Lee.org

Pixyglam Yahoo Group is the place to find out all the poop.
Ha ha

TGIF Humor is the list to be on for that

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.

Molls sent this to me before xmas. I stole it from this site and pulled it local for posterity. Click on the picture to play this shocking Shockwave.

PPG showed this to me. From :The New York Times

Gallery Show Seeks the Art in Spam, Seen Through the Eyes of the Future

January 26, 2004
By SAUL HANSELL

The discordant verse, in simple black letters on white paper, is in keeping with the basement alternative art gallery in which it hangs:
———————————————-
victorious tank tepid conservatism veldt

cerulean carl
frontal decry brennan
———————————————-
It may seem the work of a striving, if cryptic, poet. But it is an excerpt from the nonsense words found in a junk e-mail message, as captured in a Manhattan exhibit that tries to make art out of spam.

The exhibit, titled “Reimagining the Ordovician Gothic: Fossils From the Golden Age of Spam,” is at Spaceworks at the Tank, a gallery and performance space on West 42nd Street devoted to experimental works.

Jesse Jarnow, one of the curators, said the name was inspired by a display he saw at the American Museum of Natural History on the Ordovician period, an era that ended about 445 million years ago, when the earth was dominated by primitive sea creatures.

“They had all these brightly colored snails,” he said. “But they don’t really know what it was really like.”

Riffing on the idea of junk e-mail as a lowly commercial life form, Mr. Jarnow along with the other curators, Daniel Greenfeld and Mike Rosenthal, tried to depict how an archaeologist 450 million years in the future might present current culture, based only on relics of spam. Motifs include the random text typically added to the end of spam to avoid being discarded by spam-finding filter programs, which the exhibit presents as the work of the “great writers of the ‘Ordovician Gothic.’ ”

The accompanying text notes that “this school of writers emphasized playful literary juxtaposition, frequently casting aside the period’s typical syntax in order to achieve a more visceral form.”

Using the sort of displays common in natural history
museums, the exhibit examines other aspects of the world as captured in the amber of spam. Light-up dioramas, for example, show pictures of the actual deposed African leaders who are frequently the purported authors of e-mail proposing deals that typically involve wire transfers of many thousands of dollars. “It is not known whether or not their appeals were received by willing accomplices or not,” the exhibit commentary says. “If they were, most likely, those who responded were simply drawn into the deep unrest from which the requests sprang.”

The spam exhibition will be on display through Feb. 15 at Spaceworks at the Tank, 432 West 42nd Street. It is open Thursdays and Fridays, 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.; Saturdays, noon to 6 p.m., and during performances.

I spent New Years eve in Philadelphia. Saw fireworks right up close! I was there with PPG and several PP friends. PPG’s Sw has an apartment right on the river (no, literally. If you drilled a hole in his living room, you’d hit a parking level and then water!) The party itself was a bit low key for my taste, but the apartment is lovely. Red curtain, amazing modular wall storage up to 18 feet, rice paper lighting, and a winch-operated table!

I got a cell phone.

Sony Ericsson T610 with a T-mobile 300 minute plan & bluetooth headset….

I ordered it on Amazon.com… it should arrive late next week.

My folks just got a new computer running XP Home. I’m installing stuff on it and happily noticed that the Messenger Service is turned off by default. This is the service that allows Messenger Spam. :-)

I tried doing an upgrade install on a client’s computer from XP Home to XP Pro. The Upgrade install failed miserably. Midway through, the upgrade got stuck, churning over one point and restarting. I had to install Pro from scratch. Hurumph! A few months ago, I tried doing an upgrade from 2000 Pro and had a similarly crappy experience :-(

A month or so ago I did an upgrade installation from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. It sucked. Windows ran slow, there was this persistent hesitation problem where the machine would lock up for 5 seconds out of every 10 minutes… My computer wasn’t happy. So when I got the 200 gig hard drive, I decided to do an install from scratch. You know, ever since Windows 95, it’s been “a good idea” to reinstall Windows every 2 years or so. What’s with that??

The only problem I’ve had so far is that Maxtor insisted that I use their Maxblast3 formatting software and not the XP formatting tool. That’s kind of funny because I banged my head against a wall of “Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt | \system32\hal.dll | Please reinstall a copy of the above file” BECAUSE of the Maxblast3 software” for 4 hours because of that bad suggestion. To get around this problem, I booted to my old XP and formatted the 200 gig drive with Windows and Partition Magic 7. After that, I installed WinXP on the new drive just fine. Patting myself on the back, I figured that one out all by myself.

My Windows XP install is now snazzy-fast :-)

I changed my DNS so that Spenix would be my new web provider. A month ago I switched from Register.com to GoDaddy.com for my DNS b/c GoDaddy is $8/year instead of $35 and GoDaddy’s website has a few more bells and whistles. Now I’m moving from Earthlink to Spenix b/c, although Earthlink has very good LiveChat support, it’s for a product that doesn’t have as many features and easy customizations as Spenix. And Spenix is $8/month instead of $20/month! Of course, it worries me that the main Spenix.com site appears to be down today. But I’m sure that’s just a little glitch… Yipe!

Some site details like the comment engine and hit counter will be broken ’til I fix em. so there.

I wrote to a friend today the following:

We were talking before about what the heck we should each do for a living… I wanted to give you hopeful news and say that I’ve been being “The Computer Guy” with moderate success for the last couple months. I go to people’s homes and help them with their computer problems. Little things and large things alike. And gosh darn it, I think I’m good at it! There’s a big teaching component to it, showing people how to do things and helping them help themselves. I think this could really be something.