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Ants Invade iBook
xkranda writes "Seriously ... this is off the Apple Discussions site. Apparently some poor sap's iBook became infested with ants. All I have to say is ew! Ew! Ew! Ew!!!"
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Funny because a colony of Ants is kind of like Mother Nature's Beowulf Cluster.
Also, please don't mod me into oblivion for making a lame joke =)
OS X is full of bugs.
iAnts? *rimshot*
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
It seams that the server is infested also or is it /.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
I looked down and saw the ants on my computer.
I was like... hnuh...
The ants de-voured my computer.
It was a really good computer.
---
Ellen, once you feel the ants crawling on your skin, darling, it's time to seek help.
Ants are supposed to have a strange sense of magnetic fields and electric fields. Electronics give off a lot of stuff, animals are especially attuned to it. They have been known to short out traffic lights etc., by crawling inside and bridging connections. They use these fields for navigation and stuff. They are pretty precise.
big deal. What's next in the news: Birds fly into Windows server?
Come on, editors, watch those duplicate posts.
======================================
Writers get in shape by pumping irony.
(Spooky voice)"Wait, Captain--these are no ordinary ants. Your iBook has... Java ANTS!".
Well, that's okay then.
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
All I have to say is ew! Ew! Ew! Ew!!!
It's ok, you can get down off of the chair now, Daisy.
I know more than you drink.
Maybe the iBook was just on acid.
My deviantArt site
Thats one rotten apple!
True story -- I remember a report a dozen years ago of a person who took in her buggy Macintosh SE. It was full of cockroaches, eggs and everything. I have no idea how that could happen, or what the owner's concept of hygeine was. Maybe she left too many muffins sitting on top to warm.
I heard once about a problem like this before. A few cities in the southern US were having. Apparently, red ants would get into traffic lights' circuitry and completely destroy the stuff, costing a great deal of money.
It turns out that a few ants had got in there and fried. Upon their deaths, their bodies released pheremones, attracted more ants, who promptly got fried, releasing even more pheremones, attracting more ants... You get the idea.
I use to keep a P133 out in the garage workbench. I One day, I went out and the screen was black. I powered down for a hard reboot and got a few odd beeps and nothing else. I live in the middle of the Arizona desert and expected dust would eventually kill the machine. Turns out a fat ass black widow spider decided to melt her fat self on my processor.
Heh, I was browsing the apple discussion boards when things slowed down to a halt... So I thought, hell, I'll just read slashdot while I'm waiting for this to clear up... Lo and behold, I found the reason. ;)
— darco
iMac: Colonize Different.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
i used to have a 7200/120 that housed a roach family. that was pretty fucking gross.
i eventually had to take everything in my house and shake it out over a plastic tarp that i ringed with roach killer. some stuff had to be submerged.
moral of the story: never pay $180 a month in rent, anywhere.
go get it
Imagine if it were infested with nmake!
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
I had something like this happen once before to me to a cordless phone charging stand that was in my kitchen. Something with sugar in it got underneath the charger and the ants made the charger their home. I'd guess someone left something sweet was around the computer. I haven't seen the comment since Apple's site isn't responding.
:)
I just take the charger apart. Sprayed it with Lysol (yes this will kill ants). Put it in a plastic bag and left it. Next morning lots of dead ants. Then came cleanup followed by lots of drying. I also had to keep spraying for ants
until eventually they quit coming back.
However the charger is still working nicely for me.
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I just remembered, the second (or was it third?) big game released by Maxis on the Mac, long before the PC, was "Sim Ant"...
Revenge is a dish best served with mandibles and insect appendages...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Maybe the ants were in fact PC enthusiasts, set out to destroy every Mac in sight. Thank god this guy was able to stop the invasion in time, or this would have been the end of Apple.
VIVA LA REVOLUTION!
I don't see why this kind of thing should cause revulsion. Ants are extremely useful and interesting and they are usually harmless. If there is anything disturbing about this it's that such useful critters needed to be destroyed.
You're getting an infestation!
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Most disgusting tech support job I've ever done was cleaning ants out of an Epson ink-jet printer. This lady ate a lot of meals at her computer. Some food crumbs, like bits of jelly from her PB&J sandwiches, had fallen under the printer. The ants found this nice, warm place with a ready food source and moved in. And I had to get them out. Bleagh!
