email for pics

I just read an article at Ars Technica about a virus that chats with you and tries to convince you to install it. It first disables anti-virus software and software firewalls on the infected computer. It then sends out instant messages to everyone on the buddy list of this machine’s IM client. The user of the infected machine never sees these outgoing IMs or any of the conversations that result.

The virus sends a link to all the buddies and asks them to click on it. The kicker?

If the user queries the bot about the link, the virus will respond: “lol its not a virus.”

If you ever ask someone about a link they sent you, and they respond “lol it’s not a virus”…it’s a virus.

Talk about a false sense of community.

I didn’t know this, but it turns out in 1997 volunteers at the Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City lost control of a balloon and nearly killed a 33-yeard old woman. The next year, Macy’s put its proverbial foot down and trained the balloon handling volunteers in nearby Hoboken, New Jersey, before the parade.

In the following years, Macy’s has slipped on this pledge to train the volunteers, and chaos appears imminent. Exhibit A:

“There’s no, like, training,” said one first-time handler who was given an instruction sheet and told to report for duty at 6 a.m. tomorrow.

Oh, you want training? Here’s your training: hold the f*** on.

To it’s credit, Macy’s has offered voluntary training sessions four times a year and invited all volunteers to attend. The sessions are mandatory for a “few hundred team leaders”. Still, chaos is around the corner. Exhibit B:

This year, in place of the fitness tests, volunteers handling the balloons were asked whether they suffered from asthma or cardiac problems that would impede their ability to walk the two-and-a-half-mile course.

How about, instead of fitness tests or asking if the volunteers are heart patients, we recruit twice the volunteers we need, split them in half, and have a tug-of-war. The team that wins gets to march with the balloons. It seems to require a similar skill set.

Regardless, the situation is more serious than I have made it out to be. When volunteers lost control of the balloon in 1997, it severed a portion of a lamp post, which then fell to the sidewalk. The 33 year old woman was permanently brain damaged and won a $395 million settlement with Macy’s, New York City, and a city contractor.

Here’s to hoping for a safe and entertaining Thanksgiving Day parade.

The lead singer of The Darkness, Justin Hawkins, bought a copy of his own band’s sophomore album on Ebay after an advance copy was illegally offered on the auction site. The Darkness, a giant of our modern musical age, has for the time being prevented the unauthorized release of their album “One Way Ticket To Hell… And Back”, the follow up to their debut “Permission to Land.”

Is it possible to overstate the importance of The Darkness within the world of rock music? No, not really. I say a word, you give me the first thing that pops in your head: ROCK. No, not The Beatles, nor Elvis Presley, nor Led Zeppelin. The Darkness. That’s what I’m looking for. You disagree? You’ve obviously not heard “Permission to Land”.

Mr. Hawkins has something for the true believers to sink their teeth into:

“There’s no way that a fan of The Darkness, based on what we did on the last record, is not going to love this record even more than the first one.”

1-2-3…ROCK!

I am in the process of selling my laptop on Craigslist, and as one would expect, I have received plenty of attention from scammers trying to get me to ship my laptop without payment having actually been made. The most common scam is to send me a fake electronic United States postal money order, which the scammer claims is from BidPay, and as soon as I receive the email “confirmation” for the money order, I am supposed to ship the laptop. No dice.

I received quite an odd offer recently, though, one that seems to not involve money orders at all. The email starts out like this:

I am looking for a good laptop and was wondering if you
would be interested in maybe taking 1/2 cash - 1/2 trade.
This is what I have to offer……….
IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT MY MASSAGES ARE
ALMOST AS GOOD AS SEX

Intriguing. I must admit that I read on. The author continues,

I give a full body Swedish/French massage and do offer
sexual tension release.
I don’t watch a clock nor do I charge by the hour. I like to
work on you until I get out as much tension and relieve stress
as I can without hurting you.

What exactly is a Swedish/French massage? I think the “sexual tension” bit is pretty clear. And what about the masseuse herself?

I am 44 (but look like I’m in my 30’s) I have been giving
massages for 22 years and if I my say so myself….
DAMN I GOOD AT WHAT I DO. .

Sold! No, not really. It’s more than a little creepy, to be honest. But it was funny. If you have a laptop and are looking for a Swedish/French massage with sexual tension release, Craigslist is your place.

Not nearly so entertaining as Dixie’s last.

I recently persuaded my brother to get a flickr account. He does interesting things from time to time and I like seeing about them. Rather than checking some website, or getting emailed pics, I subscribe to an RSS feed of his so-called “photostream” to keep myself up to date with his current happenings. Sweet.

This isn’t a plug for flickr (though flickr does bring to you the amusing header above); it’s a comment on the ease of information distribution in today’s society. It seems the goal is to allow people to be as lazy as possible (it’s recently been pointed out here that a more pleasant term would be “efficient”; I prefer the former). That’s fantastic. But it’ll get better. Mark my words, the day will come when distribution is so robust, people will no longer even have to remember anything. Vast communication networks will allow blindingly fast information retrieval on everything from “which was the president of the United States of America who served non-consecutive terms” to “where did I put my keys”. Chip in your head, people. Chip. In. Your. Head.

