What is Phishing

Phishing is a form of Internet fraud that aims to steal valuable information such as credit cards, social security numbers, user IDs and passwords. A fake website is created that is similar to that of a legitimatorganizationon, typically a financial institution such as a bank or insurance company. An email is sent requesting that the recipient access the fake website (which will usually be a replica of a trusted site) and enter their personal details, including security access codes. ...

The latest phishing scam has to do with paypal. This phish is almost comically clumsy to the naked eye, and we're not here to analyze it seriously. The e-mail is extremely simple, composed only of text and no real attempt to make it look like it came from PayPal other than using a "service@paypal.com" address. The subject line of the email is: You have added a new e-mail address to your account. (normally this would freak you out if you had paypal as it would mean someone hacked you).

How to combat phishing schemes? The answer is ALWAYS the same! Never click on an embedded link in an email, especially one you didn't know was coming. So you ask, "how do I know then if my paypal (or bank or whatever) account was hacked. Launch a separate browser window, log in to your account and see what if anything has changed. I myself received this phish for the paypal account. It was about 2 weeks after we changed email addresses for the TimeWarner/Comcast buyout so I was confused. I just logged in to my paypaaccountnt and checked the email addresses. Simple. I never clicked on the link embedded in the email message.

Educate yourself about phishing at Phishing

Internet Explorer 7.0 & Heuristics

Or - What has Microsoft done for me lately?

In case some of you using Windows XP haven't noticed, one of the Automatic Windows updates that you may have downloaded automatically or by just trusting Microsoft by clicking download - was that you automatically downloaded IE 7.0. What does this mean? Well for most people, it means more security! YAY!! One of the most important features of IE 7 for home users is that the new browser includes Heuristics. The definition of Heuristics is: A problem-solving technique (in the computer world - an algorithm) in which the most appropriate solution is selected using rules. Interfaces using heuristics may perform different actions on different data given the same command. All systems using heuristics are classified as intelligent.

What does this do for you? Simply put - Microsoft has enabled your Internet Explorer browser to actually notify you if you stumble upon a phishing scam or website. It reports the site as "Suspicious". The site has not been reported, at least not yet conclusively, as a phishing site, but IE7 has examined the site programmatically and determined that it has characteristics of a phishing site. I think that is pretty cool to the casual home user.

I've looked back in my years of blogs and see that I don't have any information on phishing scams. Wierd, I thought for sure I blogged about that. I will bore you with that in another post.

The real Living and Dining Room

Health Check

Well here I am 8 days after the whole coughing fit, blow out all the muscles in my neck, ER trip. What type of recovery have I had? I know you are all dying to know..... Well, for the first 5 days it was absolutely brutal. Any movement was painful for my neck due to the strained muscles and pulled ligaments. The bronchitus has been exhausting and its only today that I feel a little like myself. That's 8 days after diagnosis and probably at least 10 days after I developed it. I'm on my 3rd dose of antibiotics, the first being the shot in the butt of Roxithromycin , the second being a Z pack (a whimpie one), the 3rd starting Tuesday of levaquin. I seem to be coughing up much less green globlets since I started the levaquin. That's a big bonus. I tire very, very easily. Just a trip to lunch is exhausting or taking the garbage out. It's incredibly frustrating.

Now I just have to be very careful not to overdue it. Bronchitus, especially in asthmatics, tends to have a high relapse rate and we all know how I am. The overachiever to be sure.

Trunk Monkey - Compilation

3 Beautiful Things

1) Sinking a 25' putt for par on the 4th at Roosevelt GC.
2) The satisfying feeling of actually getting the LA Times to pay for the screen door that their carrier thru our Friday paper thru - 2 Friday's in a row.
3) The smell of fresh paint as we paint our Living Room.

2 Things that piss me off

1) The idiots at Time Warner HighSpeed internet that came out here on Saturday and didn't do anything to fix the problem, totally wasting my time.
2) My neighbor who has 4 big labs that shit on my lawn and he doesn't seem to think he should clean it up.

The bizarre of the day

Well, pretty much anything in Los Angeles......

Our new Dining Room -

What do you think? Is it too pink?

Emergency trip 1 of 1 for 2006, hopefully

Well last night was spent in the emergency room. I was at a Technical Training class in Anaheim yesterday and had such a bad coughing fit that I was spitting up blood and pulled every single muscle in my neck. I could hardly move. I've never really felt that kind of pain in my chest. It was like each time I coughed a thousand tiny pins were poking my inner chest. That can't be good.