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Anybody see the independent movie PI? The mathematician's "super computer" gets infested with ants in the beginning and prompts him to make a deal with someone for the best chip out there in return for research into the magic number (sort of like the unified theory but different).
Was this guy looking for order in chaos? Did it spit out a 216-digit number before the ants infested it? Does he have intense migraine headaches?
But it does sound like some of the people in tech support. Between the human Bio-Hazards and the Goth's walking through the support department is quite an experience. customers are lucky it phone support.
No they just try to sell you car insurance.
and I was building a new colony in this Thinkpad, and, uh, like someone put a floppy disk in and it was like, beep boop bop, and our colony was, like, gone...
this sig deleted by another sig
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The ants outside my house measure in inches, they're red and they bite like a mother fucker. Did I mention they number in the trillions? On a hot day in september you can't see the ground.
Hippies in the 60's and 70's often recal tripping quite hard on the "moving ground" that happened to take their picnic away with them.
Mybe you like an ant farm. Sure they are cool to look at when they are a little 12x12 inch plastic picture frame type farm. However it's a very different thing when your entire 10 acres of land are swarmed by the fuckers who eat your horses alive.
they're features.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
I dunno, but for what it's worth, there's a green plastic $3 chair I got at Target that I keep out on my back deck. It's clean (plus I've cleaned it several times just in case) but for whatever reason, it has ALWAYS got ants running all over it. It's like they're attracted to the plastic or something, and it's really weird. I've always got a few ants on me after I sit in it. It's not like they're trying to set up shop there (it is, after all, a plastic molded chair and there's nowhere to hide)--- it's more like they just like to cruise around on the stuff. Weird.
Better than finding a worm in your Apple.
Or half a worm for that matter.
Ba bum bump
The interesting thing was they must have been using them for quite a while because many of the phones had damaged circuit boards in them which caused the phones to stop working, this is how the infestations were discovered initially. We had recieved no reports of ants in guests rooms from guests or housekeeping staff prior to the failures. A coincidence, perhaps. But very strange just the same.
to a windows-based notebook, instead of a macintosh based one. :)
Even the ants are switchers!
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
They should have taken over a Graphite iMac. Then the owners would have had a combination computer / ant farm.
Take a look at her switch ad. The second I read the parent, I was LMAO. Oh, if only I had points to mod it (+5,Funny).
Probably the first time a bug-induced crash was fixed just by turning on the Raid, rather than vice versa.
Come on, it's funny. I hear you snurfling...
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
Another Steve Jobs company attacked by Antz.
Is Dreamworks responsible?
What are the odds?
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
the first shippments of xboxes had roaches in them. my girlfriend works at funcoland, and when they cut into the boxes to unpack them roaches came skittering out and scared the shit out of them.
I want 2D games back.
there is an easy explanation:
read Ruckers Book: "The Hacker and the ants"
see also http://www.fourmilab.ch
I had a buddy of mine ask me to take a look at his computer. It had begun to make thumping/ticking noises when he would turn it on, and would not stop till he turned it off. I cracked the case, to find a quite dead and petrified rat inside his case, that thumped against his cpu fan. fuckin sick.. how it got in, and died in such a way to not stink to high heaven, I will never know, though I suspect someone put it there..
I'm a little tea pot.
Mike Myers was introducing another segment of "Germany's most disturbing home videos" when his computer was found inoperable, lying on the ground. He turned it over to find....Ants!
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
I know even though the debug seems lame thats how it all started in the end anyways. Bugs would crawl into the "supercomputer" short the vacume tubes and the tech would go searching for it.
Bad joke, but we are going full circle lol
Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 09:07:26 -0800 ...
...
From: TechSupp
To:
Subject: RE: ants in omniview switchboxes
Thanks for the feedback. This is a new one to us. If you have any problems
down the road let us know and we will replace them. I have forwarded this
info to the President of Belkin and the Product Managers.
