Nigerian Spam: It's Not Just for Nigeria Any more

Kind of like cannibalism being good enough for Congo, so it's good enough for North Korea too.

Here's the latest opportunity for wealth that I'm about to pass up:

Urgent Business Proposal

It is with respect and confidence that I decided to contact you for a confidential transaction,which requires your assistance for our mutual beneficial relationship.

My name is Mr. Dialo Muktar,a close friend of Late General Guei Robert and the director viga assistant security company in Cote D'Ivoire.There is this sum of $12,000.000.00 that the former military head of state in Cote D'Ivoire General Guei Robert deposited in our custody last two years,which he wanted to use to contest for the next presidential election in Cote D'Ivoire.

But during this crisis in Cote D'Ivoire, he was killed; his wife and children were also killed leaving nobody as next of kin . So I am seeking for your assistance to transfer this money out of the country immediately.The process that I wanted to use to transfer this money is to push the money to our affiliate company in Europe through diplomatic means, and then I will delegate my son to meet with you for the clearance and sharing.

Meanwhile, if you are interested, for your assistance, 30% of the money will be for you and I will forward to you more details of this transaction and every document that regards to this transaction immediately I receive your positive response to my proposal.You can send me your reply at my mail addresse:dialo@infodesi.com or dialo@omaninfo.com

Remember that this business is risk free because I am the only person that is aware of this transaction. Your telephone number will be highly needed for easy communication.

Best Regards,

Mr Dialo Muktar

I know, I know... how could I pass up such a great opportunity!

Moving Report

I've had the domain since 1999. I'll probably explain why on the 2.0 blog, because the domain will make no sense otherwise.

I have the hosting, and the name servers have been changed. I can access my hosting via IP now. (And I haven't even mailed the check to pay for it yet, having just ordered last night.)

At home I have a download of pMachine, and think it appears easy based on the documentation. Jen says it's super easy. Maripat says it's harder than she'd expected. Mileage obviously varies.

I will obviously need to find out how to access MySQL and stuff like that on the new host.

So if I am preoccupied or run into trouble, my move could be a whole week or so away. If I hurry, it could be a few days. Stay tuned...

The State Is Funny

One quarter I file sales taxes a couple days late, compute the penalty, send the whole thing off, and get a refund because I overpaid the penalty.

Another quarter I file almost a month late, compute the penalty and interest carefully, and they send a bill for $6 more. All I can figure is they added an extra month. No biggie, but I figured I was saving them the trouble of sending me a bill. I used the same formula to compute it both times. The one they say to use. Go figure.

At least they don't get too excited when you're late. I was busy and low on cash flow, and the small penalty isn't too much to pay for a little flexibility.

Spam

115 Spam e-mails in three days. Yay.

Symposium

RWN has an excellent and entertaining symposium on the 2004 election. Long, but fun reading.

Note to Self

Return again to this site. I wasn't setting out to do a Dungeon Tour, but the name intrigued me, and it's one I am sure I'd include.

I also noticed this one hosted under Dean's domain. I love the design and colors, yet it remains readable in contrast and text size. Often that gets sacrificed to being pretty.

Another Refugee

Even as I am here changing the DNS for the domain I will use when I move, I get notice of another fine refugee from BlogSplat.*

damnum absque injuria, also known as Xrlq, has moved. Woohoo! Make all the requisite blogroll changes.

Enetation Is Becoming A Reason To Migrate

Mostly Enetation has been great for comments. And after all, it's free. But I have been noticing, with debugging turned on in IE options, that when the comments choose not to appear, I have to click an error message for each post where comments should appear. That's a lot of clicks. It seems to happen to other people as well, and if debugging is off, seems merely to make for extra slow loading.

I see less of this in pMachine and Movable Type sites that have their own comment systems.

Today, for me, Enetation has been especially bad. I refresh my site, eager to see what new comments may have been left, and instead I have to click "no" about 40 times and comments don't exist. Then I refresh a few minutes later and they're back. It's bizarre.

Argh

InterNIC and then Network Solutions used to be so easy. What a pain. It used to be that I'd go fill out the text form and mail it in, using the "send from" method. I have not yet found if that's even an available method any more. They assigned me a user ID for logging in a while back, for which I just had to create a password, but that appears only to be connected to one domain. I am the admin for about 10 domains.

