Infinite Monkeys

If an infinite number of monkeys could eventually write Shakespeare, how many Nigerian scammers would it take to string together a couple of plausible paragraphs trying to scam us?  Not enough, at least not yet…:

THIS IS THE (F.B.I)

http://www.fbi.gov
fbi_cyberwatch_us@yahoo.com.hk
Robert S. Mueller
Executive Director FBI

FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION SEEKING TO WIRETAP THE INTERNET

Dear Esteem Beneficiary,

Have you receive your fund from the FedEx Courier Service Nigeria? Or from any organization claiming that they have your fund with them? We have been watching every transactions that you made from last year 2008 up till date and you have to know that we are also working to make sure that your fund which is supposed to be delivered to you some days ago can be immediately be delivered to you without any further delay or any kind of excuses.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation does not want any of our citizens to lose their fund and that is why we have been working every hour on our cyber watch department so you won’t get burnt by this scammers.

We are aware of every payment you have made on the transaction you are into to make the transaction succeed, yet the fund is still held down by the drug law agency and the immigration officer at the airport.

We want you to take note that our special investigation service diplomatic men are the one to deliver your fund of $5.8million to you without any further roadblock agencies.

The diplomatic delivery men are in Nigeria where your fund is originated at the international airport now, as soon as you get back to this email by applying to the instruction that is sent to you, the delivery will take effect immediately.

The payment you are to send now so that your fund can finally get to you is the sum of $400USD for the airport clearance of your fund due to the huge amount of money, and as soon as this has been sent down via money gram or western union international money transfer, the delivery will take immediate effect by the delivery diplomatic men.

You have to stop every transaction you are into and communication with other organization to avoid delay on processing of your fund and wrong contact that is why we at the FBI have email you to warn you that your fund is in Nigeria at the immigration office where the diplomatic men will deliver it to you personally as soon as the payment of $400USD is sent to them.

Get back to us at the FBI as soon as you receive this email.

Thanks for your co-operation.

Robert S. Mueller,
Federal Bureau of Investigation
J. Edgar Hoover Building
935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, D.C. 20535-0001, USA

All Along the Flak Tower

Flak towers just visible in Humboldthain Park in 1977

I was watching Hitler’s Hidden City on the Nat Geo channel a couple of nights ago.  It was a bit on the hyperbolic side (more typical of the History Channel, actually)…but I was particularly in interested in the flak towers built during WWII.

When I was in Germany in 1977, we stayed at a youth hostel in the Wedding district (now redivided into the Gesundbrunnen district) across the street from Humboldthain Park.  Best I can tell from Google Maps, the Jugendgastehaus Nord might now be a Holiday Inn.

Every day as we walked to the Gesundbrunnen U-Bahn station, we wondered about the “bunker” remains that we saw in the park.  On our last night in Berlin, an early group of BackAmp researchers jumped the fence and sat on top of the concrete structure.  There were no signs or information, but we guessed that it was a WWII structure.

So when the TV showed a photo of the same Flakturm Humboldthain, I finally knew what we had been exploring 32 years ago.  It turns out that the interior is now open for tours from the Berliner Unterwelten.   I’m looking forward to updating our reconnaissance in the not too distant future.

Update: I had been wondering why the Tower is partially buried in a hillside and two of the gun platforms are missing.  According to Urban Exploration Resource:

The Gefechtsturm or G-Turm (lit. “Battle Tower”)
Built in 1941-2, alongside the S-Bahn line, by Italian and French workers.
In 1948 – 51 the G-Turm was partially demolished and the two southerly gun platforms destroyed. 1.6 millon cubic meters of rubble was heaped up around base to form artificial hill and to enhance the park to plans by Garden and Building Department Leader Gunther Rieck. The work was carried out by local jobless people. Most of the rubble was pilled around the south, east and west sides, access being available. But as the tower is build in close proximity to the railway, to the north, dumping and pilling rubble was not done to any great depth. So the northern side is left partially exposed.
The northern face of the bunker is still visible. In the north of the park, and now known as “Humboldt-85 höhe” it overlooks the Hochstrasse and the Gesundbrunnen U-Bahn station.

I suspected that the tower was buried in its own rubble to improve that park which is now confirmed. It’s lucky that any remnant remained visible otherwise it may have completely forgotten.