Technical Support Manager
Belkin Components
-----Original Message-----
From:
Sent: Monday, November 27, 2000 10:24 AM
Subject: ants in omniview switchboxes
came back to work from the holiday weekend. noticed a stream of ants
going up the cables in the back of a rack in the server room. oddly, this
stream of ants was carring larva up the omniview cables, and appeared to
be entering the omniview via the dip switch hole, and then exiting withot
the larve. I traced the stream out of the building, then traced a smaller
stream down a hallway and to another room with another system with an
omniview. here as well ants were streaming in from outside with larve,
depositing them in the omniview, and exiting. I took both omniviews
outside and opened them. hundreds of ants and hundreds of tiny white ant
larve were in each omniview, apparently storing and guarding the ants
under the bottom circut board. nothing was hurt, so I shook/knocked/blew
the ants out, dissasembled the omniview, coated the case with ant spray,
let dry, reassembled, reinstalled, everything works fine.
it dosen't appear the ants were after food in either case. I think
something about the omniview gave them a home they felt compelled to store
their larva in. I just can't explain why they would pick those, and how
the so effectivley found the only two omniviews on that side of our
building. the omniviews involved are both SE 4 port, and are still
working fine.
-J.R.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Not exactly the same thing.
I had stopped using my Kenwood portable CD player for a few weeks, and a rather large spider made its home just inside of the CD viewing window.
I remember thinking, "What a terrible place to hunt for insects," but apparently I was wrong.
The spider was quite surprised when I pressed the play button...
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
As is "aqua" or "carbon" or whatever it's called.
Those Evil Geniuses at slashdot have "themed" this thread so that it has the visual look-and-feel of a Mac!
Nice work, lads.
I recall reading a story about something quite similar, only years and years ago. Supposedly, a college/university student had one of the original Mac powerbooks, and it suddenly died. Upon inspection, it turned out it was infested with thousands of ants that entered when it was in use outside, on the grass, someplace on the campus.
It just seems suspiciously familiar that this basic story has come back again, only this time with an Apple iBook notebook. (Statistically, you'd think you'd hear about this with a "Wintel" laptop, wouldn't you? Or do ants only like to eat Apple branded notebooks?)
I'm starting to wonder if this one's completely true, or just a rehash of an urban legend.
I had a friend who had to throw out an alarm clock because he couldn't get the ants out of it. Of all the electronics in his room, they infested that. He had a nice line of ants going to it too, like they were harvesting or something.
It was even better when he called his leasing office and told them ants infested his alarm clock, and he wanted them to do something about it. They gave him some advice, including "move your alarm clock."
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
Back when I was a Mac hardware repair guy, this person came in with an SE30 that would fail "only in the mornings". We thought it might be an odd time-sensitive extension like an anti-virus app, but we opened it up, and it had some big bug habitat in there. Even though the bugs seemed absent, their nests would collect the morning dew and short out the board.
So, I was doing my time, paying my dues and doing what I could to bring quality to the lifeless void that is a Best Buy black shirt technician (well, we became black shirts while I worked there). Anyhoo, this "woman" brought in a very old packard bell that was covered in yellow dust. A smoker. Some of the worse shit comes from smokers. As soon as she walked in the door, the AV tech told me to tell her to go away. My manager heard this and got pissy. She later recanted.
She brought her computer up and slapped down her PSP that had 20 or so days left and demanded a new computer because this one would no longer turn on. So I said okay, checked it in and put it in the back. When we opened it, a whole cock-a-roach family came running out. I almost vommited right then and there. It took WEEKs to get rid of those fuckers, adn even then we knew they were not gone.
Aparently about two months earlier this same nasty lady came in to the av area with a vcr for a "cleaning." When the AV tech opened it he found a dead mouse and silverfish. To this day you can find silver fish in that best buy :
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
when you leave an apple laying around.
This reminds me of the November 4th entry (scroll down a bit) on Paul Lujan's site entitled, "Ants Ate My Hub!". Pretty funny(?)...
--
http://www.aikiweb.com - AikiWeb Aikido Information
1) Power on laptop
2) Wait for smoke and insect screams to die down
3) Ventilate Area
Slashdot comments can be accurate, highly modded, or posted quickly. Pick two.
Wan't this a problem with that Pumpkin-puter that ran linux in halloween? I'm surprised that it's the second year I see this on /. without bug complaints. Other than OS bugs, that is ;)
;)
By the way, it looks like we'll have to replace that old kernel panic comment... "Penguin on the Bus?" to a more realistic "Pathway bug?"
