We are near completion of Week 1 of desperately wanting WoW and not having it. Going cheap-o on the shipping has to rate as one of my dumbest moves ever. I can't even remember the logic behind that move. I should take four dollar bills, frame them, and mount them somewhere noticable as a reminder to never be this cheap and stupid again.

Back in high school (early 90's) I wrote a program that stole usernames and passwords on our school LAN. Our computers at school didn't have hard drives, so you had to use a boot disk and all programs were run from the network. So I wrote a program in basic called login.exe that looked just like the normal prompt for a username and password, but then errored out as if the user had typed it incorrectly. Meanwhile their username and password were written to a file on the boot disk.

My reasons for doing so were decent enough. 1) I wanted to see if I could do it. 2) I wanted more network rights so I didn't have to bother the teacher every time I wanted to compile something. So while I was doing a "bad thing" it wasn't really with bad intentions. Anyway, my program worked flawlessly and within a week I had the superuser password and had given myself additional rights.

If you've ever hung around computer geeks long enough, you'll know we're a proud lot. There's a lot of one-upmanship that goes on about who can code what better and so on. How this relates to me is that I was so proud of my little program that I played games with it on other people and eventually I told my friends what I had done ... who no doubt told their friends ... and a week or two later I found myself alone with my teacher trying to explain why I had done what I had done.

The point of this story? You know that part where I had a great thing and I went and bragged it up to the point that I got caught? That was genius compared to my move of saving a lousy $4 on shipping.

Stupid.