Rick's World

I got an interesting spam email today. It purports to be from the 'United Stated National Medical Association'. As soon as I saw this name, I was highly skeptical. I had never heard of this 'government agency' before, so I did a quick Whois search on the domain. I discovered that not only was this so called government agency domain only registered on June 29, 2007 (a couple days ago), but it was done through a domain info masking service. In other words, it's a brand new domain and the owner is trying to hide his identity.

Had this been a genuine government agency, it would likely have been registered long before June 29th of this year, and they wouldn't be hiding their whois identity. Also, it likely would have been using a *.gov domain rather than a *.com domain. This appears to be an attempt by an online seller of prescription drugs to knock out the competition by making unsuspecting email recipients think they are a valid government agency. Then they just list all their competitors as unauthorized sellers of drugs and they get all the business selling drugs as the only 'legit' company.

I have to say, it's always interesting to see how the spammers are constantly changing their tactics to try to keep people buying their crap. You can read the entire email below. Note that I intentionally broke up the URL links so that they won't work from my blog and this site won't get any traffic from me...

The original spam email

The United States National Medical Association

Do you buy pharmaceuticals online? The US NMA was specifically established to
protect the consumer. Our experts check every online shop for bogus medicines. The
blacklist of unreliable or simply fraud shops is updated every week. We strongly
recommend to visit our site before buying any medical products online. visit us

Our site http: // www .us-nma .com

The common ways of online cheating are:
- delivery of low quality or fraud products.
- an enormous delay (up to 2-3 months) in delivery of products.
- shops obtain all the credit cards numbers and other credit information and then
simply send nothing.
- shops sell unlicensed products they know nothing or very little about.
- shops themselves don't have a license to sell the pharmaceuticals.

Please check our blacklist of unreliable and fraud shops before buying any medical
products online!!! Protect your family and yourself.

http: // www .us-nma .com/

With all due respect and care.
The US NMA.

Update: It looks like they are back. See my comments here...

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Yesterday was a hilarious day.

It hit the news recently that one of the main decryption keys for HDVD was cracked by hackers. A news story was posted to Digg listing the decryption key. Digg then received a DMCA takedown notice from the MPAA. So the article was deleted and the user who posted it was banned from Digg. Then, in protest, another article was posted to Digg containing the code again. This article too was taken down and the user banned. By the end of the day there were many, many more articles listing the code - too many to even remove. People were posting the code everywhere in comments. They were posting it on Slashdot. They were creating domain names with the code. They were posting the code using various simple hiding techniques to comments in articles. They were creating T-Shirts containing the code. It was out of control!

And I was loving every minute of it.

Why? Because it's just this anarchy of the Internet that I love. Once information gets out onto the Internet it can't be taken down. You might be able to take down some sites, but there will always be more sites that will pop up. Since the Internet is so dynamic and so easily modified, you are chasing a moving target. Realistically you can never completely remove something from the Internet, if there is enough interest to keep it available. It will simply move around. This very fact scares the hell out of many oppressive countries. China, for instance has the "Great Firewall of China" which is their attempt to block 'objectionable' material on the Internet from entering their country. The problem is that it's impossible to completely block these stuff. If you hunt hard enough, you will find it.

This free and chaotic exchange of information on the Internet is why I have long believed that the Internet is the more important invention of the last 100 years. It has the potential to change the world (and it already has.)

Last week, one of my coworkers got her hands on a new 8GB Sony VAIO USB 2.0 thumb drive. She got it for a VERY good price (about $62). So naturally when she told us, we are all interested in getting one ourselves. So we all asked her to order us one. She ended up with a good five more of these things being requested. She was due to get them in from her friend this Friday. This morning one of my coworkers mentioned that he had read that some of those 8GB drives are scams and aren't really 8GB. Upon hearing this, I suggested we borrow her 8GB thumb drive and do some tests to make sure it really is 8GB. She agreed and it was brought to me for some testing. Here's what I found:

No Files over 4GB will copy

Apparently, the USB thumb drives are formatted with FAT32 which has a limit of 4GB for each file. I was trying to copy a DVD image that was 4.5GB and I kept getting an error message saying the drive was full. This was odd since it was empty! Apparently this was a bit of a deceptive error message. The drive wasn't full, it was just that you can't copy a file that big to a FAT32 formatted drive. It also appears that you can't format a thumb drive to NTFS, so that idea won't work either. I'm not sure if an external HD based 'thumb drive' will format as NTFS. It really sucks that I can't copy DVD image files to the thumb drive. That is one of the main reasons I wanted one.

One copy window at a time!

I was trying to copy a bunch of files onto the thumb drive, in an attempt to fill up all 8GB of it. I wanted to make sure it could really hold all the 8GB it said it would. I copied a bunch of files over to the thumb drive. Windows brings up the 'copying files' dialog box. I then did this twice more. So now I had three 'copying files' dialogs all copying files at the same time. This is something I've done with hard drives for a long time with no problem. Do NOT do this with thumb drives! This multiple 'copy files' dialog box trick appears to have completely corrupted the file system on the thumb drive! The odd thing was, all the files copied, but the data was corrupted. I couldn't even create an empty folder on the drive. When I did this, I ended up with a brand new empty folder containing garbage files.