"Wireless : LAN
Maybe they were stealing his time?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
"But what a disaster that laptop was. My god. I mean, it was near biblical proportions. Well, maybe not as bad as that, and certainly not as bad as the whole big thing with, you know, General Mandible, but still, it was pretty bad. I mean, we couldn't do anything we wanted, it was like the whole thing was fighting us. When we tried to build something it would crash down on us, and the whole thing was far too hard to defend. It was totally unsecure and just about anyone could waltz right in and make themselves at home. It was just, you know, bad.
"So we tried a new iBook. We love it. It's warm, and clean, and dry, and everything just works. It's the best, really. It's saved my butt. We moved the whole colony in there last week, and we're never going back.
"My name's Z and I'm an ant."
So when insects infect a Mac, can you just use ordinary Raid, or do you have to wait for Apple's soon-to-be-released xRaid? Do I detect the start of a sales campaign? 8^)
---
I have Unix underpants.
just imagine what her car is like. i bet she cleans her house once every 6 months or so, but honestly, would a person like that EVER clean their car? not likely
I've seen outrageous shit in peoples cars. Used condoms, doggy bag dinners from weeks earlier forgotten in the back seat, roachs (the ones you smoke and the ones you dont).
These are the same people that shit on the floor at gas station restrooms. Natural selection hasn't quite caught up with them yet.
I had a similar thing happen to me about a month ago. My brother's iMac started smelling really funny and then stopped booting. I pulled out the hard drive and saw a dime sized patch of melted surface mount chip material stuck to the hard drive carrier. Upon further examination, I found the head of a termite sticking out of a crevasse in the drive.
Maybe they were just looking to play SimAnt against the computer AI?
I'd like to remind them that as a trusted web personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
Last week a friend of mine's electronic gate stopped working. Ants had built a nest inside the control box shorting a bunch of stuff out. Just now I cleaned out about a quantrillion baby ants from under my BSD box.. Must've been some food crumbs under there or something. I first noticed them 'cos there was a trail of ants going from under the computer up to my modem and back. I can't see any food on the modem either so I have no idea what they were doing there!
I think they just like warm dry places to nest, and inside electronic devices is usually warm and dry.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
I fix iBooks in the computer store for Brown Uni and we had someone bring in an iBook that apparently had been vomited on copiously at some party. ALL over the keyboard, and inside the circuits. For some reason, it wasn't working! And they brought it in about 3 days after it happened....
shame on us / for all we have done / and all we ever were / just zeroes and ones
They're undocumented creatures.
I kid you not...
I once worked as a tech for an Apple Authorized Service Provider. One day we received a box from Apple containing a PowerBook we had sent in for service earlier in the week. Nothing unusual about that, we usually got one or two every other day.
Upon opening the box, however, we noticed something very unusual: something was moving...then another one, and another...the box had several huge worm like larvae crawling around in it! The buggers were a good inch-and-a-half long, a quarter inch in diameter, looked sort of shiny and soft, and they were just racing around the bottom of the box. Top speed looked to be around an inch per second... Fortunately they were too big to actually get inside the PowerBook. (How would we explain that to the customer?: Sir, your PowerBook is fixed, please come pick it up ASAP because it's full of huge shiny nasty worm-like larvae and we want it out of our shop...)
The closest we could figure out was that they came from Apple, unless they grew inside the PowerBook in less than three days (turn around time from Apple). Also, presumably someone at Apple would have noticed larvae while fixing the computer if the bugs had been living in the PB.
For the next few weeks we were kind of careful opening those boxes...
When I was doing my time as a bench tech, a guy brought in his IBM desktop, complaining that it had turned itself on, smoked and will not work anymore. We figured lightening. When he brought it in, it had the yellow staines of a smoker, but nothing else to tip us off. I opened the box and dozens of roaches came pooring out. We had to bag it up and call the guy, telling him that we couldn't work on his PC under warranty because IBM refused to pay for bug bomb! The roaches had curled up in his power supply, nested there and started eating the cables. To this day my skin still crawls when I see one of those IBM desktops.
www.linux-skunkworks.com
only problem is the dumb thing has those retarded "sleep" and "wake" buttons.