Somehow I got myself to the Bellflower Medical Center at 5:00p and finally left at 8:30p. Not bad considering it was an ER. I had a chest x-ray, blood drawn, 2 breathing treatments, a shot for pain in my ass and another shot of antibiotics on the other side of my ass. All in all, a good day for my ass. The Bellflower ER is small, tiny even. I wouldn't recommend going there after 5pm or on weekends as I'm sure its a miserable place. Of course, if you needed medical treatment during business hours, then you'd go to your doctor right? I suppose in hindsight that's what I should have done, a day or two earlier before it got so bad. Who knew?

I was sent home with a stack of prescriptions and this morning finds me extremely sore all over, can't turn my head at all. It's going to be a lovely day.

Neighboroo

A very cool Google website

http://www.neighboroo.com/

My Dodge Magnum - in the shop

Transmission problems and Dodge/Chrysler seem synonymous. In 1980 I received possession of my parents 1972 Dodge Charger. I was thrilled. Little did I know the litany of electrical and transmission problems that would plague me for the next 6 years. I gladly let the vehicle be totaled when I did a couple 360's on the Winnipeg overpass due to ice (and bald tires....). I vowed never to buy a Dodge.

Flash ahead 20 years and I have a '06 Dodge Magnum (company car) and it now has 11,600 miles on it. Barely broken in right? Well, its in the shop because the transmission fluid is leaking like a sieve on my driveway. Did you know that most Chevy and Dodge/Chrysler new cars now have sealed transmissions with no dipstick? You cannot check the fluid level yourself, the color of it, the smell of it, nothing. If you want service, guess what, off to the dealer with you. Now of course, this issue is a warranty item and I will not pay anything for it, however, it is a royal pain in the ass & today is day 2 that they've had the car. Oh, and CarMax (the Dodge dealer I took it to in Inglewood) said that they had 4 cars yesterday with same problem. The 300's, Chargers and Magnum's all use the powertrain. Great. Gotta love American quality.

Time Warner flogs Comcast and me

I hate big conglomerates. They just screw the little guy, the consumer, me. Time Warner bought Comcast Cable/High Speed Internet as most of you locals are painfully aware. On 10/21/06 they officially changed over from Comcast to TW. This is such a pain in the ass. In a perfect world the only thing that people trying to get in touch with me should notice is that I sent them an email with my new email address. You see, emails from the old comcast.net address are supposed to be magically forwarded to the new ca.rr.com address. Sometimes they are not. Sometimes they are bouncing back. Sometimes they are delayed by 30-40 minutes. This is just unacceptable.

You would think they would have planned this well. Why wouldn't they send me a little app on a CD to go and magically change all the Outlook email account settings? Now I'm smarter than the average bear and I can do it, but not everyone can. I had to hold for 30 minutes on their LIVE INTERNET chat to get the bloody POP3 and SMTP server addresses. Why wouldn't they put that in a mailer or email or something! And to add insult to injury my connection keeps dropping. Totally bullshit! I HATE THEM ALL!!! And do you think they'll give me a credit, no. And even if they did, it'd be like one day. Big deal.

what a crappy week

Monday was a 12 hour day, Tuesday 18 hours, Wednesday 18 hours, Thursday 14 hours and Friday 8 hours + picking up my niece & nephew for the weekend. That's a lot of work in 5 days. 70 hours to be exact. This morning was a busy with the kids, then a play - Jungle Book at the Morgan Wixson theatre in Santa Monica. Finally back home to prepare for the Wilshire Vista neighborhood Halloween Festival. It almost feels like work....

Monday is another day and hopefully with Mitel's quarter end only 48 hours away, perhaps life will begin to take on some sort of normalcy.

3 - 2 - 1

3 Beautiful Things --

1) The woodpecker chowing down on little bugs on the 10th hole @ Brookside Golf Course.
2) Making par on the 9th hole (par 4)
3) Making my first 200 yard drive!

2 irritating things --

1) Having my body limit my ability to do what I want
2) The guy that lives 2 doors down and his 4 dogs that shit all over my lawn

1 - the bizarre --

And the bizarre is all 3 of us chipping from off the green on the 15th hole and 2 of us having it role in the cup, and me, the 3rd, landing 1/2 inch from the cup. Bizarre and unusual not to mention lucky!

3 - 2 - 1

There is this new thing on blogs called 3BT -- 3 beautiful things. I think I'm going to morph that and call it 3 - 2 - 1 ----> 3 Beautiful things, 2 things that piss me off, and 1 bizarre/unusual/LA kinda thing.