Phonatic

Phonatic

I got a bit lost on a jog (slog, run, trudge…) around Brown University in Providence RI today.  As I was walking back to the hotel, I saw the best.Vietnamese.restaurant.name.ever….”Phonatic”

Five Handy Travel Tips

Handy Travel Tip #207:  If your bag is ten rows behind your seat, avoid the urge to barge past 40 people when the plane lands.  You’ll get stuck trying to come back and just clog things up.  Try waiting patiently until the intervening passengers have deplaned and stroll back casually to pick up your stuffs.

Handy Travel Tip #416:  Don’t text at the urinals in the DFW airport Men’s room.  Just don’t.

Handy Travel Tip #847:  Don’t piss off the flight attendants by trying to put 22″ roller bags in the short overheads on the port side (at least on American).  Editors note:  Port is left, but always relative to the front of the airplane, so that’s to your RIGHT as you are boarding.  In other words, over the seats labeled A, B, C or A, C.  And don’t ask what happened to B.)

Handy Travel Tip #264: When you get to your row and there’s someone in the aisle seat blocking your access, don’t stand immediately in their way blocking them from moving into the aisleway.  Where exactly do you figure they are going to go?

Handy Travel Tip #914: If the revolving door leaving the secure area has a recording that says  “Only two people per revolving door opening, please.  Touching the door will cause it to stop.”, it probably means that five people in the door opening is going to cause a delay.

Collect them all!

Fracking Vista

Photo: Kristi Evans

My friend Niel recently blew away Vista and installed Ubuntu because of stuttering media issues.  I applauded the move and certainly considered it myself with a long standing wireless problem on my Thinkpad.  A couple days ago, my desktop Vista machine, which has been reasonably solid, started having stuttering during playback.  Pretty much any music or video playback over the web would stutter a bit with any other activity, browser, network copying or even just local disk access with Explorer.

So I turned up Mark Rossinivich’s blog post about Vista’s multimedia playback and network access.  In a nutshell, Microsoft TRIED to improve media playback by adding a service (MMCSS) that increases the priority of the media thread.  OK so far, but MMCSS seems to clobber some network connections.  That I could live with, but it turns out that it’s not altogether bug free and the service itself can cause the media to stutter.  Um, wasn’t that the whole point of the damn service?  This all worked fine on XP, so why does Microsoft go trying to fix stuff that isn’t broken?

One reg hack and one disabled service later (thanks ZDNet) and the problem appears to be resolved.  I’m still uncertain why this issue would suddenly turn up since I don’t allow Windows Update to run automatically and haven’t installed anything recently (…oh wait, I did install Raw Therapee the other day, could it be?…nah).

Hey, We’re Walkin’

I was poking around in Flickr (sorry, forgot to note whose profile I noticed it in) and discovered WalkScore, a website that assesses walkability of where you live.  WalkScore uses Google Maps and generates a score based on what’s nearby.

My results:

• Current house in South Austin: 37 (A bit low IMO since there is an HEB just around the corner which could fulfill 75% of most people’s needs.)
• Last house in Podunk, FL: 6 (Admittedly a bit low too, with a grocery and a couple restaurants close.  There are worse, not a lot, but worse.)
• House I grew up in, Rockledge, Florida: 54 ! (Big points it seems for a close hospital, high school, and churches.)
• First house in NW Austin: 35 (Hrm, compared with current house, more stuff but further off.  Would have expected worse.)
• Second house in NW Austin: 60 (WTF?  Must be big points for having a bar and gas station close by.  It’s clear that there is no allowance for walking routes on busy roads with no shoulder/sidewalk.)

Update: According to the “How It Doesn’t Work” section, WalkScore only considers distances as the crow flies and does not understand pedestrian friendliness, bodies of water (and other impediments), and so forth.  That’s too bad since it heavily skews the results.  For example, our old house with the ‘60′ score had no decent walkable destinations.  There were plenty of closeby amenities, but driving was a necessity due to freeways and busy roads.  OTOH, I walked to the grocery store, video store, and restaurants several times at week at the house with the ‘6′.

WalkScore is teaming up with Zillow and a number of realtors to promote their rankings.  That’s great and I’m all for walkability, but I really do have some reservations about their rankings.  I hope people are just using this as a starting point.

JetBlue is my New Hero

Photo by Samantha Celera

I just heard a quick report on News 8 Austin about an aborted JetBlue flight out of Austin-Bergstrom.  It seems a passenger refused to turn off his cell phone.  The pilot returned to the terminal and the passenger was asked to deplane.  The nice Jet Blue people refunded his money and BANNED HIM FROM JETBLUE FOR LIFE.