Username taken, please choose another one.
Any real computer geek would have put them to work.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
...then imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.
*ducks and runs*
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
I had a logitech ScanMan color - one of those sheet feeding scanners - it was great.
One day , though I noticed it had a trail of ants going to it... sure enough it was full of ants , nesting. They had completely covered the inside of the scanner window and were having a great time.
Solution? I unplugged it and took it outside and left it in the sun for a few hours (this was in summer, so it was about 30 degrees C). I just left it out on the grass in the sun.
The ants decided that roasting in a scanner wasn't good, so they packed up house and moved out. They did a pretty good job of tidying up, I just had to clean the optical path a bit, but all the eggs (and ants) were gone. Beat the hell out cleaning a bunch angry (or dead, after spraying) ants out of inaccessible scanner insides.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
My sister used to work in a fabric store, and quite a bit of product from India was sold there. Rolls would arrive all bound up tightly in hessian and card, and need unwrapping/rerolling to remove the inevitable kinks in the rolls from shipping. In the middle of a roll of cream fabric were dark red stripes - which sometimes happens when ink is spilled, and that part is marked and avoided when it comes to selling. At the end of the red marks however, was a 2" sliver of finger, complete with partial fingernail and bone. ugh. At least it had dried up enough not to stink out the place.
:)
My own personal worst was an eBay buy - a Mac IIcx that was bought "as is" as the seller had no way of testing it. No wonder, as it had been through a flood, was packed up with silt, and had a mouse nest up under the power supply, with lil mousey droppings n pee all over the place.
It worked after a (very thorough) cleaning
a grrl & her server
Ever read The Hacker and the Ants by Rudy Rucker? Covers this sort of thing exactly though his ants were a lot harder to kill.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I think it's pretty obvious why the ants went for the iBook. Whenever i go on a picnic, the ants always go after the fruit first, especially APPLES. I'm going to get modded off the board for this.
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
Ants do not have the sense of hearing so the hum would need to carry through material well for the ants to feel it. I don't think the vibrations from a clock would carry enough for ants to notice. Though they have amazing senses of smell, some people speculate that ants are attracted to the small amounts of ozone produced by electronics, others believe it is the insulating in the wires. It may be a combination of many factors that bring them there but any electrician can tell you stories of infestation. Just one of those things bugs are bugs.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
This sounds like girl-talk. Since when girls started posting headlines on Slashdot?
couple of things:
1) The person states that multiple queens were in the I-Book strike number 1, the only time you have multiple queens is when they are immature larval stages, the Princess kills off her compentition, finds herself a nice young hunk of a male, gets pregnant then flies off to start her own colony.
2) queens don't move, so they couldn't be in the machine... A queen ant is freaking huge compared to all of her subjects, it is highly unlikely that it could get into the guts of the machine itself.
3) He dissasembled his I-Book layer by layer... um (this may be old info) but notebooks don't really come in layers.
there were more but its late and I do not want to reload the story up, especially considering it is most likely fake.
There's a popular book by the same authors called Journey to the Ants.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
The reason that ants will infest electronics is because they are attracted by the heat generated.
Excellent! Now all I need to do is put electric baseboard heaters around my outside walls and the li'l bastards will march right into fiery death!
Trolling is a art,
Ants leave a pheromone scent-trail so their colony-mates can find them. Its like an invisible highway -- have you ever seen a trail of ants travellign two or three 'shoulder to shoulder' in both directions? -- bottom line, disincect (well) the entire area and dont put the ibook back there for some time... theve 'marked-up' the inside already.
Hopefully he realizes that his vacuum cleaner is now infected and disposes of the bag ASAP.
This reminds me of Rudy Rucker's SF book, The Hacker and the Ants. Go SquidBoy!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Now, I'm off to get some of those ant cups for my iBook; do you think plastic will do well on top of my processor?
I'm laughing so hard, I'm actually crying :-D
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
This "odorless decomposition" can happen if a small animal dies of dehydration, particularly after eating certain types of poison bait. And a rat can get in anywhere its head can fit -- that's a hole about fingertip-sized (so a missing slot plate or a fan gap at the bottom of the front panel would be big enough). If there wasn't any chewed wiring, I'd guess it was already 3 parts dead when it arrived, albeit under its own power.
