mcgees.org

I am being bombarded with a new spam campaign.  A typical email contains the following text:

Furthermore, safety, privacy, discretion, and time are all major factors.

It is then followed by a URL.  The software generating the messages, though, is smart enough to shuffle the order of the “factor” words around, and sometimes omit one of them.  So I tried creating a “Delete It” filter in Gmail that matches all email with the words “safety”, “privacy”, and “discretion”.  That would eliminate 80% of spam from this campaign.  However, according to a test search, I would miss quite a few messages from the ACLU….

Answer to What We Pay For Gold at GoldKit:

The first question many people ask us is: What is the price you will pay for my scrap gold? To answer this, we need to weigh and evaluate your items. […] The amount of your check will depend on this evaluation.

And Prices We Pay at Cash4Gold?

Material	10 - 50 oz	50 - 100 oz
8K	$12.03(dwt)	$12.68(dwt)
10K	$13.43(dwt)	$14.03(dwt)
12K	$15.01(dwt)	$16.44(dwt)
14K	$16.59(dwt)	$18.85(dwt)
18K	$22.02(dwt)	$24.87(dwt)
22K	$28.72(dwt)	$29.30(dwt)
24K	$31.27(dwt)	$33.00(dwt)
PLATINUM	$48.36(dwt)	$51.06(dwt)
Jewelry (Plat.)	$43.53(dwt)	$45.94(dwt)
STERLING	$8.40ozt	$9.60ozt
.999 SILVER	$9.20ozt	$12.60ozt

So they’re not world-shattering prices, but I think I’d recommend the known quantity, thank-you-very-much.  ‘K, bye, GoldKit!

The sequel —

The entire point, of course, is to eat while poor, but not to eat poorly.  The new recipe — append “whatever you can afford” to each ingredient:

1 can tuna packed in water
some cheese
some crackers
Bragg’s Liquid Aminos
Tabasco Smoked Chipotle sauce
sourdough bread

This also qualifies as a “one pot meal”, a bachelor’s friend.

Drain half the liquid from the tuna.  Slice some cheese (the more piquant, the better.)  Add both to a saucepan, and heat on medium high.  Add a good squeeze of Bragg’s Liquid Aminos (or substitute Worchestershire) and a pour of Tabasco Smoked Chipotle to taste.  Cook, stirring, until the cheese is melted.  Crumble the crackers and add to the saucepan, and cook slightly longer until they are softened.  Transfer to bowl.  Serve warm on toasted sourdough bread.

A note on the Bragg’s and the Tabasco: if you can at all afford it, and are not homeless, develop a pantry of condiments, spices, and flavorings.  They go a long way towards making otherwise boring food palatable.  Yeah, it’s $3.50 - $5.00/bottle up front, but they last a long time, and you will quickly learn what to do and when (sweet paprika here, fenugreek here, Marie Sharp’s there).  They are good for the long haul — except for the Tobasco Smoked Chipotle, discussed before, of which I could easily go through two bottles per week just by myself, and have to throttle my intake for my budget’s sake (one man’s fine dining is another man’s Hidden Valley Ranch, so feel free to scoff.)

The Bragg’s will take you to Whole Foods, and the Tobasco to a “regular” grocery store, but the rest is 99 Cent Only Store material.

Bob Mike, you told me lifetimes ago about the homeless man you had befriended who taught you about his breakfast feast.  It involved Spam.  Do you recall?  Do you want to be guest chef for Eating Poor #3?

OK, it’s been weird lately.  New apartment, waiting for Internet access — then my phone dying — then getting Internet access, but losing Gmail access — all rolled into one stressball with my Dad being in the hospital.  This has all conspired to make me one of the most difficult-to-reach people on Earth.

Among my great accomplishments of late was missing the annual meeting for the Penguins on Stamps Study Unit — of which I’m the president.  At least, if they didn’t throw me out for missing the meeting.  So unfortunate.

But I’m back.  My Internet connection works, and so does Gmail.  My phone works, and even rings!  And, best of all, my Dad’s out of the hospital.

