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  • The more random and stupid the email, the better.

    written by

    james

    And I’ve been known to get some pretty decent random, and stupid, emails. I got this one last Wednesday.

    From: spam@email.address.removed
    Date: Wed 11/18/2009 10:12 AM
    to: undisclosed-recipients:
    Subject: RE: SHIPMENT AUTHENTICATION REQUIRED

    Head Office Branch
    Plot 84, Ajose Adeogun Street
    Victoria Island, Lagos, Nigeria.

    RE:YOUR PAYMENT NOTIFICATION
    From:Dr Paul Smith.
    Remittance Manager.
    Zenith Bank Of Nigeria.
    Attention:Beneficiary

    This is to officially inform you that we have verified your contact file presently in our database, as regards your African Union (AU)solidarity fund that was awarded to you upon been one of the lucky Beneficiary in its last draw on the 9th of November 2009.
    This award is funded by the African Union( AU) so as to strengthen tires between Africa and the rest of the world with particular reference to Nigeria.
    We have discovered you have not received your payment due to your lack of co-operation and not fulfilling the obligations giving to you in respect to your contract payment.
    Secondly, you are hereby advised to stop dealing with some non-officials in the bank as this is an illegal act and will have to stop if you so wish to receive your payment immediately. After the board meeting held at our headquarters, we have resolved in finding a solution to this problem, and as you may know, we have arranged your payment through our SWIFT CARD PAYMENT CENTRE in Europe, America,Africa and Asia Pacific, which is the instruction given by our president, ALAHAJI USMAN AMIR YARADUA (GCFR) Federal Republic of Nigeria.

    This card center will send you an ATM CARD which you will use to withdraw your money totaling to a tune of $7.000.000.00 (Seven Million Dollars) in an ATM MACHINE in any part of the world, but the maximum is ($2,000) per transaction. So, if you like to receive your fund this way,reply to this office immediately for the issuing of your (ATM) CARD with the below Information.

    (1) Name:
    (2) Address:
    (3) Phone:
    (4) Age:

    Alternatively, you can come down to the header address to claim your fund with the original notification mail that will be sent to you shortly.
    We shall be expecting to receive your information you have to stop any further communication with anybody or office apart from this office of the presidency.
    On this regards, do not hesitate to contact me for more details and direction, and also please do update me with any new development.
    Thanks for your co-operation.

    Best Regards,

    Dr Paul Smith
    Remittance Manager
    Zenith Bank Of Nigeria.

    Note: Because of impostors, we hereby issue you with our code of conduct, which is (202) so you have to indicate this code when contacting or emailing this CARD CENTER and remember that there is a $100 charges for openning your non-residence and we would advise you not to reply to these e-mail if you do not have the said fee for openning your non-residence account.

    Were this email actually legitimate, and were I actually entitled to any amount of money, and were it in fact due to be coming to me ASAP from some overseas establishment, I doubt they’d be sending me a poorly written email about it. But, since neither of those “if”s appear to be true, and the email in question looks as though a 4th grader had a crack at writing it, it gets the spammer stupidity award for November, 2009. Sometimes, 419 scams amuse the royal hell out of me. But just sometimes.

    Also: If anyone *does* actually want to send me 7 million dollars, I won’t say no. Just don’t tell me via email.

    ,

  • Maple Leafs 2, Capitals 1.

    written by

    james

    So they do know how to win. Or at least, how to pretend to win. And in a shootout, of all things–that’s been a problem for them since they introduced the bloody thing back in 2005. Well into the season’s second month, and we’re the proud owners of a 4th win. Compare that with way too many losses and we have a small problem. Still, at least we won this one. I was afraid we’d have to drop another 10 first. At the risk of sounding way too optimistic, I hope it’s a sign we’re turning around a little. Although, the logical part of me–the part I usually try to shut up on account of it makes too much goddamn sense–is already saying don’t count on it. Sometimes, I hate logic.

