I get what I think are weird questions, but they may (or may not) have a
sensible answer. Since there is no other good item for them......

16 responses total.

A newuser wrote me and had a lot of questions about using telnet from
Grex, as well as ftp, etc. I learned during the conversation that he
was telnetting in from Australia. After he brought the conversation
back to the same point a couple of times, I asked him why, if he can
telnet to Grex, why doesn't he telnet directly to wherever he wants?
He said only "Good point.", and went back to asking about telnetting
from Grex. How would you interpret this?

Maybe I'm making a mistake by assuming the worst about the situation, but
I'm guessing he was trying to telnet out of somewhere where he would be
less tracable, possibly so that he could do something for which he would
not want people to be able to catch him.  <sigh> Yet another example of
why we need to demand verification for outgoing telnet.  OTOH, maybe he
just wanted some variety in places to telnet from.

Unfortunately, I'm guessing that scg is correct.  Seems odd,
though, I'd expect someone with malicious intentions to already
know how to do those things.

I don't know if I'd call it a "weird" question, but one fellow
was asking me how to upload a tar.Z file, I was talking him
through the process, then in the middle of it he asked if
he was allowed to run a MUD here on Grex.  When I answereed that,
he said "oh ok bye" and left.  Bet we'll never see him again, I
thought.

A few minutes later, the same user writes back to me.  Okay, I
say, obviously I was unfair, he does want to learn more about the
system, he must plan on staying here for a while.

His question - "Do you know any free systems where I *can* run a MUD?"

And my all time favorite, not a question I answered personally, but
one I saw in someone's .sig file:

        Help!  I can't get anonimous ftp to work!

I had a helpee from Mexico who's keyboard apparantly didn't have an @ sign.
He wanted to send internet mail.  I set him up a little shell script called
"mmail" that does:

   mail $1@$2

and told him just to do !mmail user sitename

Got mail from him later:

>From macaulay Wed Oct  2 20:12:38 1996
>From: Guillermo Rosales Erives <macaulay@cyberspace.org>
>To: janc@cyberspace.org
>Subject: Thanks
>
>Hi its me another time, i am just writing to say thanks becuase what you
>did to my account it really works, now i can send and receive E--Mails
>and i am very interested to send my quote, because like people like 
>you and perrsons who did this program make possible to have an e-mail 
>without  an university and all that stuff, send me the direction and we will
>be in touch
>Thank you very much.
>Oh i forgot it i was talking to a helper, i dont remember the name
>but he says that was impossible to send a message without having that sign
>he say you were wrong, and he ask me your name, i said to him that
>i dont remember it just to leave hings like this. But congratulations
>See you.

Impossible, eh?

<sigh> *I* only get the ones who want to know where sexy sites on the net are.
(Other than real questions, I mean.)

If anyone was curious, I was the one who talked to him later.
If he'd told me it was you, I would have known that you had root,
and checked his directory.  As it was, he told me that you had said:

        mail robh cyberspace.org

would have worked.  He kinda left off that extra m.  Ah well, if it works
I won't worry.

I figured something like that.  Old professor rule.  If the student says "but
the TA said it would work if I did this" then it can be taken for granted that
the student asked the TA a completely different question, based on completely
different description of a completely different problem, and got a perfectly
correct answer which the student has wildly misremembered.

I figured it was something like that, but never having been an old
professor, I didn't know the exact concept.  >8)

I just had a helpseeker ring me up and ask:

   Sorry ik vraag me af hoe ik mijn naam kan veranderen o

I told him about chfn and he went away happy, but at first I thought he must
have his fingers on the wrong keys.

This response has been erased.

Very impressive!  We need to get rcurl to be a helper, he actually
speaks some Dutch.

Jan must too...or deduced it (ne said "Sorry (English), I'd like to ask, how
do I change my name?").

I speak some German.  I couldn't do much with the start of the sentance, but
"kan veranderen" is pretty close to the German for "can change".  I visited
Holland once and figured out that in Dutch "j" is actually a vowel, like "i"
or "y", so I figured "mijn" might be "my" or "mine".  "Naam" for "name" seemed
likely.  I fingered him, and his name was weirdly capitalized, so it semed
likely he might want to change it.

Most of the Dutch I've met seem to have pretty good English.  This guy at
least seemed to understand my English answer.

Lately I've been having "requests" that vanish.  That is, even in the short
time it takes to get to a shell escape in Picospan, I get EOF from them.  When
I write back anyway, one or two have written back saying it was an accident,
others have remained silent until I've finally given up & terminated.

Those happen all the time.  Plenty of people hit the wrong key from
Menu or Lynx, and don't know a graceful way to get out of it.

Dutch has some commonly used diphthongs - ij, aa and ui in particular - 
which make spoken Dutch harder to understand than written Dutch.

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