Aimless Wandering

The last day of the month and I thought I’d be free…  But nope, Friday afternoon the e-mail came in:

“You’ve been selected as a urinalysis observer for Monday July 31″

Doh!!!

I’ve got to say after completing that task I’m so pissed off (insert rim shot here)… which I guess is better than being pissed on! :D  Thanks, I’ll be here all week!

This time there were a lot fewer poor souls begging to pee, and unfortunately a lot more souls who needed to be reminded to zip their fly!  Trust me, there’s nothing there they need to be showing off, especially to me!

Words can’t describe…

www.moonamtrak.org

Don’t worry, it is safe for work… Although some if the links on the page may not be.

So, if you’re going to spam a few thousand people in a phishing attempt, maybe you might want to do a little research first.  You don’t need to do much research, but maybe a little bit might make you more successful…

Take for example this message that arrived in one of my e-mail accounts this afternoon:

Welcome to AOL Customer Support

Dear valued AOL member, It has come to our attention that your billing informations are out of order.

If you could please take 5-10 minutes out of your online experience and update your personal records so you will not run into any future problems with the online service. However, any failure in updating your records will result an account suspension.

Please update your records before the 30 July 2006

Once you have updated your account records your AOL session will not be interrupted and will continue as normal . Failure to update will result in cancellation of service, Terms of Service (TOS) violations or future problems.

To update your AOL records Click here .

http://billing.AOL.com
© 2006 America Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Problem Number 1: This wasn’t sent to an AOL e-mail account!  I have an old AOL e-mail account from The Wife’s days as an indentured servant for AOL, but this e-mail wasn’t sent to my AOL e-mail account…  Oh Mr Fraudster, it may be time for you to GET A CLUE!  If you’re not sending out your phishing message to an AOL account, then you’re probably not sending it to an AOL subscriber, which means that the chances of you getting what you’re looking for are pretty slim!

Problem Number 2: Considering the amount of publicity AOL has gotten over their hard core, cut throat, don’t take no for an answer customer retention policies, do you think that an e-mail threatening to cancel a members account if they don’t update some information is going to scare anybody?!?!  Heck there will probably be subscribers who start jumping up and down yelling “I’m FREE! I’m FREE!” when they see this e-mail come in….  That is provided that the originator finally gets enough of a clue to start sending this to people who have aol.com e-mail addresses…

 Although, I’m sure some even bigger dope with a computer is going to click on the bogus link in that e-mail and enter their information, and have absolutely no idea how their identity was stolen….

So, when geeks with too much time on their hands get hold of a camera they do things like create a movie like Chad Vader…

When geeks with too much time on their hands work at a memory company and have control over that companies web page things get bizarre too. Head over to Corsair’s website and check out the Corsair Configurator.

To be as accessible as possible for all of their visitors there’s a part of the page that allows you to select your flag to change the language of the page… Which is really useful, but take a look at the flag in the buttom right corner… The Jolly Roger! Yes, you can get the Corsair web page to talk like a pirate to you!

They tend to make things like this…

Sunday was actually a pretty cool day… Unfortunately not comfortable cool, it was still a bazillion degrees (yes bazillion is a real quantity, it’s slightly more than googlpillion) in town, but we made the best of it… by leaving town!

We had tickets to a Giants game at PacBell Park SBC Park AT&T Park, soon to be called Identity Crisis Stadium!  Little did we know when we purchased those tickets on a chilly windswept day in March, that this outing would be an escape from the oppresive heat of our home.  It amazes me San Francisco is about a half hour away (without traffic) but is typically 20 degrees cooler than it is out our house.  They call the crazy weather patterns here “micro-climates” and its supposedly why the grapes do so well over in wine country.

Since I don’t feel like cluttering up the front page with this one post, you’ll have to click below to read more…

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If only Saturday ended with our return back from the scooter adventure… Oh no…

After coaxing The Boy down for his now 2 hour late nap we rehydrated  and such.

Once The Boy awoke we figured it was a good plan to hit Sears to get the filter that I failed to earlier.

No problem, we wander slowly through the mall, play with the new Apple McBooks at the Apple store, get some Orange Juliuses just chill a little before hitting the appliance department at Sears to get the needed filter…

Where we discover two racks of replacement filters, the rack on the left has filters that are all one size, and the rack on the right has filters that are all a different size…  Oh and even though the filters are different sizes, the boxes they come in all say “Fits ALL Kenmore, Maytag, Whirlpool refrigerators”  HUH?!?