;)
Unless, of course, you noticed this guy's roommate (if any) walking around with the most peculiar smile..
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
What he doesn't know is, his marquee selection tool is realling a bunch of ants square-dancing.
For those being invaded by streams of ants (who most often enter a building looking for water):
Ants will NOT cross a swath of diazinon granules (corncob-base *only* -- the newsprint-base type like Ortho doesn't work) and the few that try it won't survive the attempt. Also, two tablespoons of diazinon granules dribbled around the entrance to a hill is enough to kill the ENTIRE colony overnight -- and this even works with those aggressive mound-building fire ants. You can also use it to block their path thru cracks in concrete floors, etc. (Not recommended for any unventilated spaces where warmblooded creatures sleep, tho the weird smell goes away after a day or two.)
Borax is also reported to work, tho I can't attest to that one personally.
I like ants.. fried or in chocolate or anywhere OUTDOORS!!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I worked at a Field Force Automation specialist - we supported users with laptops and printers. We would swap out 2-10 items a week - new machines, new printers because the sales people in NYC were really hard on thier machines.
... well... It was finely ground bits of cockroaches! All the nice paper pinch rollers in the printer also kill roaches dead! So, we just tossed it into the dumpster including the shipping box. I think we marked it in inventory as "Scrapped for parts".
So, we replaced a printer - an HP320 portable inkjet. We got the old machine back and as we unpack it, there is a light brown dust falling from it. My Co-worker (and wife) passed the box to me and said "I don't want to know"
Coldnight
The floor, man! The floor! It is so damn ugly! Where in the world did you get that kind of floor panel from?
He should have just fired up Mozilla and watched as the Gecko started to eat them. Problem solved.
You can find it here
When you ask a Mac user to set up a "honeypot" machine.
That's one hell of an image. Thank you!
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
This got me thinking about my laptop. I got it for free from a government project (take obselete computers from companies, give them to schools), so I have no idea who owned it. And I'm getting paranoid about the thing now. What if the fan doesn't work because of dead insects blocking it? What if ants have been eating away at the speaker cables, causing really bad screeching noises to come from it? What if my friend's CD drive is locked shut by a corpse?
Uggggh.
Some time in 1995, hudreds of ants invaded my Texas Instruments notebook. My laptop never was able to fully recover from this since the ants have created an nest on the other site of the LCD. Although the ants were gone, the mono LCD screen looked pretty damaged.
This happened to me several times when I worked in California doing comercial and residental construction related stuff. Ants would come in over night and get into my Makita cordless power pack battery charger when I left it in charging. Other people at my construction site reported very similar things with their battery chargers. I never experienced the ants trying to nest in the chargers because I never found eggs, but they definitely liked being in there. It seems that the ants like the high frequency voltage, which gives them a buzz. I suspect that the ants like to get high, go figure.
I discovered a sort of rule to it some time later. In general, if you can hear it buzzing while it is charging, bugs might take a liking to it.
For those who don't know, Makita makes power tools, especially professional grade cordless power tools. Their signature is that they use a turquoise/blue plastic or paint housings.
http://www.makita.com/
Story.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Had Ant Attack for my ZX Spectrum around 20 years ago. It was cool.
Steve.
Last summer I had a colony move into my mailbox. I opened the box and there they were, moving in right on top of my mail, but mostly towards the back of the box. I dusted the queen, workers, and eggs off my junk mail and closed the box after getting over my initial repulsion (at least there weren't any fliers). The next morning I was going to evict them with a hose before the mailman arrived, but they had already moved out.
:)
Did the bugs leave a forwarding address? They still owe me rent
My cousin had a mouse living in his pc. he left one of the slot plates (the things that go over unused pci slots) and the mouse went through that. packed his pc full of dogfood. it pissed and corroded the metal. The reason he asked me to look at it was the mouse chewed the ide cable.
-Foxxz
A friend's old Powerbook (500 series) became a hive. They didn't know it, but all of the ants that had been infesting their kitchen were roosting in their laptop set up on the kitchen counter. When the machine finally died from the generations of life that had lived in their machine, they had another friend open it up and discovered that it was packed full of ant-hive. The ants themselves had moved on by the time they had the machine looked at, as it had been turned off since it began to malfunction.