  • Hurricanes 6, Maple Leafs 5.

    written by

    james

    Uh. What? How in the hell did we go from a 3-goal lead at the end of the second period, to… to… well… losing. In a shootout. Badly. We just don’t do that. Like, at all. Against Carolina, of all freaking teams. Carolina. Loser of 14 straight at one point. I think they might actuallh possess the same number of, if not more, wins than us. And we were winning. Please, please tell me this season’s almost over. Or at least tell me we’re getting a new team.

    Last match

    The Hurricanes came to Toronto a few weeks ago, and much to my surprise, at which point they rather got soundly beaten. We played probably only slightly better then, and managed to get out of there with 2 points. We show up in Carolina, play like we plan to soundly beat them even more so, and then… promptly fall asleep at the wheel. Huge difference a couple weeks makes. I’d like the team from a couple weeks ago back, please.

  • I am so here.

    written by

    james

    As the title says, I made it here intact and about 5 minutes ahead of schedule. We were supposed to be in by quarter past midnight, but ended up actually pulling in at about 10 past, give or take delays. Most of Friday night was spent being all manner of lazy, and just catching up. Well, that and sleeping. Yesterday consisted of hanging with Julie and her husband for the better part of the evening. We came to the not too surprising realization that as a general rule, blindness organizations suck for anything beyond good PR. Not that we didn’t already know this, but y’know. Shooting the shit with them lasted a couple hours before we packed it up and headed back to Jess’s apartment. There was sleep to be had, and a nice, healthy dose of relaxation. And the random conversation among other things didn’t hurt matters any either. Today’s been relatively low key–most of it was spent doing not a whole lot, and now we’re sort of contemplating exactly how much effort to put towards dinner.

    I did get a chance to show off the new phone this weekend–the same phone that approximately half this post was written on before the battery finally gave out, and the general consensus matches mine–the phone, in all its unvelieveable thinness, still kicks wicked ass. Folks who follow my Twitter feed will note I was able to update multiple times throughout the trip, even on the US side of the border. I happened to be on one of Greyhound’s attempts at a newer bus–and, let’s say, it could use some improvements in the leg room department. But, aside from that It’s not half bad. I stole their wireless connection after we crossed the border, and proceed to IM with random people as we were heading out of Buffalow. I still owe an assessment of the phone, and it’ll happen later on this week, if I remember. But as for now, the girlfriend’s up to her ears in housework, and I’m off to maybe attempt assistance without breakage. I’ll do hockey recaps later, also if I remember. In the meantime, have a Sunday evening.

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  • A moment in history. Or, not.

    written by

    james

    For perhaps the second time in my life, my Christmas shopping is officially complete. And it’s not even the last week of November–although I didn’t miss it by much. And, with the exception of the mother thing almost spying her gift by accident–fortunately, she didn’t end up looking in that direction until it was appropriately adjusted–I dare say it went off without a hitch. Tonight, however, is going to be loads of fun. I have giftage to wrap. I have things to pack, including laundry. I have arangements to either make, or not, depending on whether or not Jessica can get the holiday off. I have gifts to either bring with me, or leave here, again depending on said holiday time off being obtained by the said young lady. And, I have to do the last minute mad dash around my apartment making sure I have the various rather important documentation required in order for me to flee the country for upwards of a month. And, somewhere in there, I have to remember to breathe. If there’s time left after that, there exists Christmas cards that need to be readied for mailing when December actually gets here. Roughly translated: oh crap. This could be a late night.

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  • Yep, this inspires confidence in the uniform.

    written by

    james

    This doesn’t exactly make me warm up to the idea of having police officers in schools, for any reason. An Ottawa police officer, now suspended with pay, is being brought up on child abuse charges. Well, actually, more like 4 counts of assault–and 2 of them with a weapon, but they might as well amount to child abuse. Considering the children in question were in his own family and all. And he was dealing with the public on a regular basis? Sometimes, the city scares me.

