This is a real error message
The message was just like this, including the exclamation points and the number one. It was on a browser tab for a book I was reading at Google Books: Topography of the County of Sussex. Grok tells me: HTTP 403 Forbidden means the server understood your request but refuses to fulfill it because you don’t have permission to access the resource.
Next time I booted, the book loaded fine. Somebody coding Google Books having a laugh.
Another hot, sunny day and I’ve been sitting quietly in the shade playing computer. Nothing but hot, sunny days forecast for as far in the future as it goes (which, for the record, is Tuesday the 11th of August).
Posted: July 29th, 2026 under personal.
Comments: 3
Comments
Comment from aelf
Time: July 29, 2026, 8:53 pm
More & more potholes like that are appearing on the information superhighway.
Just as access to, well, everything is predicated on that same infrastructure.
Comment from Uncle AL
Time: July 29, 2026, 9:52 pm
Yes, I confess, sometimes we geeks get off on practical jokes and having a laugh.
Years ago, I was an operating system programmer in an IBM mainframe center. (If you must know, it was GEICO almost 50 years ago.) That meant I had access and control of EVERYTHING. I wrote up a little mod to TSO terminal control and command pre-processor that woke up if and only if the user was my boss. If he used the SUBMIT command to run anything, my little program would generate a random number so that between one out of ten and one out of twenty times, the answer to SUBMIT was NOT TONIGHT HONEY I HAVE A HEADACHE would appear for three seconds and then disappear. And the randomness and long duration between events meant nobody but him ever saw it happen.
After a week, I removed the program and everything returned to normal. I never told him I was the culprit.
As we geeks are prone to say:
BWAHAHA!
BWAHAHA-HAAAHAAAHAAA!
BWAHAHA-HAAAHAAAHAAA-HAHAHA!
Comment from S. Weasel
Time: July 30, 2026, 4:35 pm
I used to work with a typesetting system that had the error message “any port in a storm.” I forgot what it meant.
I used to write jokes into the comments of my code, but there’s an absolutely 0% chance anyone will read them. Nobody will ever want to touch my code.
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Beware: more than one link in a comment is apt to earn you a trip to the spam filter, where you will remain -- cold, frightened and alone -- until I remember to clean the trap. But, hey, without Akismet, we'd be up to our asses in...well, ass porn, mostly.<< carry me back to ol' virginny