Month: September 2012

The FBI is sending me money!

This sounds pretty authentic. Odd numbering, bad punctuation, and everything.

Like too many of us, I get a lot of junk e-mail. Fortunately, most of it goes into my spam folder. A recent one came from the “Anti-Terrorist And Monetary Crimes Division” of the FBI, but signed by Mr. Robert Mueller, the director, informing me that they have “have completed an investigation on an International Payment in which was issued to you by an International Lottery Company. With the help of our newly developed technology (International Monitoring Network System)” – WOW! – “we discovered that your e-mail address was automatically selected by an Online Balloting System, this has legally won you the sum of $2.4million USD from a Lottery Company outside the United States of America.”

Yay, I’m practically rich!

“You will be required to settle the following bills directly to the Lottery Agent in charge of this transaction who is located in Cotonou, Benin Republic. According to our discoveries, you were required to pay for the following,
(1) Deposit Fee’s ( IMF INTERNATIONAL CLEARANCE CERTIFICATE )
(3) Shipping Fee’s ( This is the charge for shipping the Cashier’s Check to your home address)
The total amount for everything is $96.00 We have tried our possible best to indicate that this $96.00 should be deducted from your winning prize but we found out that the funds have already been deposited IMF and cannot be accessed by anyone apart from you the winner, therefore you will be required to pay the required fee’s.”

This sounds pretty authentic. Odd numbering, bad punctuation, and everything.

Seriously, usually, I ignore these things, but in this case, I thought I ought to report it to the REAL FBI, in case someone else is foolish naive enough to believe this rubbish. Surprisingly the FBI doesn’t seem to have an e-mail address in Estonia. I went to the FBI website and reported this scam to The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), a partnership between the FBI “and the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C), funded in part by the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA).” I dutifully filled on the form, then submitted it. Or tried. It took me FOUR times to send it because the word verification was so tricky – it’s really difficult to tell the difference between m and rn, for instance, when any given letter has TWO colors.

So when I got a SECOND, totally different message from the FBI in Atlanta (Japanese e-mail), I didn’t bother reporting it. Ya got to make it easier, FBI.
***
My URL shows up in Dustbury’s spam. Oy.

 

Fixing the Internet, episode 1057

In the course of my job, I’m on the Internet. A LOT. And invariably, I find items that are incorrect. Whether I bother to correct them depends on whether I think it’s substantial enough that someone else might assume it’s correct and restate it as fact.

I’ve only fixed two things on Wikipedia, as far as I can recall. One, which I did with Steve Bissette, was a major overhaul of the FantaCo post; still imperfect. The other was back in 2006 when someone indicated that the next Presidential campaign was in 2007, rather than 2008. But I do not find the need to add something insubstantial; e.g., another advertisement that made use of a cover of the Kinks’ All Day and All of the Night.

I’m listening to my favorite music podcast, Coverville. Episode #894 is an all-request show. The second song is listed as She’s All Liquored Up by Dash Rip Rock, a cover of the Mojo Nixon original [listen]; I’m not familiar with either version. But the song sounds very much like Dizzy Miss Lizzy, the old Larry Williams song covered by the Beatles [listen], which appeared on Beatles VI, the very first LP I owned, as well as the UK Help! album. Now, I’m not positive, because songs do get adapted and changed.

As it turns out Amazon lists the samples for the Tiger Town album by Dash Rip Rock, at least for tracks 5-9, one song off:
5. says True Drunk Love, IS Fallin’ Apart
6. says Shine A Light, IS True Drunk Love
7. says Dizzy Miss Lizzy, IS Shine A Light
8. says All Liquored Up, IS Dizzy Miss Lizzy
9. says Livin’ Breathin’, IS All Liquored Up

The sorta good fortune is that the error created an unintentional Beatles-related medley:
Gimme Some Truth by Sam Phillips (orig. John Lennon)
Dizzy Miss Lizzie by Dash Rip Rock (orig. Larry Williams, made famous by the Beatles)
Revolution by Grandaddy (orig. Beatles)

Host Brian Ibbott noted the error, and mentioned me, at about the 18-minute mark of the next show, Episode #895 featuring Van Morrison. He also mocked Amazon’s spelling of Martha Reeves’ name (as Reeeves) on this item, from which he culled a song for the show.

I’m trying to get Amazon to rectify these problems. Fixing the Internet: a full-time task.

The poli sci guy hates this story, but the librarian loves it

The librarian sees it as a lesson learned for people who expect data ALWAYS to be available

 

In New York State today, we’re having the primary elections. For me, there are three Democratic races.

