Archive for November, 2009

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving

This has been my 5th year that I have prepared Thanksgiving dinner by myself, and without my family in New York. The first couple times were in Korea in a crappy apartment and without an oven so I had to purchase the turkey from popeyes chicken onpost. So in all fairness I would say that I have cooked about 3 birds. Maybe….

This year was the first where everything that was planned worked out perfectlly though. Couldn’t have been happier… Well there was no apple pie and the turkey was 7lbs with no legs or wings, but that’s not exactly a bad thing. Still I guess Apple pie would have been great and I did try but realized that I only have 1 pie dish here and couldn’t find any place that had disposable ones in stock (my fault for waiting until the last minute). So it was a choice between pumpkin and apple and my wife has a big sweet tooth for pumpkin, more than mine for Apple so she got her wish. It’s also a lot easier to cook. =)

I think the biggest difference was that the turkey was so small that we could start it really late. Not even 3 hours in the oven and probably basted it 3 or 4 times total. Gave us access to the oven for other things and focus on smaller things and take our time. I guess I also am not freaking out on how perfect everything has to be and cook exactly everything my grandmother cooks. I still have a full fridge of leftovers and passed out the couch at around 6pm. Now it’s 2am and I can’t sleep. Maybe I can get everyone to wake up and hit black Friday….. Yeah right! =)

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Spam at its best

Spam at its best

I have an e-mail address I use exclusively for spam.  I visit a site, they force me to login in order to do anything, they get this address.  Today I got an e-mail at info@razornylon.com which I have never used for anything, and from now on it will only see my spam folder.  Below is the message:

Dear owner of the adium@razornylon.com mailbox,
You have to change the security mode of your account, from standart to secure. Please change the security mode by using the link below:

http://accounts.razornylon.com.verzzn.co.uk/webmail/settings/noflash.php?mode=standart&id=84821682180119139763927570572924627885997635531797028081890793&email=adium@razornylon.com

For starters, they can’t spell “standard”.  Second they make it look like it came from my own domain.  The one I own, the one they are contacting via the info@razornylon.com account.  Then upon visiting the site (running linux on my laptop) I see that they want to show me something, but I have to install flash first.  Of course they are hosting the exe file, which is how they would get you, but this has to be the lamest attempt I have ever seen.

At least with those fake virus warnings they are targeted at everyone, and sometimes look very convincing.  This message is directed solely at me, a website admin, using my own domain to disguise their own.  Is it maybe possible that a guy who built a particular website is aware that there is no subdomain “accounts”?  Maybe if they sent the e-mail directly to the account in question, but no… they sent it to the info@razornylon.com account.

That said, I am sure there is probably some idiot that will fall for it.  However I can’t imagine the success rate is really all that high.

verzzn.co.uk was registered on Nov 19 to:
Suzanne Mendez
Taylor Street Apt. 22
Wilrijk
2771
Belgium

Through the company http://www.123-reg.co.uk
Hopefully they take appropriate measures before Suzanne finds the one dumb bloke!

Dropping journalism

Dropping journalism

After jumping through about a dozen hoops with this issue over the mix up with the journalism professor using bait and switch to get students to join her class I finnally gave up and went straight to the school president. Which from now on is going to be the first thing that I do. It took me all of 10 minutes to have the form needed in my hand with instructions on what to do. Because they can’t just run in and change grades without the right paperwork I have to fill out an appeal form that says everything that happened. And because they fully understand everything they are going to push it through so I don’t have to wait long.

Now why was this so hard and why do I have to climb to the to top of the tree to get the guy at the bottom to do their job? Oh well, at least I am getting my records fixed. Maybe I can do this for my English class too. That issue still hangs over my head.

(Testing out this iPhone app to write this too, and it’s 2am so we’ll see how it looks on the computer later.)