3 Beautiful Things:

1) Walking out my back door after a long morning of computer work and feeling the sun warm my body and release the stress
2) My new blackberry high definition color screen
3) My new Jabra bluetooth headset with interchangeable earpiece colors so I can customize it to my mood.

Things that piss me off:
1) Customer's that call in problems but don't test the actual problem first or perform any preliminary troubleshooting.
2) Office Depot -- I hate office depot. They have absolutely no customer service and usually one or less check stands open. They are often surly, which usually makes me surly.

And on a bizarre note:
-- Here's to the woman davining in the basement parking garage (facing a concrete pylon) of the Office Depot store. You win the bizarre/unusual/LA award today.

Thought for the Day

I couldn't have said it better, "Time is a companion that goes with us on a journey. It reminds us to cherish each moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we have lived."
Captain Jean Luc Picard

Time

When I was younger I used to think - "if I could just survive this next hour, everything will be ok." Then as I got older I somehow started to modify this statement and it became, "If I can just survive this next hour, it'll be OK, you can endure anything for an hour." When did life become something you have to endure? As I got older still and in the work force I used to say, "oh this day is going to be tough, just suck it up, you can endure anything for a day."

Something happened to me this last summer, I had to say, "if you can just endure the next 6 weeks, it'll be ok." Wow, 6 weeks. That's a long time to endure. I find myself jumping from one fun occasion to the next. But these jumps are in my mind, and everything in between is just a blur. Is this why life goes quicker when you're older? When I was young time couldn't pass fast enough. I wanted to be 9, then 10, then 16, then 21. Then shortly thereafter I wanted time to slow down. Now that I want time to be slow, it's accelerating.

Funny how life works.....

What geeks do with their time..

Thought for the Day

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer

Fairytale or Heartbreak

As the Dodgers deliver a crushing 19 to 11 victory over the Colorado Rockies today, closing in on the Padres, one can't help but reflect over the past 2 weeks, past 2 months and the entire 2006 Dodger season. Missed opportunities, spectacular moments, heartbreaking losses, and amazing, record breaking wins. One game caused the Baseball Hall of Fame to call the Dodgers and ask for the bats of the 4 home run hitters in that fairytale night September 19th. Check out the links here for Video and Print. On September 25th, another amazing night - Garciaparra hits a walk off grand slam home run with 2 outs in the 9th. Check out the article here.

There are but 3 games left to the regular season. It's an exciting time for baseball fans in Southern California. We run numbers, what if's and scenario, but mostly we hope. We hope that the next 3 days will bring wins and the miracles won't end until the World Series is over.

Isn't it Grand?

Tonight was quite a night. A Dodger game that they actually won. Sitting with friends in great seats. Drinking beer, eating nachos and hearing the crack of the bat and the slap of a 97 mpg fastball hitting the catcher's mitt. Ahhhhhhh baseball. Hope springs eternal as every game brings highs and lows as the Dodger's do their usual waffle and shuffle toward first place. Who knows, maybe we'll be going to the National League playoffs. As I said, hope springs eternal.

But the events for tonight didn't end under the big Think Blue sign in the parking lot. We scoot out of my perfect parking place and roar out of Dodger stadium. We drive into downtown LA and a calm comes over me. Civilization beckons. Moments later I sit holding a glass of champagne in one of the most beautiful hotels I've ever seen. We are toasting the 10 year anniversary of great friends of ours - Arlindo and Michael. What a fitting venue for the toast. The Biltmore in downtown Los Angeles on Grand. It truly is Grand. The hotel is truly breathtaking. Designed in the style of the Spanish Italian Renaissance, the hotel opened in 1923 to national acclaim, and was designated a Historical Cultural Landmark in 1969. The cathedral-like public room ceilings were hand-painted by Italian artist Giovanni Smeraldi of White House and Vatican fame.


Touted as the “host of the coast” from the beginning, the Biltmore became the place to be for Los Angeles high society, film industry czars and stars, conventioneers, and cross-country travelers. Among the momentous events held at the Biltmore was the founding banquet
for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It was at the dinner on May 11, 1927 that the concept and design for the “Oscar” were conceived. A statue was sketched on a napkin during a Crystal Ballroom banquet marking the occassion. The statue was named Oscar.

They hold high tea here and I plan on taking my aunts and my mother in April of 2007. I'm sure they will enjoy the architecture and beauty as much as I did this night. People ask me all the time why I live in LA. Here is one of the ten thousand reasons.........