Further, I myself have a power supply for my speaker system that from time to time becomes infested with the tenacious little bastards. This thing is packed with them, I tell you. To get rid of them, I always just unplug the power supply for a few days.
A US scientist has named an ant after Harrison Ford.
Edward Wilson has called a Central American ant, Peidole harrisonfordi, to honour the actor's conservation work.
Ford is Vice Chairman of the American society Conservation International.
Wilson, a Harvard University scientist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, has also named a shiny brown ant from Mexico, Pheidole mooreorum, after Intel Corporation co-founder Gordon Moore and his wife Betty.
The Moores are leading environmental philanthropists.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
[Cmdr Taco] The next posting was sent in by Lucas Bamberger of Mac-baden. Here he has come across an Apple Powerbook, which in itself is not so disturbing. Until it is turned over to reveal... ANTS! ANTS! ANTS!
[Cowboy Neal]
Now that's an ant farm of a different color!
Um, sounds great, we'll, er, be sure to visit, uh, real soon.
My wife would have a stroke at more than one spider at a time. I've talked her down a bit -- I kind of like them because they eat things I really don't like, and are beautiful -- but they are still escorted outside. Here, inside and outside are still distinct, though there was that raccoon I had to chase off a few days ago....
And they carried all my data to the neighbor's PC byte by byte.
Table-ized A.I.
I lent a joystick (an MS Sidewinder 3D Pro) to a friend. It sat at his house for a while, during which time I sorta forgot about it, and two months later I got it back. At this point I was really itching to play some Descent II, so I brought it in, hooked it up, and launched the game. Everything loaded fine and the game recognized it without a hitch, so I started playing a game I saved before I lent him the joystick. I was able to ignore the crunching noises every time I bent the stick for a few minutes, but when I looked back at the joystick, I saw ants crawling all over the joystick, my hand, and the computer desk. Of course I promptly shut down and removed the infested device, but the horror (and odor) I experienced when I first opened it up cannot be described.
Are you listening, Evan?
Now THAT's a fucking cool power strip. Screw the three dollar Walmart specials. Give me a junction box and some outlets!
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
Umm, hello? Are you really claiming that capitalism doesn't make everyone's life better, wise guy?
In a country where even the `poor' have cars, spacious apartments or houses, refrigerators, air conditioning, computers, and so forth?
In a country where even the `poor' have a standard of living which no other society has provided even to it's `rich'?
Nice try, wise guy.
(and yes, I'm posting non-AC now. Posting limit per day and all.)
What those of you who claim that capitalism is `breaking down' miss is that capitalism continues to deliver improvements at all levels of society, unlike any other system out there.
To give a clear example, the bottom 20% of society in the US in 1990 had, consumed, and spent as much (after adjusting for inflation) as the middle 20% had done in 1950.
No other system provides growth like that. That's why while you whine and complain, the `workers' (if such a term even makes sense in a society with as much social mobility as ours) aren't on board with your tyrranical ideas.
What he's saying is that the closest anyone in this country comes to being `fucked' is to have one car instead of two, two bedrooms instead of four, or a pentium II instead of a pentium IV. Even the `poor' have that much, plus refridgerators, air conditioning, cell phones, and all the other things that the poor in a non-capitalist system such as the Soviet Union could only dream of.
So if you want to call that `fucking over the little guy', go ahead -- just don't expect people to take you seriously.
Your kidding yourself -- there's no one in this country who couldn't have a computer (or a car, or a house), if those were there priorities.
If people choose to spend their money on other things instead, well, unless you're telling us that you have a right to tell them where to spend their money, well, that's how things end up.
The only thing sad about the situation is that it's exactly those who listen to idiots like you and blame others for their problems instead of working to make their lives better who suffer.
Fortunately for everyone, that's not very many, though it must burn you up that that's the case, eh?
