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That's why Mike Jittlov, creator of one the Best Damn Movies Ever Made, wrote his own birthday jingle and expressly entered it into the public domain.

Schwab

So - is it just me, or did Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, just make it possible for the "Good Times" virus to work as advertised -- in all of it's myriad variations!

An AC tells me that the calculator I'm referring to is the CURTA calculator. Looks like some shweet high-tech stuff to me.

From the Good Times virus hoax FAQ, the original message announcing the Good Times virus read:

Thought you might like to know...

Apparently , a new computer virus has been engineered by a user of America Online that is
unparalleled in its destructive capability. Other, more well-known viruses such as Stoned,
Airwolf, and Michaelangelo pale in comparison to the prospects of this newest creation by a
warped mentality.

What makes this virus so terrifying is the fact that no program needs to be exchanged for a new
computer to be infected. It can be spread through the existing e-mail systems of the InterNet.

Luckily, there is one sure means of detecting what is now known as the "Good Times" virus. It
always travels to new computers the same way - in a text e-mail message with the subject line
reading simply "Good Times". Avoiding infection is easy once the file has been received - not
reading it. The act of loading the file into the mail server's ASCII buffer causes the "Good
Times" mainline program to initialize and execute.

The program is highly intelligent - it will send copies of itself to everyone whose e-mail
address is contained in a received-mail file or a sent-mail file, if it can find one. It will
then proceed to trash the computer it is running on.

The bottom line here is - if you receive a file with the subject line "Good TImes", delete it
immediately! Do not read it! Rest assured that whoever's name was on the "From:" line was
surely struck by the virus. Warn your friends and local system users of this newest threat to
the InterNet! It could save them a lot of time and money.

The Good Times virus described by that message never existed. You can claim that the message itself is a virus, but then it wouldn't be the Good Times virus, it would be the "meta-Good Times virus." (And if I get you to repeat this description to your friends, you could call that the "meta-meta-Good-Times virus," and then they could spread the "meta-meta-meta-Good-Times virus" and so on... GEB, here we come! =])

cot

In case anyone believes the above, here's a link to the Good Times Virus Hoax FAQ.

Geddit? (Goddit.) Good!

1) First, you have to have a personal home page which is regularly updated. I haven't updated my personal home page in quite a while- it was really just a very short exercise in HTML- but I still access it almost daily. I have links to Alta Vista and Deja.com which use the text-only interfaces. I use them all the time. It's here just in case anyone's interested. Does incrementing some web counter count as "regularly updated"?

2) For my personal home page, I was only allowed access to two scripts provided in my ISP's cgi-bin. If you wanted your own cgi-bin, you needed to buy a commercial account. How many other personal home pages have similar restrictions?

Even though I don't have anything worth indexing, I have to wonder just what Alta Vista's thinking with this.

The Good Times "social virus" is one of the best examples of an effective, low effort hacks.