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  • Senators 3, Maple Leafs 2.

    written by

    james

    Wow. We suck. Oh my god do we suck. The only one of us who’s getting any kind of consistent points here is Kessel. And if he weren’t, there’d probably be a lineup outside GM Brian Burke’s office full of gun-wielding Leafs fans. Hell, couple more nights like tonight and there might be anyway. Just how craptastic is this season so far? You need only look as far as an exerpt from Twitter last night.

    Holy crap. Was that an almost goal? By Toronto? @torontomike, please tell me I’m not seeing things.
    @quanin The equalizer is imminent

    And then, almost right on queue, the horn sounded. And away went the chance for that equalizer. I cringe at the thought of disputing the word of a man who’s loyalty to the Leafs equals or betters my own, but… well… enough said. Is it next season yet?

  • Precisely why I’m a linux user, and a Gentoo user specificly.

    written by

    james

    A couple months ago, when they released version 2.10 of Glibc into the unstable tree for Gentoo, I thought it’d be fun to try rebuilding everything right then so that I might get what was left of the old 2.9 version off my system. Didn’t quite go as well as I thought–in fact, one of the programs I use fairly frequently when I’m not home, absolutely refused to compile against the new Glibc. Well, crap. There just went that. So I filed this bug report, and expected not a whole lot to get done about it–I’m probably one of a very small subset of users who actually still run that program, right? So clearly it won’t be a priority. I mean, that’s what I’m used to–you send Microsoft an error report, or any of the Windows program authors a similar report, they more often than not just sort of ignore it. I was perfectly ready for them to do that here. I’d even started researching alternative programs I could make use of while on my coming up road trip. Then, in with the other couple hundred of last night’s emails, I get this.

    17 Nov 2009; Dawid Węgliński (cla) bitchx-1.1-r4.ebuild,+files/1.1/bitchx-1.1-open-mode.patch:Pass mode to O_CREAT bug #285374

    It’s probably not directly related to what I reported. At least, I didn’t think so. So I wasn’t in a real big hurry to test it out. I waited until the automatic synchronisation went off this morning to pick up the new changes, and this afternoon, out of random boredom/curiosity/whatever, I tried yet again to compile the thing. And, surprising the hell out of me, it actually didn’t fall over sideways. I’m really not used to that.

    that’s something I literally never saw, like, at all in all my years using, writing about, complaining about, trying to fix, abruptly breaking, and eventually reinstalling Windows. I have no idea how many times I naively hit the “send error report” button on this or that crashed program, utility, or the OS itself, thinking “Hey, Microsoft might get to fixing this.”, only to install several Windows updates that, yep, didn’t actually fix it. So actually seeing an update come across my desk that, wouldn’t you know, actually fixes a problem? Yeah, that’s new. And it’s definitely not hurting my consideration for putting more and more time into using Gentoo locally.

    Explanation: BitchX, BX for short, is a Linux based client for connecting to IRC (Internet Relay Chat). I have no idea why they call it BitchX. But, it’s a decent enough program for what I use it for, so I also don’t particularly care.

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  • Convensional TV isn’t making it any easier to start watching again…

    written by

    james

    For years now, I’ve been watching slowly less and less TV. At least, watching less of it actually *on* my television. Before, say, in about 2003 or so, I used to watch just about everything I wanted to on TV–you didn’t use to have a whole lot of other choice. I mean, you could download every single episode of every single series you were keeping up with, one episode at a time, but it usually took for bloody ever, and often times they weren’t exactly of very decent quality. Plus, I was in college, and the college network had a nasty little habbit of randomly crapping out–sometimes for a couple hours at a time, so that made doing anything that required a constant net connection a little tiny bit challenging.

