Once again, other than the redacted URL, this is entirely verbatim. I think there were more words that were supposed to be randomly chosen from arrays of synonyms in a lot of places, but somehow those words were never inserted… thus leaving this spam a bunch of complete nonsense.

Subject: Become an investigator
From: “deidre carter” <isaac@djlong.accessgenealogy.com>
To: “Sherri George” <cody@zone38.net>

,

let go I held for .

thank you enough for me in this . You have given me a on life. Already
twice as much as I in my old job.

I a . Taking home in 18 months. in this . and I am a hero to the and
to my . What an to be in.

exactly what your me to do, . I go to the and locate all of the I can
handle.

(more…)

OK, so we all know by now that the campus buses here at UGA don’t run at all on the days of home football games, but I figured I’d be able to catch a city bus somewhere near campus, right?

Wrong. Unless I wanted to walk approximately a mile and a quarter to the nearest bus stop that they do pick up at on game days (an illustration via Google Maps).

And they do not mention this fact at all on their web site. After actually getting over my telephonophobia and calling transit headquarters to confirm whether the routes run to south campus on game days (hey, at least I had the foresight not to wait at the bus stop for an hour wondering where the bus was…), I left a message with the Athens Transit webmaster letting him know that, hey, the fact that the routes change on game days is something that needs to actually be mentioned somewhere.

As for that mile-and-a-quarter walk? The temperature right now is 86°, according to AccuWeather, while the heat index is 94°. I was about to collapse just walking the quarter of a mile to the East Campus dining hall… yeah, I know, part of it’s because I’m out of shape, but I could make that walk in the winter without much trouble.

From a University of Southern California press release, this may be one of the most self-referential headlines I’ve seen in a while:

Grammar Lost Translation Machine In Researchers Fix Will

(found via ACM TechNews)

Argh. Yes, there may be a public transit system here, but rapid transit it is not.

I decided to take a little excursion this afternoon, while I had some free time, to go to the grocery store to pick up a couple things I needed— namely, orange juice and a box of blueberry Toaster Strudels™®©. (Mm, I love those things.)

Catching the bus to the grocery store wasn’t an issue, either. So I got there without a hitch, and found the orange juice I needed… but lo and behold, the store’s freezer wasn’t working properly, so the Toaster Strudels were more than a bit warm. I didn’t want to risk it, so I decided just not to bother with them.

So I came out with the grocery store and waited eight minutes for the bus, just like the schedule said.

And waited.

And waited.

By this point, it was already past time for the bus to be several stops past the one I was at, yet I hadn’t seen the slightest hint of it.

So I decided to walk back a bit… slow as it was.

Finally, after several minutes of walking— honestly, I had lost count of how long it had been by then— a bus showed up and I stepped on, to ride it all the way around the route. Naturally, there had been no buses that showed up on the other side of the street… and even if there had, there’s no way I’m playing a life-sized game of Frogger to get across that busy road. (Who in their right mind would design a major intersection and not put a crosswalk there, anyway?)

Total time spent? Over an hour. For a carton of orange juice. Now I have to go to some other store some other time to find the Toaster Strudels.

Maybe I should try my hand again at learning to ride a bike…

OK, I’m going to have to find somewhere else to do laundry. The place I’m supposed to go to is two blocks away… and not air conditioned. There’s no way I could spend several hours in there watching over my clothes— and there’s no way I’m walking back to my own apartment, where I can’t even hear the washer or dryer go off, not to mention that I’d have to walk back to start the next load. Even waiting outside the laundry room would be an issue; it’s just as hot outside as it is inside, at least during the summer and early fall.

I wonder if there are any laundry pickup/delivery services around… or even a public laundromat on one of the bus routes…

Actually, even better, it seems that the Housing department will let me use the air-conditioned laundry in the next apartment building over, if I can get a signed letter from Disability Services explaining the circumstances. And yes, before anyone asks, it is a disability issue; I’ve passed out because of my asthma and other medical conditions in similar circumstances in the past. So at least the outcome looks promising.

Fans of parodically bad writing, take note: the Bulwer-Lytton Contest results are in. I’d have made some witty comment, but my creative spark’s just not there tonight; regardless of what they say, no muse is definitely not good muse…

Y’know, after I got one too many spams advertising a Canadian pharmacy “verified by BBB”, I just had to go check it out and see how truthful they were.

So, after removing all tracking information from the URL to prevent any sort of click-through revenue, I entered the address of the site. It looked fairly legitimate, and even had a number of seals at the bottom identifying affiliation with various big names in online business.

Except… well, let’s just say that something was rotten in the province of Ontario.

Upon closer inspection, every one of the links pointed to a page on the pharmacy’s own domain. Sure, they tried to hide it by hiding the address bar via JavaScript, but it wasn’t too hard to unhide it and reveal their duplicity.

And why were they hosting the BBB report on their own site, rather than linking to the BBB? A quick search at the BBB’s web site turned up the real report (compare the mailing address in that first screen shot if you have any doubt!), which points out that they’re not even a member— membership, of course, being a requirement to display the seal featured on the front page. Oops.

Oh, and also, those links in the fake report don’t work at all. So much for getting the much-needed background information.

Even worse: They claimed to be a secure site using a Verisign encryption certificate. Of course, that was also a fake certificate hosted on their site. Indeed, there was no security at all— no padlock in the corner, no HTTPS URL, nothing.

So yeah. Avoid these guys like the plague— no pun intended!

Egads. The fact that people are opening this Mytob virus despite the utter illogic of its social engineering is scary enough, but what’s even more scary is how much of a bandwidth eater it and others of its ilk are. Here’s a screenshot of what greeted me when I checked my mail late this afternoon, after spending the morning and early afternoon on a trip away from the computer.

OK, so maybe I’m partly at fault for having a catch-all account, but still. At least you can’t say I’m helping to spread it… I’d have to load up Virtual PC and copy it into a shared folder if I even wanted to execute this trash in the first place. 🙂

Edited 2005/06/10 to add: Oh, yeah, and it was surprisingly easy to filter on the server side, too. How? Well, suffice it to say there’s no such product as “Zone38 Antivirus”, so why would any legitimate e-mail mention it? Of course, this needs to be changed to apply to your own domain, but still, it’s prevented me from having a mailbox looking like the one in the screenshot above…

Well, I’m visiting UGA‘s campus right now, and the good news is, I think I can get around the campus fairly well now.

Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about going off campus: not only do the city buses not run on Sundays, they also don’t run after around 6:30 PM. There go all my plans for nighttime mall trips. (And the street on which the mall is located is hardly pedestrian-friendly, I should add… besides, it’s an insanely long distance from campus.)

I hate this world sometimes.

Speaking of bad transit maps and UGA, this part of Athens Transit’s system map really needs to be redesigned. There are so many routes overlapping that I literally can’t tell what goes where in some parts of the map. And some of the street names and landmarks are obscured by the routes, too, which only makes things worse. Oh, and forget about trying to find one of the smaller streets on campus under all those routes– as far as I’m concerned, they don’t exist on this map! >_<