If you sent me an email, I almost certainly received it and responded.  If I didn’t, please send it again.  If you left a voicemail and I didn’t respond, please call again — I’m not sure what got lost while they were doing account manipulation at T-Mobile.

So, sorry for the silence, but I’ll be back with chatter now.

Hope this helps someone.  I just upgraded Firefox in Hardy Heron (Ubuntu Linux).  Transition was smooth, except that I could no longer log in to Gmail.  I would try to log in, but it would just send me back to the login page, rather than take me to my Inbox.

The solution: clear your cookies.  Edit -> Preferences -> Privacy -> Clear Now -> (Just “Cookies”) -> Clear Private Data Now.

Sorry for the quiet.  Sebastian and I are nestling in nicely to the new apartment (that finances have dictated), and Internet access is up and running at last.  Niall will see the apartment for the first time on Saturday.  Friends, email me for my new mailing address and for the new mcgees.org email address that will be sent directly to my cell phone.

If you ask Google what time it is in Singapore, Google will tell you.  It will also give you a link to this page about the tumultuous history of Singapore’s time zoning.

I don’t need to write them.  I don’t need to embed them.  I downloaded some OpenOffice.org macros from the web, and for the life of me I don’t understand what to do with them.  In the morning, when pain meds have faded, it may be very clear, but, be a dear anyway and answer my question: “I have a .sxc file that I want to be able to use in any arbitrary OpenOffice.org Calc document, new or old.  What do I do?”

I can’t bring myself to actually post this on a support group, because this is “so obvious”, apparently.

From my chair this afternoon, I heard Sebastian incessantly licking something plastic-sounding.  After quickly running through a list of plastic-sounding things that could kill him, I decided this is one of those things I was better off not knowing, and went back to work.

I just went to go make some lemonade, picked up my 1 lb. bag of generic sucralose, and found it covered in, seriously, like a two-millimeter-thick sludge of greyish bodily fluid.  Three guesses.

So: Splenda transferred to new bag, hidden from cat, and mental note added: check on weird licking sounds.

Has it ever bugged you that there is only one “h” in the middle of “Threshold”?  Of all the double-letters to do away with?

Anyway, my feedback rating crossed 500.  Hoorah!  I had hoped for that to happen in March, but I fell behind.  I am now be-purple-starred.  And as the Sibs decided some years ago, Purple is the Atheist color.  So I’m sitting pretty.

Great Engrish:

My shoe is off, my foot is cold
I have a bird I like to hold
My phone is off, in bed I've rolled
And now my story is all told

On April 2nd, Representative Monique Davis of the Illinois Legislature, during a session, condemned Jewish activist Rob Sherman for “destroying what this state was built upon”, shouted in open session, told him to “Get out of that seat, you have no right to be there!”, and commented, “What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous.”

Oh, wait.  Did I say Jewish?  I meant Atheist.  Brad Sherman is atheist, an activist, and an American.

If Sherman had been Jewish, the airwaves would not have stopped shrieking the story for the last six days.  Monique Davis, a black, female legislator, went all 1841-Mississippi on Sherman’s ass, and there was barely a murmur in the media.

Some of you who get your news entirely online will contend “Oh, everyone covered that, Josh!”  What I want the rest of you to do is, if this is the first, or the first detailed, report you have encountered of what happened, to post, “I didn’t know about that.”  You with me?  The usual suspects can go ahead and tell me I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, and I’m just asking the rest of you to be honest about this.  Did this get the coverage it would have if, for instance, an Atheist legislator (Ha!  Must be a fucking incredible duck hunter!) had told a 71 black woman that she had no business in a legislative session?

(You can see it buried deeply in the Chicago Tribune.  I know the Web has a way of flattening sites, but just note what column it appeared under, when, and where.)

Want to see almost real-time video of an eagles’ nest off the coast of California as it is alternately fed by Mom & Dad?  Go here for the eaglecam.

Linux users in X have it great.  Type mplayer http://media1.vcoe.org/eaglecam1 in a shell window, set the window that pops up as “always on top”, and just hang it somewhere on your screen(s).

Thanks, Amal!

I’m alive.  More to follow.