They have claws and teeth! Geckos are insectivores, they are vicious little hunters. I used to live in Hawaii, we had hundreds of geckos all over the house. The would climb all over the place, but they loved window screens, because screens are where the bugs go. They would fight each other for the best hunting spots. Sometimes they would crawl on the ceiling and fight each other. I've had them fall on my head. My roommate's daughter hated them. When they climbed on the outside of the window screens, she would flick the screen with her finger, sending them sailing.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
In the winter, field mice are attracted to the warmth of the building. One of them decided to build its nest under the speaker of my AppleII! It was eating cough drops (wel, licking them) and leaving black poops all over the place. I took the machine outside in a plastic bag and let it out only to see it run back in the building within a second.
D'oh!
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
Actually, you're sounding like a spoiled kid -- unlike you, I have lived in this world for a while, raised kids, and the whole lot.
I understand that you're pissed that your father made bad decisions. Really, I do. But it's sad that you extend this into calls for changes which would only make everyone suffer.
The fact is, capitalism, as practiced here, has done very well at providing a baseline. All socialism has ever accomplished is to set a ceiling -- and to show how low the floor could go, as the system dragged everyone down.
You can hurl insults all you want, but `uncaring' would be pursuing a system which has already been proven bankrupt by history, instead of the system which has brought more people more liberty, prosperity, and democracy than any other in the world's history.
Sure it does, do you know how many geeks live in unsanitary conditions with soda and cookies all arround their computers? And since there is no help section for "My Computer is Infested" someone has to report on it.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
iBooks have more ant_ennas :-)
Or maybe because you take for granted all that you have, you don't realize that you're already living better than the citizens of any socialist system ever have or ever will. Now you claim that you're not living better than you are now because `the rich people have all the wealth', but that claim doesn't make any sense:
See, let's take it for granted that the claim that people like you make is true, and the top 5% or so of society control 50% of the wealth (what this means when the top 5% is a constantly changing group isn't clear). So let's do what you'd seem to like, and kill them outright and `redistribute' (it sounds so much better than `steal') their hard-earned wealth.
Well, if that's 50% of all wealth, than that's enough to take everyone else and double their holdings. Now ask yourself honestly -- if your wealth was doubled tomorrow, how long would it take you to spend this money and be back where you started? A couple of months? A year? Two years?
And then what? The new top 5% doesn't hold nearly as much as the last one, so you're not going to get very far by killing them too, and in the meantime, you've destroyed an enormous pool of investments which had been hard at work creating jobs, growing new technologies and so forth, so everyone is doubly hurt by your plan.
Sure looks to me like you haven't thought this through all the way...
You argue that capitalism `hasn't been good' to your family, even as they enjoy a standard of living unheard of in the world's history, and miles beyond that enjoyed in any socialist state ever.
And then you suggest that we dismantle the engine which got us this far, and is getting us farther with each generation (you live better than your father ever did, and your children will have more than you do) in search of some pie-in-the-sky `redistribution' scheme, whose results history has already shown us a dozen times over to be tyrrany and disaster.
I guess you haven't really thought about this too much, have you?
i have always hear that you could lock a coloney of roaches in a tank with a TV and they could thrive... they may just need a lil water and air, but the TV is enough nutrition for them. maybe we should take big (escape-proof please) tanks of roaches and dump in all those old computers that are going to infect landfills.
The only time you have multiple queens is when they are immature larval stages, the Princess kills off her compentition, finds herself a nice young hunk of a male, gets pregnant then flies off to start her own colony.
I'm guessing you haven't lived in California where they are all just one big huge colony. I had the garbage bin under my sink infested once. I counted around 5 queens. They *were* huge compared to the rest of the thousands of worker ants. Granted, they didn't move that much (compared to the workers). They will not attack each other if you shovel one colony onto another.
"Would you rather have a playstation addicted dork wearing a star wars t-shirt?"
First off, a lot of rich people do indeed get there with hard work -- the number of millionaires in this country, for example, has been growing by leaps and bounds for years now, and even the fortune 500 has a fair amount of recent wealth in it.
But that's completely beside the point -- by obsessing on the idea that someone, somewhere might have more than you, you are both a.) ignoring the opportunities and wealth which you have in this society which you wouldn't have in any other society, and b.) ignoring the fact that this society, unlike others actually uses the wealth of the rich to produce wealth at all levels of society.
In short, you're laboring under two misconceptions: