Thursday, February 28, 2008

Fun With Spam (Revisited)



I’ve been repeatedly getting the funniest e-mails in my inbox the last few months. I finally figured it out with the format of the subject line used for this one from diederdeningval@gmail.com:

.....Subject Line: **F\/(k Y()u!** [[I know where you live]]

.....E-Mail Body: I know where you live. 4488 Heem Street, Ladd Illinois, 61122. Fear me! I will pound you when you least expect it!
(when your finished reading this post, click here for more about the above address)

Yea, I know, this e-mail doesn’t seem particularly funny by itself so let me give you the history behind it. On the AA’s Guitar Page, I wanted to write a funny blog entry about spam e-mail. So here’s basically how it went.

“I get a ton of spam e-mails everyday, and so do a lot of other people that I now have the e-mail addresses for thanks to the spam I received. So I decided that just for kicks, I would send an e-mail to all the thousands of other people that received the same spam e-mails that I did. In that e-mail I asked them to join the multitudes of people who want to end spam and reply to every spam e-mail with the following message:

.....Subject Line: **Warning** [[Incoming Spam Detected]]

.....E-Mail Body: Attention spammer, all outgoing transmissions from current ISP <#415-362-18425> must cease immediately. The equipment must be disconnected from all public internet communication networks. You have 24 hours to relinquish ownership of said ISP number.”


So here’s the thing. I just figured that everyone would ironically label my e-mail as spam, and blog readers would just laugh it off. Nope. Apparently, between the e-mails I sent and the people who read that blog, there were more than enough “participants” in that particular prank to have some affect.
.
It just cracks me up that these spammers received these messages and didn’t even question the fake ISP number, and then they actually unplugged their computers and canceled their internet service. I never would have guessed in a million years that any spammers would do that. I am continually shocked at the level of computer illiteracy found among so many computer users.(spell check corrected illiteracy, LOL)

Classic Rock Quiz


I was A Master!
I scored 86/100 on theClassic Guitar Solo Quiz

Can you identify classic rock songs by listening to their guitar solos?


Quiz by Ibanez Guitar Blog

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Vote Strong, Vote Confident, Vote NONE OF THE ABOVE

The other day I got my absentee ballot for the upcoming Ohio Primary Election. So who am I going to vote for? Nobody. Don’t believe me? Click here. That’s right! Apparently if you don’t specifically ascribe to either the Republican or Democratic Party, you don’t get any choice at all. There’s No Ralph Nader, No Pat Buchanan, heck there isn’t even a Ross Perot on that ballot. But hey, I can at least vote for or against additional funding for the Zoo.
.
This ballot cracks me up, but I actually did know that there weren’t going to be any Presidential candidates on it. I was however shocked to find that there aren’t even any choices for the local races due to candidates dropping out of the running for each office. This doesn’t sound right to me; I mean just because one of the two candidates in each race threw in the towel before the election, they completely left those choices off the ballot. But what if I don’t like the remaining candidates? It is possible that a majority of the people in my State, County and/or Township doesn’t like a particular candidate. Then the automatic election of that candidate would totally negate the purpose of the Democratic process. It sort of takes away the freedom to vote, which has actually happened to me in the past. Don’t believe me? Click here? But seriously, I think we should at least be permitted to “veto” these guys.

.
Think about it. If we could actually “veto” the candidates with a “none of the above” vote then we wouldn’t be stuck voting for the lesser of two evils all the time. I would definitely have voted “none of the above” for the last two presidential elections.

Friday, February 15, 2008

Please Stand By. I Am Experiencing Some Mental Difficulties.


I have to apologize to everyone for not posting anything this week. Aparently I have kind-of been in a funk all week. If I had been thinking clearly earlier this week, I could have scanned a document and copied a link and totally milked this idea that for some reason didn't hit me until just now. Until then, check out the 2 new other blogs that I have discovered and linked to over there on the right. Slick and Chuck's Advice Site is pretty funny, and The Rock House blog is really helpful to guitarists.

Friday, February 8, 2008

A Penny Debited To Your Account Is A Penny Earned

I haven't had any time this week to come up with a new blog post, so I thought I would post this oldie from an old blog of mine called What Andy Really Thinks. I was reminded of this after recently reading the Snopes.com answer to a reader's question. By the way, the Snopes people got it wrong because they refered to the coins as possessions and not as a representation of wealth in the US treasury.

When asked what I thought about the most recent efforts to eliminate the penny from American currency I thought:

Good deal, because a penny saved is no longer a penny earned.

The US treasury estimates that by the end of the 2006 fiscal year it will cost 1 and 23/100 cents to manufacture a 1 cent coin. If the coin can only represent 1 cent from the treasury, then the other 23/100 of a cent ends up being lost. So a penny saved is really only 81/100 of a penny earned. It’s kind of a rip-off when you think about.

What do we really save from eliminating the penny? We would save 23 cents on every 1 dollar roll. If the treasury makes 10 billion (10,000,000,000) pennies per year (they actually make more), which is 100 million (100,000,000) 1 dollar rolls, then we would save $23 million ($23,000,000) per year. Just for the record, a similar thing is true for the nickel. We can save 73/100 cents for each of the 1 billion nickels eliminated.

In 1994, I opened a checking account from a national bank that included this new thing called a ‘check card’. Interested in having immediate access to my money at the point of purchase where previously I had to first obtain cash from a teller or ATM, I jumped on this new technology. Unfortunately, this required that I have a driver’s license style picture taken for the front of it. This wouldn’t have been a problem except that this relatively early Saturday morning was preceded by a very late and alcohol filled Friday night. The only way the bank will retake the picture is if I close the account and reopen a new one. So, 12 years later, there is still a funny picture of a very hung over me on the front of this card. The good news is. (1) I always have enough money from my account on my body and person to buy something. (2) Lose cash, and it’s essentially gone, but lose the card and no one else can use it and the bank replaces it. And (3) the neighborhood ice cream truck is about the only place that I can’t use it.

Years ago I would refer to this card as if I was the only one in the world advanced enough to have one, but now I can’t do that because almost everyone has one. For most of the country, cash has become mostly obsolete. It is entirely possible to eliminate all coinage lesser than a quarter from American currency because most transactions that can in no way be made in any other form than cash are conducted in amounts rounded to a quarter. Girl Scouts, school fundraisers, the paper boy, and the aforementioned ice cream man are prime examples.

On the other side of the coin, so to speak, I think we can also eliminate all currency greater than the 10 dollar bill. This may sound crazy, but think about it, what are you gonna buy for more than 20 dollars that can’t be purchased with a card? Drugs? If the police find the guy with all of the ten dollar bills, then they found the drug dealer. But, more importantly, the treasury recently reported that American currency is being counterfeited at a record rate. Nobody is sure exactly how much money is “stolen” from the US Treasury via counterfeit money every year, but the Secret Service estimates it to be in the hundreds of millions. So, if nobody accepts 20’s, 50’s or 100’s, then the counterfeiters can make as many of these bills as they want without hurting the economy because they just aren’t gonna be able use them anyway.

.
Even though this is much more possible than people realize, I don’t see cash being “counted out” anytime soon.

Get the RSS Reader

Subscribe to this blog by e-mail

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

Add this blog to your homepage

Add to Google Reader or Homepage