Category: *heh*

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More “Phishing pfor Psuckers”

Text of an email I received recently:

Dear Customer,

Your order has been successfully canceled. For your reference, here’s a summary of your order:

You just canceled order 162-427-72682 placed on May 11, 2012.

Status: CANCELED

_____________________________________________________________________

1 “Mounts”; 2003, Second Edition
By: Jamie Turner

Sold by: Amazon.com LLC

_____________________________________________________________________

Thank you for visiting Amazon.com!

———————————————————————
Amazon.com
Earth’s Biggest Selection
http://www.amazon.com

Now, someone who wasn’t paying any attention (or is just too stupid to waste oxygen on) could easily have been caught out by this. There were links to a malware installation on both the purported “order number” and on the text referring to Amazon.com at the end of the email.

But… this one was just too, too easy to resist. First, I knew I’d not placed such an order. “But then,” someone might say (though certainly not YOU, gentle reader), “surely that would lead one to click the link to check on that order. After all, someone might be using one’s stolen Amazon ID to make purchases!”

Except, not mine, and I’m not clicking on ANY obscured link in an email without KNOWING where it leads. Not happening.

But, I did look at the email’s source text and see that the links were NOT to Amazon but to a site that would steal my Amazon creds were I to go there and log in. Except that neither my browser nor LastPass would recognize the site and offer to log in for me, were I to be foolish enough to have clicked the links anyway.

Oh, and the email was to an account that is not in any way, shape, fashion or form associated with my Amazon account, nor has it ever been. Sure, all my email accounts are polled and gathered by one account, but I checked which account the email had been sent to, AND the form is not what I’d have received from Amazon, what with a few pertinent details missing.

So, just taking few seconds to do a coupla quick checks averted the possibility, remote though it is given my other simple measures, of having my Amazon account credentials stolen.

It’s not hard and doesn’t take any time at all, but I’ll bet a few mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging oxygen sinks with fewer active brain cells than a cracked crock of kimchi will fall for it.

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I Do These Things…

…so you don’t have to. Driving into town this a.m., I began singing (if “singing” is the word for it) a little ditty that popped into my head for (literally) God only knows what reason:

On top of some carrots, all covered in mud,
I shot a “wabbit” for old Elmer Fudd.

I cooked it with pepper (it tasted like hare),
Poor Elmer just sat there; he could only stare.

“I ate all ‘your wabbit’,” I said with aplomb,
“‘Cos you didn’t shoot it; now sit on your thumb.”

OK, I was really close to town by the time I started, so I didn’t even finish the thing, but there you are: my mind, coffee-deprived.

Continue reading “I Do These Things…”

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Old Dogs, Old Tricks

…and old news, but still laughable. The Zero’s people have been pillorying The Romney Android for transporting his dog on top of his car in a dog carrier (complete with improvised windshield) in 1983 as cruel and unfeeling. I agree. The poor thing couldn’t hang its head out the window into a stream of 70mph wind! Poor thing!

OTOH… Stolen:

Q: What did Barack Hussein Obama Soetoro‘s dad tell him at the dog park?

A: “Don’t play with your food.”

And…

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Late Bloomer

I’ve always been a late bloomer in nearly every aspect of my life. Just slow, I guess, or maybe I’ve just been distracted a lot of the time by the one or two areas where I “bloomed” early, I dunno.

Anywho, I do know what delayed my love affair with coffee for a while. Sophomore year in high school. Band trip into Mexico. We stayed in all kindsa places–whatever the communities would arrange for lodging. Big towns/cities: maybe commercial lodging facilities. Small towns? Notsomuch. I recall lodging accommodations in a convent–yeh, a convent. They were pretty hard up to take on a bunch of high school boys as lodgers even for a night.

Breakfast the next morning? Some questionable egg dish, tortillas and some “fresh ground” coffee. No, I mean it tasted like some ground they’d just dug up and put in the pot to boil. Overnight. Those of us who tried it wanted to take back the previous night’s concert for the town.

It was four years before I tried coffee again.

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One Thing About eBooks…

…and particularly Kindle books, is the ease of taking notes within the books–and searching notes. This is especially useful for those books that have error reporting enabled. One of my fav notes to submit in an error report is, “Consult Inigo Montoya. (No, not that quote; the other one.)” I generally slug that comment in wherever a word is misused. And, oh, am I finding a slew of those! The quality of proof readingand copy editing has really, really declined in recent years, and in self-published books it is frequently non-existent… or of a “quality” that can only–charitably–be described as comparable to toxic sewer sludge.

Oh, well, at least I have the joy of making LOADS of snarky notes, and even–happy-happy-joy-joy–submitting a few as “error reports”.

Gottalovethat.

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Not Exactly Divina Commedia, Perhaps

More like, Commedia Nera… maybe.

Hey, my folks are approaching 90. They have doctors’ appointments just about every day of the week (and this last week definitely every day), and their lives seem to revolve around medical tests, consultants with specialists, surgeries, therapy and who knows what else.

At least with the weight I’ve lost, I’ll not have to buy a new suit for any funerals.

See Sydney Carton for the relevant viewpoint on death and dying:

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

I would miss ’em, but really, “…it is a far, far better rest…” Still, glad they’re having fun with their busy medical schedule, since I really don’t want to start missing them. Selfish of me, I know, but there it is. As long as they’re having fun, let ’em rack up the med hours. They’ve certainly earned it.