The wee hours, the hours after midnight but before the sunrise, are not kind to a crippled bipolar bachelor.

There is too much to think about.  Too much happening, too much not.  Too little comforting breathing beside you, that you have spent a decade learning to expect.

There is no motivation to read.  No desire to let television wash over me.  Just an urge to take a mallet to the mocking green LEDs of the clock-radio.

I am thinking of redoing my bedroom.  Vinyl floor with a fabric runner between a proper futon at one end of the room and the ensuite bathroom at the other.  Prolific shelving on two walls.  Hanging linen “dressers” for folded clothes, the rest of the clothes on hangers, in the recessed part of the third wall called, by the architect, the closet.  Maybe linen, again, to define its wall, currently demarcated by decrepit sliding-panel doors, their track long since damaged to the point where it is a battle of wits, will, and vertebrae to move them.  Serious blackout shades for the windows (pull-down shades sandwiching lead foil would just about fit the bill.)  The walls: satin black.  And all LEDs?  That is what duct tape is for.

Sleep, death, opiates.  They have the same draw, and they all have the same feel: velvet, and quiet, and soft, and undemanding.  Butcher’s “Perfect, endless darkness”.  And all with a riptide.

Maynard James Keenan named one album “Opiate”.  He named another “Undertow”.  I don’t think this is an accident.  They could be the same name.

When it’s two o’clock, three o’clock, and you’ve taken all the assistive chemicals you can safely consume, and you bob on the water — bounce, bounce, bounce — and wait for the riptide to catch you, wait to be pulled under, pulled in.  Wait to take a breathful of darkness.  And wait.

Consciousness?  Overrated.  Stimulants?  Keep them.  I don’t get the urge.  I just want to sleep, to die, to glide, to be free of the soundtrack and perseveration and scheming my mind — me, I guess — explores, constructs, deconstructs.  I come up with great ideas, yes.  I come up with ideas for companies, for novels, for throwaway lines of novels.  I come up with solutions to technical problems I didn’t even know I was working on.  I find optimizations and melodies and connections.  I find everything a hypomanic 148 I.Q. should.  But I don’t find sleep.

Someone once said that computer programmers “don’t like drugs that make them stupid.”  But that’s not quite right.  Not stupid.  Just still.  Or silent.  Or gone.

2:43.  2:43.  2:43.  2:44.

I once went to a nice restaurant by myself, before going to the theater by myself.  There was another lone diner, a man, sitting next to me.  The waiter approached him, and he held up the menu and asked if they had anything with potatoes.

Potatoes?  What?  I mean, as the main course?  Or, nothing else matters but the potatoes?

It was a nice restaurant, and the waiter kept his composure.  I’m sure he’s been asked stranger things before.  He points out the menu items that come, by default, with potatoes, but helpfully notes that potatoes can be added on the side of any item on the menu.

We’re both sitting alone.  I want to go sit across from him and ask him, “Why potatoes?”  He’s in a suit.  I’m in a suit.  I’m having lobster ravioli, and he’s jonesing for potatoes.

Potatoes.  Potatoes.  Why potatoes, of all things?  2:47.  2:47.  2:48.

Reread.  2:50.  Have to push “Publish” at some point.  My readers are patient, but reading the transcription of every minute on the clock for the next fortnight — the fortnight to come before I can sleep — is pushing it.

2:51.  How do you stop an out-of-control mind?  Where is the sandy incline for when your mental brakes fail?  Where’s the fucking button to turn this machine off?  148 kilos of pure suction.  We don’t want to be stupid.  Ha.  Why not?  Can’t stupid people sleep?

PIC line.  4mg Dilaudid.  Saline push.  Stat.  I said, STAT!  Shit.  No nurses.  No wife.  No son.  No Dilaudid.  Just me, and this award-winning, much-lauded freight train of a mind.  This problem-solving machine that can command six figures and ruin my life.

2:58.  Good night.