A quick consultation with a sales guy and we decide that the filters on the left were the filters for us…  And of course we got home and quickly discovered that the filters on the left rack don’t fit in our fridge, it turns out that the filters on the right rack were the ones that we needed….  Yeah…

Just wait, tomorrow I’ll tell you about our trip to Pac Bell Park, SBC Park, AT&T Park where we got to see the other San Francisco treat oh yeah and the Giants too…

It seemed like a good idea at the time, set out this morning on a 15 mile ride up to the Vespa dealership to look at a paint issue on the scooter and then over to Sears to pick up a water filter for the refridgerator…

Even though it’s supposed to be a million degrees today (ok around 100) I’d be there and back before it got really, really, skin charring, pavement melting hot right?

It started well too, it was a little warm heading to the dealership, but not at all uncomfortable.  Definately a nice ride up.  When I got to the dealership they even had good news for me, the top box that we’ve been waiting 2 months for FINALLY showed up.

But it went downhill from there… rapidly…

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So there’s a story over on MSNBC about the PR department over at Fox News.  It’s interesting how they “wish some one well” as they’re chopping that same person’s head off…

Take for example this statement they made about MSNBC’s Keith Olberman:

Because of his personal demons, Keith has imploded everywhere he’s worked. From lashing out at co-workers to personally attacking Bill O’Reilly and all things Fox, it’s obvious Keith is a train wreck waiting to happen. And like all train wrecks, people might tune in out of morbid curiosity, but they eventually tune out, as evidenced by Keith’s recent ratings decline. In the meantime, we hope he enjoys his paranoid view from the bottom of the ratings ladder and wish him well on his inevitable trip to oblivion.

Ahhh… Heart warming wouldn’t you say?

MSNBC shares a few other gems from the Sunshine Squad over at Fox:

• Ted Turner. The CNN founder called Fox a “propaganda voice” of the Bush administration and compared its popularity to Adolf Hitler’s rise in Germany before World War II. Briganti: “Ted is understandably bitter having lost his ratings, his network and now his mind. We wish him well.”
• Tim Russert. A journalist asked the NBC Washington bureau chief whether Fox would get better treatment from the White House with Tony Snow as press secretary and he replied, “no more than they get right now.” Fox’s Paul Schur shot back: “Tim’s sour grapes are obvious here, but at least he’s not using his father as a prop to sell books this time around. That said, we wish him well on his latest self-promotion tour.”
• George Clooney. Fox News branched out to Hollywood after the actor criticized O’Reilly. “We are disappointed that George has chosen to hurt Mr. O’Reilly’s family in order to promote his movie,” Schur said. “But it’s obvious he needs publicity considering his recent string of failures. We wish him well in his struggle to regain relevancy.”
• MSNBC correspondent David Shuster. After leaving a job at Fox, Shuster said that critical reporting on the Bush administration wouldn’t have been welcomed at his former employer. Briganti came back with: “We can understand David’s disappointment in being let go by Fox News Channel, but he’s too young to be so bitter. We wish him well in getting his career back on track.”
• Jonathan Klein. On the day the CNN U.S. president was hired, Briganti offered: “We wish CNN well in their annual executive shuffle.” She later stuck the knife in further with: “We wish Jon well in his battle for second place with MSNBC.”

So I’m thinking that if the folks at Fox ever sends me flowers (like they ever would), I’m going to have them checkd out by the bomb squad first.

I’ve been looking over the latest dispatches from the War on Spam.  Specifically both here and over on The Mail Buoy.  I’ve got to say, so far I’m impressed with the results.

We were a little late to the battlefield over on The Mail Buoy, the bad guys were already crawling across the site harvesting e-mail addressed, attempting to post spam comments all over the place, even making bogus links to the site from their spam sites.

Over there it appears that the invasion has been contained.  Thanks to Akismet, I haven’t seen a Spam comment get to the site.  There’s been just 27 attempts to make spam posts to the Cruise Planners site since I installed Akismet.  That number is actually pretty low, however I think that’s due to a plug in called Bad Behavior that I installed not long after I activated Akismet.  Bad Behavior isn’t letting the spammers and such get to the site in the first place.  According to Bad Behavior, it has stopped 84 attempts by intruders to hit the site in just 7 days.

Now over here Akismet, and Bad Behavior were installed almost at the same time that I started this blog.  Both apps were running before the spammers even knew the site existed.  There hasn’t been a single spam comment yet, while 25 access attempts have been blocked by Bad Behavior in the last 7 days alone.  I think here, the onslaught as been stopped before it could even start.