Obviously I don't make changes very often! Last time I dealt with NSI, it was within several weeks of renewal time and I had trouble making any changes because they lock things tight so you can't move to another registrar until you've bribed them. I plan to move for that reason as much as to save money. There were no alternatives originally.

Indeed, I see the street address for the account is invalid, because they never changed it when I corrected it last time, so they have it flagged for me to correct now. Stupid twits.

Okay, I found the ID number I needed, in an e-mail they sent me in November 2001. Sheesh. Of course, I have to reset the password, because their never was a password in the first place.

It's probably too soon to change the name servers anyway, since my hosting won't be setup until at least sometime tomorrow, but hey. Figured while I was thinking about it.

Narrowing It Down To Three

Yet Another Weird SF Fan

Random Acts of Kindness

Technically Speaking

Too many good entries! I hate choosing, but I guess I'll go with these three. Good luck guys!

Almost Forgot Voting!

I had previously voted for the entries at:
Technically Speaking
RantDude's Ravings
FreeSpeech
BusinessPundit
Tiger
Mudville Gazette
Yet Another Weird SF Fan (at least, I'd meant to)
Sanity's Edge
Random Acts of Kindness

I thought I probably ought to narrow it down and pick, oh, maybe three. So these are my choices, and I'll ponder and vote three in the next post.

Another Defector

Justene at Calblog has moved of BlogSplat. Woohoo!

Lego Logic

This is a cool article about positive things happening in Iraq. Via Virgina Postrel.

SF That's Not Timeless

I'm currently reading The Genesis Machine by James P. Hogan. Copyright date is 1978, meaning it's one of his earlier books.

As sometimes happens, it's clearly a product of its time (and the author's background of course). Thus you see a reference to things being controlled by a PDP64.

They have no Internet, but something called an "Infonet." It's a lot like the Internet, but heavily controlled, and doubling as a videophone system. Computing power is largely centralized and costly, with terminals that tie into central computers.

All that said, it's an excellent read. SF reflecting the life and times is nothing new. Look at the failure way back to predict microcomputers by, well, about everyone, yet as the same time the predictions of robots at a level we have not seen yet... despite the microcomputing power that implies and requires. It's finally coming, in the next 10-20 years, in a big way.

Giant mechanical devices for navigational math. That never happened, and Libby wasn't needed when they failed.

This kind of thing makes SF an intriguing study in its own right.

They Sound Serious!

There's more on that crazy Oregon mileage tax idea here.

Mickey's Musings

Not to self to update link, as she's moving from here over to a new home.

Which also applies to Paul, from All Agitprop, All The Time, aka Frozen In Montreal, the resident North Korea watcher.

Those dragon's wing's are getting pretty weighed down.

More On Cannibalism

Here's another article on cannibalism in North Korea, via Gweilo.

Well this sucks

I can't even post a quick "not going to blog much today because I have stuff to do"! w.bloggar returns "appkey is invalid or inactive," which apparently as an RPC/API error meaning "I can't seeeeeee you." Blogger.com is plain dead, which would certainly explain the w.bloggar error.

How annoying.

So here's some stuff I am seeing as I look at other sites:

Acidman is truly back in good form. "Cats are terrorists." What a great line! Then there's the mind-blowing company memo. Get on over there are check out the tall dogs and shoulda sent it posts.

We're still moving up. Dunno how. Right We Are! is at 167 links in the Ecosystem, which is 119th on the list, between the gratuitous gun picture dude and Blogs of War. I'm at 160, which is 125th, between Blogs of War and Jay Caruso. Go us!

Dean has a couple good items so far today. One is on Democratic Primary Analyses. The other is on why the whole WMD blame game issue is ridiculous, and is far and away the most cohesive, comprehensive discussion of that I have seen. I'm surprised Glenn Reynolds hadn't linked it in his efforts on the WMD issue today.

If I see more, it'll be another post.

Hooray, It's Back!

Updated

Not done yet, but I made some significant updates to the template in the form of linkage reorganization. If you have an idea, or a different idea, on where you belong listed, let me know so I can torment you by ignoring your opinion.

I also watched The Princess Bride tonight, due to the evil influence of Lori.