Hidden file corruption

While files got corrupted using the multiple 'copying files' dialog trick I mentioned above, this seemed to happen at times even when I only copied files one at a time. After the file corruption problem above, I reformatted the drive and started over. This time I copied files, one by one over and it said it copied them properly. But then once I did a file compare between the files, pretty much EVERY byte was different! This means that even single file copies are getting corrupted. I even tried copying a file from my HD to the thumb drive and then the same file from the thunb drive to a different place on my HD. I then compared the two copies of the files on my HD and they didn't match, as they should.

I'm not sure whether all these problems were a result of a defective thumb drive, or just some kind of problem with 8GB thumb drives in general. Before this drive, the biggest thumb drive I'd used was a 2GB thumb drive. That 2GB space is much smaller than that 4GB FAT32 limitation, so maybe the OS just can't handle drives this big. I don't know.

Needless to say, though, we all cancelled our 'orders' for those 8GB thumb drives after this failed experiment.

On April 27, 2001, I bought my first home. That was six years ago today. It's amazing how fast time goes by. In those 6 years I've worked at several companies, paid off 2 different cars, lost a lot of weight (and gained some of it back), had my salary go down, had my salary go up, adopted 2 pets, done various upgrades to the house, etc.

Home ownership is an absolutely amazing experience. I lived for a good 6 years before I bought this place in various apartments. I never really felt at home in those apartments though. They were just a place to stay. I never knew my neighbors, I never really much cared about the condition of the apartment (it wasn't mine after all). I found it interesting that whenever I talked about my apartment at the time, I never refered to it as 'home'. I just called it 'the apartment'.

Now that I am a homeowner, for the first time since moving out of my parents house, this place truly feels like 'home' to me. Do I miss the house I grew up in? Very much so. That place will always be the very definition of home to me. I still at times wish I could buy that house and move back in. Of course since it's currently located in a fairly bad neighborhood, I won't do that! :) Despite the fact that this place isn't the house I grew up in, it feels very much like my home. I am confortable here. I'm happy here. I have no desire to move. Is it huge? No. But then again, I don't really need that much space. I'm just one guy (and 2 cats). My little 3 bedroom townhouse is perfect for me. Plus, I bought it before real estate prices in Florida went completely insane, so I'm sitting on a nice little investment that isn't too outrageous on the mortgage payments.

I love being a homeowner. Is it expensive? Yes. Is it a hassle? At times, yes. Once you've lived as a homeowner though, there is no going back. I never want to live in an apartment again. It just wouldn't 'feel right'.

I just made the final payment on my Accord! After 2 years and 1 month, I paid off over $20,000 worth of a car loan, and about $15,000 of that was paid in the last eight months or so.

God, it feels great to have that thing paid off!

WOOHOO!!!

(Can you tell I'm happy?)

Ok, I've just made a couple of changes to my site to better 'Google-ify' it.

First, and likely most noticeable is that there is now a small Google AdSense ad over on the right, just above the search box. I've never had any ads on my site before and I'm honestly not much inclined to add them. I'm just adding this for a while to see if my pathetic little site manages to get enough traffic for me to bother with it. If after a while, I see nothing coming of that little ad, I'll get rid of it.

The other change, that is not noticeable is that I've finally updated my site's Google Sitemap. This is an XML file located on the main web site that contains a link to every single article on the site. This better allows Google to index the important articles on my site and hopefully drive more traffic my way.

For anyone who is interested how I added Youtube to my blog, you can find a link to the plugin here.

This is a test to see if I can get YouTube videos to work in my blog....

[youtube]WvDedo8r1Fk[/youtube]

Update: It works! It doesn't show up in RSS readers (not surprising), but it works perfectly in the web browser.

On a side note, I chose this video because it's one of the most amazing examples of guitar playing I've ever seen...

When you get up at 7AM, you get a lot done...

Saturday morning started at 7AM for me. I normally don't get up until around 830-900AM on weekends, but I had to get up earlier than usual on Saturday. I had an appointment at the Honda dealership to get something fixed under warranty on my car. This is the first time in 2 years that I've had to take that Honda in for anything. It's been a great car. I've never had any problems with it, up until now. Even the problem I had was a fairly minor, but weird problem.

Last weekend I was opening the driver's side door of my car, when I heard a snap and then saw some things falling to the ground from the hinge of the door. My first thought was 'Uh oh! What's that?'. I looked on the floor to find several thin pieces of plastic lying there. I'd actually found similar pieces of plastic like this before in my car, but never knew what they were. Since it happened right in front of me this time, I was able to figure it out. Turns out that there is a piece of metal inbetween the door and the car that is used to hold the door open and keep it from swinging out too far. The guy at the dealership called it the door striker. Basically, it's a metal bar that slides in and out of the door as the door opens and closes. Wrapped around this metal bar is a sheath of plastic. It was this plastic sheath that had somehow broken off. As a result, it looked like the metal inside was starting to wear badly and it was making a horrible screech as I opened the door. I called the dealership this past Monday and made an appointment for 830 Saturday morning to get it fixed.

