Spam

Vote For Your Favorite “My Favorite Miata Photo” Part II

I started a little photo contest for Miata pictures back in August. I got 58 entries and then I put up a poll and asked folks to vote for their favorite. Well I expected them to judge the pictures on artistic merit, but got a surprise. People were voting for some of the least artistic ones. I checked my server log and it seemed like a lot of votes were coming from places that I had received comment spam from, suspecting some one was toying with the process, I closed the voting.

Boy did that raise a stink. The top vote getter had asked her friends to vote for her picture (not that that was against the rules) and the second place photographer did likewise, but was insulted when I mentioned I thought his picture wasn’t even in the top half I would have picked, so he asked me to pull it (I did.) Then I ran into hosting issues, so I couldn’t put the voting back up, until tonight, so…

Wake the kids, phone the neighbors, email everyone in your address book, post a link on your blog and wardrive around town voting from every unsecured WiFi hotspot you can find. The top 2 vote getters will win prizes, 1st place gets a shirt and second gets a sticker from the Life of Brian Store. Third place will get an honorable mention, which is just like it sounds, a mention. The polls will be open until Sunday, September 24, 2006 at 1700 hours Zulu (12:00PM noon Eastern US Time.)

—>> Voting Booth <<—

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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 383

Now That’s Scary

Candy!Tuesday, August 29th and the local supermarket has an aisle full of Halloween candy. It is more than 2 months away for criminy sakes.

What’s even scarier is that I got a message from my credit card company this afternoon asking me to call them about some questionable charges. They questioned 4 charges, two under ten dollars and a couple of over $300. They read me the names of the companies and I didn’t recognize them, either as anyone I have done business with or had ever heard of. They were all online charges and I didn’t ask, but I’m guessing they caught them using something along the lines of SPAM filtering. Anyway, that account is closed and a new one with card is being sent to me.

I have made several travel purchases in the last 10 days or so, but almost all were from reputable big companies. The timing was curious though, all the transactions were midday today which is just a bout 4 hours after I received my monthly email notification that my web host had hit that very same charge card. I wonder just how secure my CC data is with these folks? I would just pack up and leave, but they are the ones who registered the domain name mr-miata.net, so I’d lose that and y’all would be cast adrift in the rough seas of the internet until you found me again. If someday soon you come here and don’t find this blog, try lifeofbrian.com or mrmiata.com or some other variation on those themes…

I would do it in a heartbeat if WordPress was as easy export my posts from as Movable Type was.

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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 353

GET YOUR UNI:VERSITY DIPLOM^A

My at-work spam count, that which is caught by the filters, has been hovering in the mid fifties, but in the last couple of days a half dozen or so of them have slipped by the filter and made it to my inbox. Various titles, from various internal spoofed email addresses and all with the same internal content.

It is of course riddled with extra characters in key words that the spam filters would catch. My favorite line is:

Receive the benefits and admiration that comes with a D:iploma!

Just how is a D:iploma different from a diploma, because I have a diploma and I don’t seem to get many benefits nor any admiration from having it.

But what worries me most, is there are probably hundreds of people out there that actually call the phone number at the bottom of the email…

Spamtastic

SpamtasticI HEART Gmail. And the spammers HEART my Gmail address. Items that are classified as spam get instantly tossed into the spam folder. Like most people, I’m guessing, no matter what spam defense you might have occasionally one sneaks through the net. In Gmail all I have to do is select the offending piece of junk and click on the button marked “Report Spam” and it gets put in the spam folder. The folder is self purging, anything that is in there with a date of 30 older than current gets sent into never-land. This afternoon I reached a new high in my spam folder – 1000.

That’s like 33-1/3 a day. Now that I write that out loud it doesn’t seem that impressive. I get nearly that many credit card offers daily in the snail mail! OK, kidding about that, but my work spam filter catches about 50 a day. Remind me to look in the morning and I’ll let you know how many under 30 day old spam letters I have there.

If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Another

None of the galleries of my pictures is working. I wonder how long that has been? I have been using a program called Simple PHP Gallery. A while back I went to the home page of the author to check for updates, but discovered that the web page was unavailable. There was a little note from the hosting company asking if I was the owner and would I like to renew my agreement…The script was still working so I just ignored that.

Something must have changed on my host to alter the way the script works, but I’ll be danged if I know what that might be. Might have happened in the recent spam attack or some upgrade of a pearl module or whatever. Guess I’ll be hunting up a new picture gallery method.

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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 13

My Ship Has Come In

Bogardus

I write this august letter in confidence, believing that it will reach you in high spirit and I believe you will maintain the level of confidence and trust matters of this nature requires. Though, I know that this proposal may make you apprehensive and worried, but I assure you that all will be well at the end. Before proceeding, I wish to introduce myself. I am Mr John Clark, personal accountant to Late Engr. Mark Bogardus.

The Proposal:

An American Citizen, Late Engr. Mark Bogardus, a Petrochemical Engineer died in an autocrash in May 2000. He operated a domiciliary account here in London and had a closing balance as at the end of September 2000 amounting to $10,000,000.00 ( Ten Million United States Dollars only).Valueable efforts have been made by the security company to get in touch with any of Late Mark relation as beneficiary to his estates without success.

Consequently, the chairman and the board of Directors are planning to declare the fund Unclaimed and then forfeited into the governments account because of the security company’s inability to locate a relation or next of kin. In other to avert this negative development, I now seek your permission to have you stand as next of kin to the estate of late Engr. Mark, so that the fund $10,000,000.00 will be released and paid into your account as the beneficiarys next of kin. I will help to arrange all documents and proves to enable us get this fund out.

I have secured from the probate registry an order of mandamus to locate any of the deceased beneficiary and more so, I am assuring you that this transaction is risk free. Once the fund is moved to your nominated account, you will be entitled to 40%, 20% to charity while i get 40%.

As soon as I receive your acceptance in principle, I will furnish you with the necessary modalities for commencement.Finally, I am relying in my confidence in you, having opened up to you, if however you are not interested,please feel free to destroy this information.

Yours Faithfully,
John Clark.

Having Trouble Finding Me?

Me too. When I got home from work on Monday I couldn’t get to mr-miata.net. No website, no mail, no FTP. After dinner I could view the blog and get mail. Later when I went to blog it was missing again. The Internet seemed kind of slow to some places, I wondered what was going on. A little after 8 PM I received this:

Dear Customers

We are sorry to inform your that the server Smile is being severly attacked by spammers causing the server go on high load. we are currently still working on this situation, and we hope to stop this attach the soonest possible.

Kind Regards,
ssWebHost.com

Server Smile, I know how you feel. Thanks spammers.