It’s all over the Japanese news today:
A local council employee in Japan has been punished after it was discovered he had accessed porn websites at work more than 780,000 times in nine months.
This is one of those stories that you just go, “Wow, what a perv” over. But something is fishy here: This guy would have had to do nothing but click on porn sites continuously for nine months in order to rack up the numbers they’re claiming. For the 177,000 hits in July, assuming an 8-hour workday, he would have had to open a new porn web site once every three seconds, non-stop, full-time. While this is not impossible, it is highly improbable, to the point where I cannot accept the clearly-implied conclusion.
My boss is dealing with malware on his computer which is automatically taking him to all kinds of spam and porn sites, and if you’re using IE6 with factory settings, then it is likely that closing one window will result in a large number more opening up. The windows open very quickly like this, and even if you hold down the shortcut keys nearly continuously, the right spam script will keep opening them up just as quick if not quicker. It’s quite something to witness, in fact.
What I can imagine is that this guy had such a malware infestation, which his anti-virus software missed and allowed to stay, and the guy, bored out of his gourd with meaningless make-work, spent maybe a half hour each day just playing IE6 Porn Pachinko, watching the windows open and close, maybe even making a game of it. Certainly not productive, but I’ll bet that he didn’t get any less work done relative to what was expected, or perhaps performed by his colleagues.
Surely the media is having fun with this, but there is no mention of any evidence other than the web hits for July and for the 9-month period, and the penalty (a demotion and a $200/mo. pay cut); everything else is pure conjecture. One can only guess that the papers figure this is attractive copy and everyone can have a laugh at his expense.
One way you can tell a news story is brewing is if helicopters start to circle, like buzzards in the desert. As I exercised this morning, I first noticed the buzz over the music from my iPod, and then saw the helicopters, two or three of them, circling Ikebukuro Station. On the way to work, with little time to spare for distractions, I took a side route which bypassed the station so any potential traffic jam wouldn’t slow me down.
And sure enough, the story was there in the news tonight:
Bus plows into pedestrians on sidewalk at Ikebukuro Station
A bus ran onto a sidewalk at Ikebukuro Station in downtown Tokyo on Friday afternoon, slightly injuring three pedestrians, police said.
None of them were hurt badly. I am sure the cameramen on the helicopters were disappointed, despite circling over the area for more than half an hour.
The reason I had no time to spare was that I had to go in to work, grab the boss’s computer, and along with my own, take it down to the Ginza. Not newsworthy, but worthy of pointing out: I love the Genius Bar feature at the Apple Store. Made an appointment last night in less than a minute, and walked in to the store, and saw a tech support person within a few minutes. Less than half an hour later, both computers were fixed. The problem with both: dead batteries. My boss’s had been dead for some time, he just never got around to changing it. The school picked up the tab for that one.
My own computer’s battery had gone from normally functioning to nearly dead within just a few weeks; leave it unplugged for five minutes, and suddenly the power goes out and the thing shuts down–and when I restarted, I had to always reset the clock, re-certify my email domains, and re-input all the passwords. Several times that happened when the power connected came lose when slightly jarred.
That they replaced–free of charge. Apparently, it is a symptom of recalled batteries. My original battery had worked fine for a year, then I got it swapped with a new one when a recall was announced; that worked fine until just a few weeks ago, and now I have another new free battery. Cool.
But the nice thing is having the option of going to the Genius Bar. It was not wholly clear that the problem with either computer was a bad battery–it could have been a power supply issue or something, and ordering new $150 batteries would have been risky. Calling tech support would have entailed the support person spending an hour running me through pointless tests, and then insisting I wipe the hard drive and re-install the entire system before they did anything. Not having the Genius Bar would mean shipping the computer off and not having it for a week or more.
But with the Genius Bar, it was a short, 1-hour jaunt to the Ginza, and access to free goodies that usually come with the personalized service. Had I asked them to replace the “a” and “s” keys on my keyboard–they’re getting pretty worn after three years–I am sure I could have gotten it. They replaced my command key cap last time I went.
I always regret not lugging my camera around with me. I would just buy a cheap 3- or 5-megapixel camera, except I expect there’ll be one in the iPhone I expect to buy in July (if my read of DoCoMo’s new mobile make-over is correct). But because I didn’t have a camera with me today, I didn’t get a photo of a Chinese restaurant near Shinjuku Gyoen-mae Station, named:
Chin Goo
I’ll get it next time.
Oh, wait, I forgot that someone must have photographed it and put it up on the web already; here it is via Google Image Search. Not a great photo, though, I’ll still snap my own sometime soon.