I show up at the dealership promptly at 830 and drop my car off, no problem. The service guy was very friendly and helpful. I had no complaints there. Despite that it was a minor repair, I knew my car was going to be sitting there all day. I had arranged for my brother to come pick me up from the dealership. He came and picked me up. We left, had some breakfast, ran various errands over the next few hours and then by around 3pm I called the dealership to find out my car was done. So we headed back.

We got there around 330pm. I showed up and got them to bring my finished car around. I checked out the repair and it looked fine. I was all happy and ready to go. I then noticed an odd problem. The stereo on the car had 'locked' itself and the time was wrong on the stereo. Oddly enough the radio station settings were still there. After some help from the service guy, we got the radio unlocked. I then noticed that my iPod adapter, that was plugged into the stereo was screwed up... It was just sitting there showing an error code, even with no iPod connected and the car completely shut off!

I got angry because the iPod adapter was working when I arrived. They had apparently disconnected the battery and it had somehow screwed up the iPod adapter. I talked to the guy who actually fixed my car. He claimed he never disconnected the battery, and yet it appeared the battery had been disconnected. We called the service manager over who investigated and couldn't find any sign the battery had been disconnected or how to fix the iPod adapter. Finally, the service manager suggested we disconnect and then reconnect the battery, to reset the stereo. We did that and the stereo and iPod adapter both reset and started working perfectly. I just kind of shrugged it off and thought, "OK. Everything is fine now." So the service manager left, my brother left, and I got in the car to leave. I turned the key and nothing happened! The car wouldn't start! So now my stereo works, but the car doesn't (and it was driving a few moments ago). What the hell?

So I go *back* and get the service manager again and tell him that now the stereo works, but my car won't start! He checks it and determines that my car's battery was dead! It was the original battery that I got with the car 2 years ago... I guess if your battery is going to die, having it die at the dealership is the best possible place for it to happen. So the service manager just suggests we swap out the battery under warranty and send me on my way. He goes over and gets one of the service guys to grab a battery and swap it out right away. So within minutes of my complaining to the manager, I've now got a brand new battery too! To my surprise, they replaced the battery completely under warranty and didn't charge me anything. Usually when you get a battery replaced under warranty they charge you a price prorated based on the warranty life of the battery, versus how long it actually lasted. They didn't do it this time. They replaced it for free.

So now I've got a fixed door 'striker' and a brand new battery out of the deal and I didn't pay anything! I'm quite a happy camper now, even if I ended up leaving the dealership a good hour later than I got there. By now it's 430 in the afternoon. I leave the dealership and drive off to get some gas. I was planning on going to the Dade County Fair that evening and that's a long drive (about 35 miles) so I had to fill up first. I filled up the car and headed south.

By the time I got to the Dade County Fair, it was 6pm. There was a line of cars a good mile or two long waiting to get into the fair! I ended up waiting in that line of cars for over a hour and a half to get into the fair! That's the last time I go to the fair that late in the evening! By the time I found a parking place and got into the fair, it's 745pm. I walked in, looked around a bit and then watched a show there called 'Visions'. It was an interesting half hour show, full of acrobats and wild costumes.

I spent the next several hours at the Fair. It was a beautiful night. No rain, a nice breeze, not too hot. I walked around, ate some grilled corn on the cob (yum!) and a few other things. I looked at the exhibits. It was a nice evening. The damn rides were expensive though! $1.00 per ticket and most rides required at least 2 tickets. So I have to pay $2 to go on even the lame rides? That's not worth it! Plus they had practically NO healthy food. It was fried everything! Fried vegetables? WTF? It's truly sad how bad and unhealthy the food is there. (but that's a story for another blog). Anyway, I left there about 1030pm. By ll15pm or so I was home. I did some stuff around the house for a while and by 100AM I was in bed. That's a long day!

This is cool!

I mentioned a while back that my 20th high school reunion is coming up this year. Well plans have progressed and now a date has been set - August 3rd through August 5th at the Hard Rock Hotel in Hollywood, Florida. This is only a few miles from where I live.

The best part about all this, is that I was finally able to locate my best friend from high school that I lost track of for the last 20 years! (Hi Mike!) I'd been trying to locate him online for years without any luck. He posted a message on the Yahoo Groups group for our reunion and it had his email address. I emailed him back and sent along my instant messenger contact info, and we are chatting online right now! We are even swapping 'baby photos' (pictures of our pets).

It was actually a post of his on Classmates.com that reminded me that our 20 year reunion was coming up a few months back. The problem is that I really hate Classmates.com. They let you sign up for free, but if you want to do anything on there they make you pay! I'm not about to pay for this site. Finally, I was able to get at least enough information through the site for free that I was contacted directly about the reunion. This eventually led to getting back in touch with Mike. Hopefully we can keep in touch from now on.