passwords changed. You could have made your $25 back, and then some.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#362
post #67

Six years ago my brother rented out a beach house in another state for the summer and would let me stay there with some friends. One fun summer week a good friend and I were enjoying the house to ourselves and decided to make a 7-11 run to pick up some much needed snacks and other provisions. When we got back from our adventure my key wouldn't open the door. Unbeknownst to us, this was the one time that closing the d…

Lockpicking skills come in handy in those situations. This reminds me of the time a friend got locked out of his car, but his trunk was open. The car only had 4 doors, however, so it wasn't much use. In the trunk was a broomstick, some rope and a, erm, we call them "parrot wrenches". Fortunately, one of the rear speakers could be lifted up a bit, so I fastened the wrench to the broomstick with the rope and slid it th…

I've helped people into their cars by using a hatchet blade to bend the door just enough to take a long rod and press the "unlock" button. I learned to do this on my own car, and would demonstrate to anyone who thinks that bending metal is a Bad Thing.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#363

Summer, 1st year university. I have a summer co-op position doing tech support, which of course bores me out of my mind. Leading to: - learning win32 apis and writing a screensaver that features the rotating bald head of one of the company executives. when the head bounces off the side of the screen, it plays a homer "do'h!" - mailing a screenshot of the output of DIR of the company's webserver in an IE window on an…

> I don't think that it was so necessary to embarrass him publicly.

A good lesson to learn, albeit at someone else's expense.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#364
post #18

I rode a motorcycle across Russia and several of the former Soviet republics eight years ago. You can't help but learn many useful hacks along the way. Here's one: How to deal with the police. Their work is boring and it's not unusual for them to go long stretches of time without being paid. They see you coming up the road-- They're curious and you look interesting. They motion for you to pull over and unless you've…

Reminds me of a friend's story. He had just moved to New York from a Texas border town in the 70s. Being a starving grad student, he was a white guy living in Spanish Harlem, a pretty sketchy neighborhood at the time. When walking home at night, he'd avoid the sidewalks and walk in the street so that he was less of a target and could see people coming. One night he was walking home and saw three tough looking guys no…

And that reminds me of a relative's story:

It was his first time at NY, and he didn't know which neighbourhoods were safe, so he went driving his rental car through some shady neighbourhood - and of course some shady looking individuals approached him.

He quickly asked in Spanish for directions, and the guys told him not to come back, as this was an "unsafe neighbourhood" and "their territory".

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#365
post #141

Surfed the zero percent interest rate promos on credit cards: rolled debt onto a zero percent card (thus not really making a payment that month because you just moved the debt around) and had lower payments until the promo ran out. Repeat with new promo on a different card. One I'm proud of but might not be counted as a hack here (not exactly naughty, but good for blowing people's minds, so similarly satisfying to me…

Timely. I'll be filing paperwork for the exact same thing tomorrow morning. Did you hit any obstacles?

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#366
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We did not really have an optimal betting strategy, at least nothing that can be proven scientifically, there is no such thing. Ah, but there is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion

The optimal (Kelly) strategy for Roulette is not to play. It even says so on that wiki page.

One of the nearby casinos offers me $100 match play fairly often, which is a little certificate that I put $100 of my own money on top of.

Let's say I bet black, if it lands red, I lose $100, if it lands black, I win $200, if it lands on zero, I lose $50, and have the opportunity to try again.

18/38 times I lose $100. 18/38 times I win $200. 2/38 times I lose $50, and get to try again.

Without doing the math, I believe that puts the value of the cert around $47.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#367
post #141

Surfed the zero percent interest rate promos on credit cards: rolled debt onto a zero percent card (thus not really making a payment that month because you just moved the debt around) and had lower payments until the promo ran out. Repeat with new promo on a different card. One I'm proud of but might not be counted as a hack here (not exactly naughty, but good for blowing people's minds, so similarly satisfying to me…

Timely. I'll be filing paperwork for the exact same thing tomorrow morning. Did you hit any obstacles?

My ex did all the research on the legal end of it, I was very sick and left that up to him. So I don't know that I can help much.

FWIW: In the state we were in, he wasn't allowed to deliver the papers to me. He looked up the options and we basically drove to his place of work one morning, he took the papers in to a coworker and the two of them walked back out with the coworker holding the papers. I signed them on the trunk of the car, while the poor coworker looked incredibly awkward and uncomfortable.

After my husband moved out and went to another state, at some point, I left that state with my two kids in tow. At that point, it came up that if my ex wanted to be an ass, I could be in big trouble for taking the kids out of the state without his prior permission. Fortunately, he chose to not make an issue of it but it was something that was a bit of a heart-stopping, you-must-be-kidding-me moment.

Can't think of anything else in particular. Hope that helps.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#368

I had a really hard time convincing a large, corporate client to setup such basic things like a version control system, a central bug tracking system, or any kind of project documentation repository. Oh, did I mention this was only three years ago? It's 2007 and you're not using version control? Anyway, one day, another consultant who sat next to me got laid off and the company's IT guys never came around to remove h…

That's a very similar environment to one of my consulting gigs. No-one wanted any progress to be made because it was easier to sit in meetings all day long.

So, I just did shit, hid it, and then sprung it on them later.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. That's actually how we managed to rent an apartment, since she was legally allowed to live there. I, however, was the stereotypical undocumented alien, living in the country illegally, not learning the language or integrating with the culture, stealing jobs from the local economy, sneaking across the border into the land of opportunity.

Not quite. As you were her bf, you have the same right as her. This is perhaps one of the benefits of being in the EU that in some cases you have more rights living in another country, that is spain, than in the UK, for a Uk citizen, especially in situations where a relationship with a person outside of the EU is involved.

Are you saying that "boyfriend" is a legally recognised relationship status in Europe?

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#370

At my highschool cafeteria we'd use these RFID charge cards which you could load cash into. Now, I didn't have the means to access an RFID reader to mess around with it, but turns out that there were other problems. Being the absent minded person that I am, I'd often lose these cards, pay some extra amount to get a new card, and then find the old cards in my pocket, in a bag etc. The old cards wouldn't work in the ma…

How did they know how much money to transfer if it was stored on the lost card?

They can't - if you take money of the card using a coffee machine, they don't know how about it unless they log the coffee-transaction, in which case the auther above was bound to get in trouble for getting free coffee.
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