Tag: Long

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This showed up in the spamtraps today:

Subject: Truth of the matter

Dear Sir,

This letter can only define Nigeria Scam, a.k.a. 419. If this mail look like scam to you delete it, we are looking for serious minded person.

As we all know, top officials do loot funds out of the country with non-residence foreigners. When they try and fail, the world hears it as fraud/scam, but when they go through, nobody or a newspaper writes it.

This trade is huge here and people are making lots of money out there in most foreign countries. Though the government are mapping out sophisticated strategies to checkmate unauthorized dealers. From the president to the cleaner in the house, they are all into this trade.

And so on.

This has got to be the most brazen variation I’ve seen — and the first one that admits what it is up front. Of course it goes on to try to convince you that no, this one’s the real thing, we’re only trying to cheat other people, not you, because you wouldn’t fall for that sort of thing, would you?

I’m trying to figure out whether the proper response to this is “WTF” or “O_o” or just “Unbe-flipping-lievable.”

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For quite a while now, the always-excellent This Is True newsletter has been advertising writer Randy Cassingham’s latest (?) project: JumboJoke, a weblog-style daily joke post. I finally took a look at it, and thought I’d share the following pair of lists based on our political parties’ often contradictory platforms and rhetoric:

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There’s at least one company based in Greece that distributes authentic Greek yogurt in the U.S. The stuff can be tricky to find, but incredibly worth it. It’s very thick and creamy and doesn’t contain any gelatin or preservatives. The fat-free version could probably help a lot of people lose weight, as it tastes like sour cream and tzatziki made with it is addictive. Trader Joe’s has been carrying it pretty reliably, but as Whole Foods is closer, we don’t get to TJ’s on a regular basis. However, on our last trip to Whole Foods, they had it, right there in with the rest of the yogurt. And the peasants rejoiced.

Tonight, I went looking for it and instead found a sign: “Whole Foods Market has temporarily decided not to carry Fage Greek Yogurt. Please look for this product again in the future.” So let me get this straight: you just recently decided to carry it and now you’re putting it on hiatus for some unknown reason. What the hell? Or do I want to know what the reason is?

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We went to see the director’s cut of Donnie Darko last night. (Somehow we had missed it the first time around.)

All I can say is, I walked out of there wishing The Philosophy of Time Travel was a real book. I’d love to get a copy of it.

Interestingly, when I checked Amazon to price the DVD, I discovered a companion book, The Donnie Darko Book, which features the script, interviews… and pages from the fictional book. Hmmm….

Update (August 2, 2006): It seems people aren’t reading through all the comments. Just to be clear, The Philosophy of Time Travel is not a real book. It would be a fun read if it was, but it isn’t.

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I am thoroughly sick of the phenomenon I call the Draco Malfoy Effect. This is the process by which young (and not-so-young) women become convinced that not only are evil bad-boy types desirable, but completely reformable. Liking the maverick is nothing new for the Hollywood-hypnotized masses, especially seeing as how he’s so often played by a desirable star. However, liking the villain–the kind who has not yet been definitively shown to possess a heart–to the point that you believe he can be saved through sex with either a) you, b) your Mary Sue, or c) the ingenue of the cast is, to my thinking, simply bizarre.

I’d love to have a discussion on this. Please comment. (Even if you think I’m the one with her head on crooked.)

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Some people browse collections. I collect browsers. Mostly I just want to see what they’ll do to my web site, but I have a positively ridiculous number of web browsers installed on my Linux and Windows computers at work and at home, and I’ve installed a half-dozen extra browsers on our PowerBook.

One project I’ve worked on since my days at UCI was a script to identify a web browser. In theory this should be simple, since every browser sends its name along when it requests a page. In practice, it’s not, because there’s no standard way to describe that identity.

Actually, that’s not quite true. There is a standard (described in the specs for HTTP 1.0 and 1.1: RFC 1945 and RFC 2068), but for reasons I’ll get into later, it’s not adequate for more than the basics, and even those have been subverted. That standard says a browser (or, in the broader sense, a “user agent,” since search robots, downloaders, news readers, proxies, and other programs might access a site) should identify itself in the following format:

  • Name/version more-details

Additional details often include the operating system or platform the browser is running on, and sometimes the language.

Now here are some examples of what browsers call themselves: Continue reading →