Kickass.  I wish AA would have done the same to guy across from me flying to Dallas last week.  And the week before.  And last month.  And that crazy guy with the accent calling at takeoff.  And the chick who said it was OK, she was just texting during final approach…

Update: The story is now posted on News 8’s website with the comment that the passenger could face FEDERAL charges.  I’m printing that story and carrying it in my briefcase.

Project 12

I never got around to writing much of a summary of last year’s Project 365/366.  I did get all 366 photos taken and posted, albeit a few were taken at 11:59 PM.  It was an enjoyable project although it turned out a bit different than I might have guessed.  I expected to get better technically with my camera, and I did learn a few subtleties.  I particularly wanted to improve on approaching strangers about taking their photo, which I barely improved at (although beer helps).

What I did get better at (I think) was finding seemingly mundane things to photograph in an interesting way, at least to me.  And the record of the year is amazing, I remember each and every shot and also quite a bit about that particular day that would otherwise become more of a blur.

I did enjoy the project thoroughly and became quite comfortable explaining to friends and coworkers why I was hauling a camera around all of the time.  I considered continuing to 2009, but come  Jan 1, I was happy to not be scanning for a photo from the time I got up until I had something I liked.  It surprised me, but that “looking for a photo” mode just switched off; I had sort of expected to find myself constantly on the lookout and worrying about getting something until I would remember that the project was over.

Consequently, the camera(s) got left home a little more often that they might have been, although I have taken a few.  So, one quarter into the year, I’ve decided to resume as “Project 12″, with at least one photo a month posted.  I think having a much easier deadline will get me thinking again about regular photography without the commitment of a daily post.  Sure, it’s not much, but the three I just posted at Photoblog cover the highlights of Jan, Feb, and March for me.

Fracking Computers

Photo: Kristi Evans

A little over a year ago my (not so) trusty HP dv4000 laptop crapped out.  Barely two years old, it was almost perfect and I had bought it for a song.  I mulled over just getting by with my desktop (which lives upstairs in my home office) and my “work” laptop which I prefer to not use for fun, not that anyone really seems to care.

I ended up getting a decent deal on a Lenovo R61i with Vista.  Nice laptop, although I am not a fan of widescreens but I do watch some movies on this machine and figured it would be good for that.  It took a couple of months to turn off and/or configure some of the more major Vista annoyances and for the past eight months I have been fighting just one…the S3 resume from standby takes from 30 to 60 seconds IF it comes back at all; mostly the problem appeared to be wireless related.  One out of ten or so times, the HDD light stays on and that’s it, switch off time.

I tried everything, updated BIOS a couple times, Lenovo’s (IBM legacy really) clunky System Update, Vista SP1, etc., etc.  Nothing helped.  Since the warranty is a couple weeks from expiring, I called Lenovo and attempted to whine my way into an XP downgrade DVD pleading that I had put up with it for 11.5 months.  After escalating to a supervisor, I pretty much had them talked into waving the $35 charge until they discovered that there was no DVD for this box nor was it even licensed by Microsoft for downgrade.  Sh*t.  I’ve been threatening just to overwrite their crappy preload with Ubuntu for months, but that would prevent my Netflix instant watching, at least half the reason for even owning this computer.

So…I made one last troll through Lenovo’s customer forums.  Several people had reported random Wifi disconnects and other symptoms that they had fixed by getting rid of the craptacular Access Connections (which is actually the only one of the Lenovo/IBM utils that I kinda like).  None of their symptoms correlated with mine, so I had not tried that.   Since I was out of options, I gave it a whirl two days ago.  BADDA BING, the dang thing has been perfect so far with no resume/reconnect taking longer than 5-6 seconds.

I’m obviously kicking myself for not trying it sooner, but pleased that it seems to be a fix…and keeping my fingers crossed that I didn’t just jinx it by writing this.

Overheard at the Deli Counter

Clerk: “Oh, your daughter is so cute”

Father: “Thanks.”

Clerk: “What’s her name?”

Father (proudly): “Aberdeen”

Clerk: “Oh, I used to live in Washington”

Father (blank stare, followed by nearly audible sniff): “Well it’s actually Scotland”

Me…walking away LMAO.