fine whine

I am still recovering from B-fest. I'll write about it when I'm coherent.

So I'm at b-fest, and my voice is already hoarse. Less than six hours have passed. I have over eighteen to go...

Want to know an easy way to get thrown out of a bowling alley?

Skip the shoe rental and shot-put your bowling balls from the regular floor. They really love that sort of thing.

So what is all the hullabaloo about this "phishing" that I have been hearing in the last month or so? Scammers sending fake pages to steal personal information isn't exactly a new phenomenon, though a recently revealed Internet Explorer bug that allows bogus information in the address bar certainly helps things along, seeing as it takes away one more way to spot a fake.

I weep.

Seriously, though, I have to wonder what Mr. Anastasio and company would think of this appropriation of their band's name for such actions. Any more than Hormel would take offense at their canned meat product's fame of the last decade or so. But "spam" I have long been familiar with, and I don't just mean the can of it that has traveled with me since college. I'd heard of it and used it long before it fell into common usage, let alone on the network news. But "phishing"? I'd never heard of it until getting an email several weeks ago about the supposedly well-known problem. I feel somehow left out.

I guess it's just like me and the whole "wi-fi" debacle. But "wi-fi" popped up in those free computer magazines that still haunt everybody who's left the computer industry. "Phishing" just came out of left field, nearest I can tell. Who's making this stuff up?

You may not have noticed this, but everybody seems to sneeze differently. Some may chalk it up to individuality, but I think it is degrees of embellishment. Nobody, of course, thinks that his or her sneeze is anything but completely normal, but I think I know better. Of course mine sound normal to me.

What's different about my sneezes is that I can keep my eyes open. Science be damned.

Ah, how I miss the wry humor of Rocky and Bullwinkle "episode" title pairs. There was a formula to it: generally the first was funny by itself and the second a pun upon the first, like "Pottsylvania 6-5000, or, This episode title sucks" which I will not stoop to explaining.

Anyway, my yearnings for my childhood don't stop at Moose und Squirrel. I've been messing with LEGO bricks, as I have mentioned. I had picked up some assorted Technic parts and sets on eBay, and the last of them ended today. I'd really just been looking for some nice big wheels, and it had four huge ones, and the price was under ten pounds (GBP, that is). What was cool, though, is what amuses me about the auctions I actively take a role in winning: the way that I win. Most people know now about the programs people use to get bids in just at the very last possible moment (called sniping) but I nevertheless can beat people using these programs. The auction I speak of now saw several separate bids from me, one at $2, another at $4.86 and a final, winning one at $5.67 (I usually account for over half of the bids in a a given auction). What matters isn't the odd amounts so much as the exact moment they were cast. The last one I managed to get in with mere milliseconds to go and I managed to beat the other guy's bid by fourteen hundredths of a second and five pence.

Anyway, I thought it was cool. And I had nothing better to write.

mdl42( 88)

$5.67

26-Jan-04 21:22:27 GMT

b.r.florio( 202)

$5.62

26-Jan-04 21:22:41 GMT

mdl42( 88)

$4.86

26-Jan-04 21:20:36 GMT

mdl42( 88)

$2.50

26-Jan-04 19:05:48 GMT

pinkoconnell4( 18)

$2.20

26-Jan-04 18:17:57 GMT

mdl42( 88)

$2.00

26-Jan-04 16:55:10 GMT