Distribution isn’t enough, though. I’m waiting for the day when the internet self organizes and correlates. People then become sensory inputs to a giant, eventually sentient database of the sum (and more) total of all mankind’s knowledge. Gonna be hot. Just you wait.

Cross-posted at Cobweb because I had nothing else to post there for today, and people will howl if I don’t provide content.

Now and again someone will mistakenly ring my mobile. Usually it’s someone expecting to hear Spanish on the other end, and the conversations are brief. Once I exchanged several text messages with a guy who hoped (in vain) to score this person only two area codes away. (In LA, that’s not a great distance.) Last night, however, I had the strangest conversation with a stranger I’ve ever had.

I didn’t mean to sound friendly. I really didn’t. But, you see, I was waiting for a call from my uncle. So when the phone rang in the late evening and I detected a caucasian male voice through the pop and static of appalling reception (T-Mobile seems contractually obligated to leave service holes in places where I live), I cheerily kept the conversation up until I could figure out what was going on.

What was going on, evidently, was that someone was calling for “Simon.” Someone had also sent “Simon” a picture message, which I found out a few minutes later I could access from the T-Mobile website. Apparently “Simon,” a “big black football player from PCC,” had called this nameless individual from this number the night before last and they chatted for 45 minutes. I told the individual that the number had probably been spoofed (and heaven help “Simon” if I find out he hijacked my account and used 45 of my expensive weekday minutes talking to this person). The individual assured me that “Simon” would have no idea how to do such a thing. I bristled at the stereotyping and told him that something fishy had obviously happened, and he might want to entertain the notion that “Simon” could indeed spoof a phone number. I didn’t say, though I did imply, that he might want to ponder why “Simon” had done such a thing.

I know “Simon,” a PCC [American] football player, did not make any phone calls from my phone the night before last because my phone and I were both in West LA. That, and the only numbers in my call log were numbers I knew. Certainly not any calls to these Spokane, WA morons.

The caller changed his tack, and said that since I’d seen pictures of him and his friends, I had to send them a picture. That it was unfair otherwise. I told him he was an idiot and bade him good night. The icing on the cake was when he called for the third time and I let it go to voicemail (the one with my voice on it announcing my phone number and my unwillingness to pick up the phone). The message started with, “Simon. Some chick’s got your phone.”

Astonishing.

I received several more pictures over the course of the evening, none of which were obscene (thankfully). The caller did have poorly done tattoos, which did not endear him to me. He’d have been better off just talking.

A friend commented during this, “Interesting things happen to you.” I told her that it wasn’t really that, it was that my personal curiosity leads me to have conversations with random morons who are trying to reach out and touch someone — anyone they can find — instead of launching four-letter epithets in their direction and breaking the connection. It’s not because I’m lacking contact with my fellow human beings. It’s certainly not because I’m interested in forging a relationship with this individual. It is, pure and simple, curiosity. It’s been getting me in trouble for years, and shows no sign of going away.

I’m going to tread on sacred ground here, discussing issues of such profound importance they are never discussed out loud.
The Rules about eating your roommate’s food:
1. Don’t eat the first one
Maybe the main reason for this is that you have to open the package, thereby leaving evidence of your filching.
2. Don’t eat the last one
If they were saving that last cookie, bagel, beer, etc., they’ll know it’s gone. It’s heart rending to enter the kitchen for a tasty treat only to be forced to endure another bowl of ramen.
Pretty much everything between the first and the last is fair game.

Exceptions:
Cheap beer
There’s nothing sacred about your roommate’s cheap beer, particularly if it’s sitting next to good beer. You’re doing everyone a favor by getting that crap out of the way. Taking the last e.g. Coors Light is praiseworthy because, that crap got skunky, like, a month ago. Dude, way to take one for the team.

Hot pockets
There’s only two in a package. The Rules would imply that you could never steal a roommate’s hot pockets. This is not so. There are several extenuating circumstances to consider:
1. Are there multiple boxes of hot pockets? If so then one hot pocket will not be missed.
2. Are you in hot pocket equilibrium with your roommate? This delicate balance shifts back and forth but, due to lack of record keeping, is largely a matter of perspective.
3. Is your roommate out of town for at least two days? You don’t want those things going bad on you.

Anything else
If you plan on replacing it before your roommate could possibly want it. This can be a particularly effective strategy. For instance, if your roommate has bought deluxe cookies, you can polish them off and then replace them with some crap like Chips Ahoy.

The Milk Zeno’s paradox
The Rules do apply to milk but since milk is, on kitchen length scales, continuous, there is a bit of a problem defining “the last” in relation to milk. With milk and other continuous substances the rule is that you can take half of what’s left. A back-of-envelope calculation shows that if there’s ~100 g of milk left, then, following the rule, you’ve got about 80 uses of milk until you get to the last molecule. Of course, your cereal is going be pretty crunchy with just a single molecule of milk on it. But maybe you should quit whining and go buy some damn milk.