Our email addresses are precious.  My 5,166 spam messages received per day show the importance of good stewardship of our addresses.  But there are lots of times when you might want someone to contact you later: you meet someone at a party you maybe/maybe-don’t like, or you enter a contest for a free Audi — whatever — and you want a “no-commitment” email address to use.  Bingo, in steps Mailinator.  Think up any old claptrap address (such as, say, anyoldclaptrap@mailinator.com) and go back to check it once or twice, or when the contest is scheduled to end, or whatever.  If it gets swamped with spam, or the guy/girl at the party ends up to be psycho, c-ya!  No commitment: walk away from the address and never look back.

In the example above, the anyoldclaptrap@mailinator.com, some robots are going to come breezing through mcgees.org and pick up that email address, and add it to spam lists.  Bookmark this post and check back in a week or so to see if I’m right.  As I write this, the mailbox is empty.  To check it, go to Mailinator, enter in your mailbox name (anyoldclaptrap), and see your/my/our mail.  Voila!

Problem is, everyone else can see your mail, too.  So if you want a throwaway address to use for a while, on multiple sites, pick something longish and complicated (anyoldclaptrap-4032470234 or whatever), and now, Mailinator will generate an alternate “To” address for the mailbox (in this case, M8R-gk4u4f@mailinator.com.)  Now you can give that out, and there is no way to recover your actual address from it.  Have your mail sent to M8R-gk4u4f@mailinator.com, check it at anyoldclaptrap-4032470234, and when you’re done or tired or swamped, just drop your drugs and walk away, fairly confident that no one else has read “your” emails (They could, of course, if they successfully guessed anyoldclaptrap-4032470234.  But not likely.  It’s just security through obfuscation, which is much better than no security at all.)

In other news, days are now one hour long:

The Moxi DVR is great.  Really, really great.  It took almost a decade, but a company finally came out with a UI better than that of my Series 1 TiVo.

One neat thing about the Moxi is the ability to add an external hard drive.  I tried adding a 750 GB Seagate FreeAgent Pro drive to the unit.  It is recognized, formatted, and ready-to-go.  Problem is, after a certain amount of idle time, it will stop functioning.  When you try to play a show on the EHD, you will get a prompt — twice, oddly — that says “Do you want to keep this episode?”, with “keep” and “delete” options.  Also, if there is no room on the internal hard drive, the unit will fail to record episodes, and in the “Canceled/Deleted Episodes” log, the (unhelpful) reason will be given as “Failed (No Signal)”.  If you go to “Setup”, then “External Hard Drive”, select “Disconnect”, then physically disconnect and re-connect the drive, it works again.

The problem is that the Seagate EHD goes to sleep, and the Moxi cannot wake it up.  The fix is to connect the EHD to a Linux box via USB, and use sdparm to clear the “Standby” flag on the hard drive.  See the flags on the hard drive by typing:

sdparm -a /dev/sdX

where X is the letter assigned to the device (type “tail /var/log/syslog” after plugging in the drive to see what letter it’s assigned.)

To clear the flag, type:

sdparm -c STANDBY -6 /dev/sdX

The “-c STANDBY” clears the “Standby” flag, and the “-6” does it in six-bit mode, which is apparently required.

Answer for how to keep these drives from going to sleep was found at the blog My Slice of Reality.

Gimme a “G-R-I-T-T-E”!

Touch-ups are expected in pictorials these days.  Covering freckles and imperfections, lengthening limbs (true!), that sort of thing.  Oh, yeah, and breaking the laws of physics.

As discussed previously, I don’t usually go for blondes that much.  But Jessica Trainham of the Atlanta Falcons cheerleaders is a cutie.  She’s there on the right:

For, um, academic interest, study that image for a moment.  Here’s a close-up:

What the heck?  What’s going on with the arm and the pom-pom?  Cerna’s arm appears to be entering Trainham’s abdomen, but then — what — making a 90° turn at her pelvis to hold a frilly pom-pom in front of Trainham’s naughty bits?  Frustrated art student, maybe, with a hankering for this?

I got the pharmacy troubles straightened out, and I’m feeling much better, so I deleted the last post.  I should be relatively human again.  I get to see Niall on the weekend.  I’m still in constant, terrible pain, and found out I will probably need spinal surgery, but I’m better.

