This happened last month, on 2-13-04 but I thought it was funny enough to mention….
You remember that last month, I flooded the boys room… Well, this month, I got suspension at the middle school. I had to sit in the library with my desk facing the wall all day long. There was nothing to do but some stupid homework and a test that was really easy. And you know why I got suspension? Because I didn’t go to detention. Stupid. And I didn’t go to detention because my mom couldn’t pick me up after school. (Of course, in retrospect, I should have tried to work this detention thing out with school and my mom but hey…) And I got a detention because I wrote “Suck” on some kid’s notebook. I guess I shouldn’t have done that.
Well, actually you should replace “I” in that last paragraph with “my student”. But it was almost as awful for me. I had to sit there and watch him all day, making sure he wasn’t going to get in any trouble and that he didn’t talk to anyone and stuff. Bleck.
So, I got suspension.
Outlook 2000 had a tiny little feature whereby when your mouse hovered over a web link, the target would appear in the status bar down at the bottom of the window. Outlook 2002 eliminated this feature, making forged emails like this (at right. Click
to enlarge) possible.
The link on that email takes you to this web page (at left). Everything appears to be all on the up and up, right? Wrong. Look closely at that web page… at the top of the email. The address is “http://63.203.30.222/registration/Verify.htm” That isn’t a Paypal address. It’s a thief’s address.
If Outlook hadn’t gotten rid of that little feature, it would have been harder to pull the wool over people’s eyes on this kind of scam. Hmmm…. I’ve been hearing how Microsoft is pushing for an email postage/verification/something system lately. Am I just a wacky conspiracy theorist by suggesting that Microsoft is crippling their own program in order to make their new email verification system more necessary? No, that’s crazy.
TJIC told me “the timestamps in your blog kinda freak me out. They look like small hovering clues, as if I’d moused over something…and am being given suplimentary info…”
That didn’t jibe with any of my style sheets so I looked into it. Apparently, Netscape and IE treat the Float: tag differently. Here’s examples:
| Internet Explorer 6.0 |
 |
| Netscape 7.1 |
 |
(note: the date is an <H2> tag, the text that begins "Outloo.." is an <H3> tag)
I’ve since tweaked it a bit so it doesn’t look so terribly noticeable. The problem seems to lie in how the two browsers let CSS margins affect floated text. They do it just a little bit differently. They still don’t look perfectly the same, but they’re good enough.
| Internet Explorer 6.0 |
 |
| Netscape 7.1 |
 |
Ok, this is cool. From here and here.
I’m chasing my tail spamwise. SpamAssassin kinda works but at a conservative setting (I have it at ‘8’) it doesn’t block enough spam to make it worth me having to scan two spam folders, one for Cloudmark and one for SpamAssassin. I’d love to try CRM114 but even if I got it going well, it has to live on a Unix box, which makes it a slight pain for me (having succumbed to the succor of Windows). But if any friend of mine wants to set up CRM114 and let me filter my mail through them, I’d shower them with gifts and Jean Nate after-bath splash. Do you remember those commercials? I do. Oh yeah…
So, I’m going to try and push all my mail through my optonline.net account. It occurs to me that they run Brightmail. We’ll see how that goes. But just to be pesky, optonline just put up notices saying that their spam-buckets won’t be available for some unspecified amount of time. That means that mail counted as spam gets immediately deleted. Hurumph. that’s no way for me to do a test! I’ll wait.
Oh and it’s cool to note that CRM114 is built by a friend of mine. Hi Crash!
I haven’t used Perl in a long while. But it can be fun! I scripted up a tiny little RSync script to backup the important parts of my hard drive to another drive. Trouble is… my script sucks. But that’s ok. A rudimentary BASH script works better. RIBS is supposed to be this snazzy backup helper but it’s just a no-UI front end for a command line… I suppose it could save me some keystrokes but I’ll play with my own command-line scripts for a while.
I tried in vain for weeks to get the Dynamic DNS system on my D-Link DI-624 router to work with Dyndns.org. I gave up and decided to use DynSite instead. It does the job nicely.
Spamnet isn’t perfect. It correctly blocks about 40 spams a day of mine. But it also incorrectly blocks about 1 non-spam per day. That’s a big pain because it means I have to sift through my spam list every week or so looking for mistakes.
I’m going to try using dual filtering. I’ll set my ISP’s SpamAssassin to a conservative setting and keep Spamnet. The idea being that SpamAssassin won’t have any accidental hits. That will reduce the number of emails I’ll have to sift through.
As a side note, I just found out that Spamnet uses the same spam identification network that SpamAssassin does. SpamAssassin uses Vipul’s Razor for fingerprinting spams.
You’ve probably noticed that my journal page changes it’s look at every load. I welcome you to peek in the source code of this page to see how I do that. It’s easy. I just added a new random style sheet today.. journal3.css
@import “journal.css”;
/* This CSS inspired by http://razor.sourceforge.net/css/default.css */
body {
font-size: 12px;
}
h2 {
width: auto;
border-color #4e7aaf;
color: #000000;
background: #cde6ff;
float: left;
}
h3 {
background: #cccccc;
padding: 4px 10px 4px 10px;
border-style: solid;
border-width: 1px 1px 1px 1px;
border-color #4e7aaf;
}
.quote {
border: #4e7aaf;
border-left: none;
border-right: none;
background: #cde6ff;
float: left;
}
This really freaked me out. (local archive)
I think it bothers me for a couple reasons…
- A part of me is capable of falling into this
- I sometimes see this tendency in others… friends of mine.
- Some of my friends actually do this full-bore.
That last one bugs me the most. It’s kind of a “guilty by association” thing. Maybe this form of insanity is contagious? (oh and a note to PPG: No, I don’t count you as a person that does this)