    Flash forward 6 years or so. Now, with the growing popularity of torrenting technology, plus increasingly faster connections, downloading entire seasons of series becomes a whole lot easier–I’m downloading the first 7 seasons of CSI Miami as I write this. Add to that, you can pretty much pay I think it’s like $5 or so, if that, to somewhere like iTunes and have access to download entire seasons that way. And there’s still the old fashion method of downloading one episode at a time over your more traditional filesharing clients–Bear Share comes to mind–although many of the same issues of old usually pop their heads up when that’s tried. And, if that isn’t good enough and you want to keep things on the still semi-legal, many of the more popular shows are usually available online, streamed directly from the originating station/network’s website–for exactly free. Of course, if desperation sets in there’s always Youtube if nothing else.

    So what’s the point? Lately, I’ve been keeping track of exactly how much actual TV I watch on TV, and the amount is really quite surprising. Consider it like this. At the moment, my TV’s turned off. It may stay turned off until 7:30 tonight, when the hockey game comes on. It may get turned on maybe an hour and a half earlier for local news, assuming I decide I can’t get just as much information online throughout the day. And it will probably be turned off again after tonight’s hockey game–unless my Leafs display their usual amount of suckitude, at which point it may be turned off halfway through said game. That routine will likely continue, until approximately April 5th or so, at which point the baseball season will start, and my TV will be on long enough to watch that. I don’t usually watch Star Trek, CSI, or any of my other shows on TV anymore, unless they happen to be on at someone else’s place while I’m over. I don’t watch American Idol, or So You Think You Can Dance, so I’m not missing a whole lot by not catching up on who got kicked/voted/bought off or whatever on those series. So really, my TV watching peaks at perhaps, at most, maybe 5 hours a week–all of it sports broadcasts you can’t download, or stream without usually paying for it anyway.

    I was reading earlier this morning about the so-called TV tax hearings being held in Ottawa between the broadcasters and the cable companies. During yesterday’s hearings, CTV, one of Canada’s major broadcasting companies, escentially told the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) that if cable companies don’t start paying for the privelege of transmitting their signals–which, roughly translated, means if we don’t start paying up for the privelege of receiving their signals, they will either start blocking US programming or pull their signals off any carriers who don’t want to pay for it. Which, to me, means I’ll lose my local news. Which I get online anyway. Hockey Night in Canada is streamed online, so if I have to, I can watch it there for far less than I’m paying for the privelege to watch it on a CBC channel as it is. Rogers and Bell Canada own two of the major broadcasting channels my sports programs show up on outside of HNIC–Sportsnet and TSN, respectively, so I doubt they’ll be pulling their own channels off the various networks. And, since I get my US programming fix via Torrents, directly from the originating US networks’ websites, or when I’m over at someone else’s place, I don’t miss much by having it blocked by CTV.

    So what are we missing again? Broadcasters want compensation from the cable companies, who will take said compensation from us, for… exactly what? So we have the option to watch our local news on TV as opposed to getting it from any number of newspapers, either online or in paper copy? So we can watch the same shows on TV, occasionally interupted by commercials, that we can either buy from iTunes or download from Mininova without, or that we can watch with different commercials by tuning in the originating US network? If the choice is between that and paying more for the privelege of being able to watch the same, limited number of programs I actually still watch on TV, I see a cancelation in my not too distant future.

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  • Christmas shopping, round 2.

    written by

    james

    Not unlike my last attempt at Christmas shopping, the trip overall resulted in one mall, store, and small kiosk after another. But, I managed to accomplish more than I expected with this trip–though, certainly not everything I planned. I scratched off Christmas gifts for my father, as well as Jessica. And, of course, because it’s very easy to pick up on things mom’s contemplating getting for herself, I came away with a crap ton of ideas for her–which, the plan is, to attempt to pick up before I leave for Rochester on Friday. At that point, I will have actually, for perhaps the second time in my life, accomplished the task of getting my shopping done before December even gets here. That almost never happens–a trait I come by honestly from my dad, who this year will likely be again cruising the stores looking for one last gift idea on December 24th. All that leaves me to do after that is come back on the 23rd, and enjoy Christmas, hopefully being accompanied by Jessica. Even if I wanted to, I don’t think I could find something to complain about with that. Now, if we could just get December to show up a little bit sooner.

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