Thanks, everyone.  I should be back to posting now.

So, I made a blunder today.  But let’s go back twenty-something years to start.

I was in love with Victorinox Swiss Army Knives from the mid 1980s.  One of the (many) reasons I was looking forward to going to Switzerland with my family was my ability to purchase, in Switzerland, one of my beloved knives.

Today, I get an email from slickdeals.net advertising — what else — a top-of-the-line, $80+ Swiss Army Knife for under $35.  The sale is one of their “Gold Box Lightning Sales”, which means it has a duration of minutes to hours.  So I go to GMail and send out a quick email to, oh, just about everyone, telling them about the sale.

Then the proverbial X hits the Y.

It’s kind of funny to me, now, in a rather embarrassed way, the first time I’ve been reasonably accused of spamming.  But yes, that’s what happened — everything from pure jest to someone seriously threatening to block my emails.

I can’t really claim any extenuating circumstances, so let this be a warning to you: if you see an awesome deal, even if you think everyone you know might be interested in it, spammers have ruined it for the rest of us, and sending out a mass email to all your friends might not be the best route to go.

Anyway, I ordered my knife, and I hope some other people were able to order knives of their own — if you’re not already Leatherman devotees or something.

And if you got the email and hated it, I’m really sorry.

I can highly recommend, to US buyers, the oddly-named Vera Trinder, self-described as “London’s Oldest Stamp Accessory Store”, for philatelic literature.  They have relatively low prices, good coverage, and exceptional service.

Watch your checkbook, though: the merchant is completely honest, to be sure, but the current exchange rate (plus “international fees” on your credit card) leaves much to be desired (when importing — it has been a boon while selling on eBay!)

eBay seller internationalcovers has some awesome covers for sale right now.

No kickback, just thought the cover collectors would like to know.

I’m looking for someone who can do some simple, short translations from English into Scottish Gaelic.  Fluent speakers, please, preferably Scottish (rather than Canadian).  I can pay you or, preferably, if you have a freelance translation service, I can give you a free ad on this site — one year for every 15 minutes of translation time on your part.

Can anyone help?

Anyone use Bloglines to read mcgees.org?  Anyone having problems?  For me, it’s showing no posts since August 2007.

Big news, released today, that I stumbled upon at eBay while looking for something else entirely: beginning 1 April 2008, eBay will launch its own “Partner Network” affiliate program.  If you are a content publisher, set an alarm and visit the not-yet-live eBay Affiliate site in two weeks’ time.

Is mcgees.org going to participate?  OH YES, if they’ll have me.  I see dollar signs.  Maybe I’ll have to get rid of my Auction Sniper link to be admitted…

I’m slowly-but-surely building my eBay feedback.  It’s at 460 now.  I’m aiming for 500 by the end of the month.

A friend of mine, a PowerSeller, saw my feedback when it was right around 400 and said, mockingly, “Oh, how cute!”  I worked bloody hard for those 400, damn it!  Can you imagine reaching 13,000 or something?

Actually, I can.  It’s sort of the route I’ve planned for myself, at least in the near future.

Aside from one very recent, very undeserved Neutral, all of my feedback has been positive.  Knock on wood…

There’s an eBay lot that I really, really want.  The auction closes in less than one hour (4:40 a.m. PDT is probably some sensible time in Johannesburg, where the seller resides), and the bidding is at 14% of my high bid.  I would love to get this lot for 14% of my high bid.

I can’t sleep, as you can probably tell, so I’ve been fiddling (they call it a “one tweak loop” in computerese) with the sidebar.  Let me know what you think — if you can tell the difference.

Firefox did not complain about the word “computerese”.  Wow.

“We get a lot of stiff skepticism and disbelief from our first time clients all the time, and its okay, we’re used to it.”

Yeah?  No kidding.  Add me to that list.

Anyone care to support, debunk, or otherwise comment on this “miracle” product?

OK, any guesses on how much spam I receive, per day?

Seriously, hazard a guess.

Since I don’t want the email and (maybe) feed readers to just show the number, please click here for the answer.

That’s my number.  Care to share yours?  Average across 30 days if you can.