guapacha.com

Now I really don’t like (American) football and I think high school sports are treated way too importantly compared to things like, er, academic achivement but I wanted to give a shout out to the Brawley Wildcats football team. The local high school team is playing in their first CIF final today at Qualcomm stadium. So, go wildcats!

[Update] Sadly, the team lost but it was real close 36 – 39. Well done all round, though!

For 12 years, a famous hawk has lived at the luxury New York City address of 927 5th Avenue. He has sired at least 25 hawklets from his nest perched under a ledge on the outside of the building and was a regular attraction for both residents and visitors to the city. But last week, the building co-op decided to evict the hawk, destroying it’s nest and, most importantly, removing the ability to rebuild it. News reports say the poor bird has been seen trying to rebuild but to no avail. The residents understandably don’t want to talk about it to the media, the whole city has protested against such a shameful act, and there have been daily protests outside the building. Hopefully the bird will be allowed to return but whatever the outcome this seems just another example of the selfish attitude of the very wealthy. If you’re in the area sometime, shout some abuse at them for me.

Good summary article with links here

Just when you thought there was nothing more of me to share I am excited to announce my new moblog. Now, thanks to various state and federal laws there won’t be any candid shots from the Von’s cucumber department appearing there but if I see anything interesting I’ll snap it and post it.

I missed the beginning of the penultimate Apprentice last night but was surprised – no, shocked – to see Jen in the final two. I don’t have a whole lot of respect for Mr Trump’s perception as it is but throughout the series Jen has been presented as completely clueless on every task. How then could he choose her for the final two? Of course, it may be that she has been mis-represented in the production of the show but they wouldn’t do that, would they? This is reality TV!

You may have missed Microsoft’s announcement that they have entered the blogging world with their MSN Spaces. However, it appears that Microsoft doesn’t want you to write about just anything, some words are censored and won’t be accepted by their submission form. Maybe this is so that people can’t use their service to write what they really think about Microsoft?!

According to this article at CNN.com :

Twice as many walkers die in traffic accidents in New Orleans, San Diego and Phoenix than in Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Boston.

Apparantly the USA is getting less and less friendly to pedestrians. Well, duh. It always amazes me that there are places you simply can’t get to without a vehicle. When the oil runs out, how will we get from A to B?

Get the full skinny here.

Branson vs Trump – no contest!

The sisters are gone from the Amazing Race, thrawted by some lousy hay bails. One to watch now is Hayden who demonstrated a few interestingly timed shirt changes during last night’s episode. Still too many models on the show though.

What was Andy thinking on The Apprentice giving measly $100 ‘tips’ to the design team and denying them food until they were done. His firing was deserved just for that. Although, I really was hoping that the talentless Jen would go this time.

Finally, Ken Jennings. Was he pushed or was he just tired? I can’t believe he didn’t know the final Jeopardy question. I think he took a dive. But he needs time to start spending some of that $2.5M (although the estimated federal and state taxes on that come to $1.04M!).

Ok, my life is sad.

Well, so far my anti-spam measures have blocked over 100 spam attempts and only 3 comments have made it past. Just this minute I notice another 25 attempts that failed to make it through the Spaminator! I am sure the peace won’t last but it sure feels good to be winning for a while.

Looks like the blog comment spammers were busy overnight, my two sites, eschwa and wtf were all hit by the comment spammers. I had a couple of hundred to get rid of at the MINI blog site. So, since I can’t legally hunt them down and torture them, I’ve installed a bunch of anti-spam plugins to see if that helps any.

Also planned this long weekend is the ‘upgrade’ from Eudora to Thunderbird. I’ve been a Euroda user for over 7 years but I am tired of it crashing on a daily basis (and I have spoken to others who suffer the same) when there are images in an email, or you delete an email ‘too quickly’. Of course, being a good computer guy I’ll be backing up my old email directory just in case and all that good stuff. I’ll post an update as to how well it goes.

So first let me retract the scumbag remark, NM Online is actually the internet department of Neiman Marcus and they were very helpful on the phone. They did some research on the spot and it appears I am the victim of a very common scam.

Russian companies advertise in local newspapers for ‘reshippers’. The scumbag Russians use stolen credit cards to buy goods that are shipped to the reshipper. The reshipper forwards them onto Moscow for resale. NM called the reshipper that received ‘my’ goods and confirmed this is exactly what he had been doing. However, in this instance the reshipper thought something was dodgy pretty early on and kept many of the packages and NM believe they will retrieve most of the goods that were bought with my card. Anything outstanding will be a chargeback by BankOne so I won’t be out of pocket at all.

One real interesting thing: NM called my card company before shipping to verify my address in S. Carolina and it was confirmed. So I called BankOne to ask them how my address got changed. They said it looked like it had been done via a post office change of address notification. Now thats very scary that it can be that simple.

Keep a close eye on your accounts, people.