Monthly Archives: November 2005

Well, my sense of invulnerability to the constant email barrage of ebay and online banking phishing scams has eroded tonight. I’ve won the humiliating scarlet “I” (for Idiot) for being suckered by a (seemingly) new scam that forced me to change my eBay password after realizing I was so easily duped.

Here’s the email I got:

My first thought was “hmm, I never asked anything about any sports memorabilia”. So instinctively I want to know what the hell is going on with my ebay account – did someone ask a question via my account without me knowing? Is someone going to bid on a thousand dollar baseball jersey with my PayPal account? Like a lemming, I click on the item number link, and I get the “ebay” login screen. At this point I’m still thinking “I better log in and try to find out if someone’s hacked my account.” It fails my login a few times, but then succeeds, because I think the third attempt is the REAL eBay login page – the other login screens were part of the scammer’s site recording my username and password (the link was http://signin.ebay.com-ws.org/signin.html — as soon as I saw that com-ws.org domain, the jig was up.)

*Sigh*. So stupid. Ah well, I changed my password before anyone could do anything with my account. And I’ll know better for next time. Meanwhile, there’s an online bank that really needs me to “update my security info.” They are really interested in all my credit card numbers, too. I better go log in and give them the updated info!

UPDATE:

A related quote:

“If you give a man a phish, he has a stolen credit card for a day. If
you teach a man to phish, he will eat three square meals daily for a
lifetime; perhaps served from behind bars, but he will not go hungry.”

A while ago, Sean made this funny typo in an email:

“Sorry for the incontinence.”

It was very unique and hilarious at the time. I blogged about it thinking I was preserving a unique moment. But to my surprise, today I found that there are many references to this very typo:

Google Blog Search results

More proof that we all think the same!

I rediscovered an old one from Chris:

ANIME:

Japanese animation. Full of people that look like ^_^
[Ex: I only watch anime with tentacles in it. ]

The Gallery of Bellydancing Librarians!

“But man — and woman — do not live by information alone. At night, our gal trades her Birkenstocks for beads and serves her adoring public’s entertainment needs with the music and dance of the Middle East.”

Even in the midst of the Katrina disaster, fashion reigned supreme:

And this one will win your pity for the poor, poor ex-FEMA head:

There are more emails here. (mirror link)

Friend of mine back in the college days ended up making a name for himself doing Artificial Intelligence programming for video games. Here’s an old interview with him I recently found.

When we were taking classes together I was always impressed (and admittedly jealous) with how little preparation he needed in order to ace everything every class threw at him. The boy was scary smart!

And apparently all that computer gaming we all did during those college years paid off for him. In those days it was stuff like X-Wing, XCOM, Doom, and Wing Commander. On 486’s with 100MB hard drives. And we liked it!!!

Before diving headlong into the video game industry, Pranas worked on Virginia Tech’s CAVE project. He gave me a tour of the CAVE system once (it’s an experimental virtual reality setup). I still remember my stomach turning from the perceived motion induced by the 3D projections.

Tonight, while we watched the wind blowing leaves off the trees, Iris came up with the perfect explanation for why the leaves were falling:

“The trees are mad.”