The District Attorney contest is between the incumbent, who some think overreached by indicting some Florida folks over steroids, a case that was largely undone by other courts, and a guy, son of a prominent defense attorney whose wife was so visible on the first piece of campaign literature I received, I’d think SHE was the candidate; I also got an AWFUL, as in amateurish, robocall from her. Does anyone for someone because their spouse, or worse, their kids, tells you how wonderful the candidate is? If anything, I’m LESS inclined to vote for that potential officeholder.

Then there’s the incumbent state senator running against a guy, and there’s almost no difference in their positions on the major issues.

But the one that is REALLY bizarre is the state assembly race with SIX, count ’em 6, candidates running for an open seat. One candidate is a disgraced former county executive named Jim Coyne who was convicted back in 1992 on federal charges of bribery, conspiracy, extortion, and mail-fraud charges for taking $30,000 from the architect of the Knickerbocker Arena while the 15,000-seat indoor arena was under construction in downtown Albany. Just this week, the retired county DA said Coyne should never have been indicted and is supporting his candidacy. There’s a woman named Margarita Perez who has been all but invisible, plus a couple of guys, William McCarthy and Christopher Higgins, who ran credible campaigns, especially the latter.

But the general consensus is that the real race is between a guy named Frank Commisso and a woman named Pat Fahy. For reasons that mystify me, Commisso decides to attack Fahy regarding some possibly substantive issues, but also about whether or not she had been registered and voted in Cook County, Illinois in the 1970s into the 1990s. The Cook County Board of Elections couldn’t find records under her name. Aha! Commisso says. But here’s where the great big caveat comes in.

From here:

In 1997, the [Cook County] clerk’s office switched to a new system of tracking its voter registrations… At the time of the switch, any voters who were still active in the old system were simply carried over to the new one.

But…”If you were registered in the ’70s and then your registration was canceled because you moved or you died…those registrations were not carried over to the new system.”

…[T]he clerk’s office, because of constraints on storage space, no longer has the hard copies of voter registration cards from that far back. And that means there’s essentially no way to know for sure.

The search that yielded the records produced by the Commisso campaign… went no further than the current computer system.

It is a massive non-story politically, as far as I am concerned.

But the librarian sees it as a lesson learned for people who expect data ALWAYS to be available. I was told in my first week in library school that when technology changes, information inevitably gets lost. This is almost always the case. Not every VHS movie has made it to DVD or BluRay. There are LPs that have never been in digital format of any kind. Ever since the cave drawings failed to make it onto papyrus, it has been so.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel was – from the list of terms I try to avoid – delightful, charming, intelligent.

The Wife had seen The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel several weeks ago, with one of her friends. So when I finally got a chance, I went to the Spectrum Theatre in Albany, by which point it was playing only once a day.

Evelyn (Judi Dench) is a recent widow who had always had her husband make the big decisions. Muriel (Maggie Smith) is a bigot who needs a cheap hip replacement. Douglas and Jean (Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton) have an inadequate funds from his work pension. Continue reading “MOVIE REVIEW: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”

Should be Primary Election Day

All these elections are expensive, and it’d be nice if there was some way to consolidate at least the June and September ballots.

I understand it, I really do. Still, I wish the primary election were being held today, rather than Thursday.

In New York State, the primary is the second Tuesday in September for non-federal elections. September 11, 2001, was a Tuesday, and the voting, of course, was suspended for a week. In fact, it had not even started in upstate New York, where polling begins at noon on primary days.

The rationale for moving the voting to Thursday this year is so that folks can participate in 9/11 memorials. For me, though, nothing would be more symbolic than to be able to cast a ballot on the anniversary of that day.

Thursday, BTW, will be the fourth of five voting opportunities in the state. On April 24, there was the Presidential primary, moved up from June so that it would matter to the final outcome; it still didn’t, as all of Mitt Romney’s opponents had dropped out by then. On May 15, there was the school budget vote, held statewide for most districts. In June, there were the primaries for the federal, non-Presidential primary; that would be for the House of Representatives and the US Senate, per some federal voting law which requires a certain number of days to allow for military absentee ballots. Then September 13, and, of course, November 6.

When I was growing up, even in Presidential years, there were only two voting opportunities, in June and November. All these elections are expensive, and it’d be nice if there was some way to consolidate at least the June and September ballots.

As a secondary consideration, I hate voting on Thursdays – and I really DO need to vote, since there are competitive races – since it means I can’t vote before I go to work (the polls aren’t open yet), so I must vote when I get home, when everyone else is at the polls, then eat, take out the trash, and go back out to choir rehearsal. There is some provision in my work regulations that say that I can get up to a couple of hours off from work to vote. I’ve never actually used that in 20 years, but I’d be seriously tempted on Thursday.

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