Platter of Half Baked Ideas

 Here is the second article in my series of Tech issues which are stranger than fiction! The original article can be found here .  Here's a problem that *sounded* impossible... I almost regret posting the story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over drinks at a conference. :-) The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the whole thing more entertaining. I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department. "We're having a problem sending email out of the department." "What's the problem?" I asked. "We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained. I choked on my latte. "Come again?" "We can't send mail farther than 500 miles from here," he repeated. "A little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farthe...

 I recently came across some articles which prove that in the world of tech, truth is often stranger than fiction. Some of these articles seem like a prank or a joke, but the author assures us that these are true incidents.  I think these are too good and so, sharing these here on my blog as well. Here is the first such article - The Wi Fi only works when its raining!! You can find the original post here . That's what my dad said when I asked what was wrong with our home internet connection. "The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining." Let's back up a few steps, so we're all on the same page about the  utter ridiculousness  of this situation. At the time, I was still a college student — this was over 10 years ago. I had come back home to spend a couple of weeks with my parents before the fall semester kicked off. I hadn't been back home in almost a full year, because home and school were on different continents. My dad is an engineer who had already been tink...