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Having suffered the delights of H1-B visa processing before becoming a permanent resident I like to watch the highs and lows of the visa and immigration world. There is a cap on how many new H1-B visitors (specialty workers, such as computer programmers) the country will allow and it is almost always exhausted. For 2005, this cap has almost already been reached and the USCIS is no longer accepting applications for start dates prior to October 1 2005!!!

The financial year for immigration starts October 1st; the USCIS is stating that applications received on or after October 2nd 2004 are being returned as those applications were too late for this year’s processing! Just amazing; it gets harder and harder to work in this country.

I pride myself on having never fallen victim to a computer virus or email scam but I came close to believing a phishing email at the weekend.

The email claimed to be from ebay, the headers were so good that Eudora filed the email in my Ebay folder. It said that they had recently been unable to verify my details and would I click on the link to provide them again. My first thought was to laugh, yeah right someone wants my details. But the URL looked good in the email, and the actual URL behind the link was the same and in the back of my mind was the fact that perhaps my now-closed credit card had been on file with them. So I thought I would click and see where it took me.

First thing that happened is Firefox popped up a window warning me that although the address in the URL was ebay.com, I was actually being taken to a different site and did I still want to go there – score one for Firefox!! I bet Internet Explorer wouldn’t have caught that. Knowing for sure I was being phished I said yes, just to see how good the fake page would be. But instead of getting a page I was prompted to save or execute a dll!! Well, I certainly wasn’t going to do that so I cancelled the link and had a little laugh that I almost, only just, but almost got suckered.

If you’re worried about phishing scams read this page for some sound advice.

I have completed the first step in migrating away from Eudora but some things bother me about how it looks like Thunderbird works so for now I am running the two in parallel for a while (which is probably the sensible thing to do anyway).

In particular, it doesn’t look like the program fetches mail from all my accounts, only the one I’ve deemed the default. I have 8 POP accounts defined, all set to fetch every 10 minutes, but its been 25 minutes since I sent a test email to one of the non-default addresses and it hasn’t shown up. The one I sent to the default account was fetched. I am sure I don’t need to click the “Get Mail” button for every account but right now I don’t have confidence that it will fetch all the emails for every account. Something I will watch for this weekend.

The other annoyance is that it seems like I can’t import my Eudora message filters of which I have probably a 100. I really don’t want to have put them all in by hand but it looks like I have to. And that is made worse by the fact that it doesn’t look like Thunderbird lets you do filters the easy way: in Eudora you can select a message, click on ‘make filter’ and the new filter window appears filled in with all the likely filters from that message pre-populated. You just choose the ones you want and there it is. No such neatness here, it seems.

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.

Dear reader, I know the reason you come here is to learn more of my oh-so-correct opinions on important matters. So… here are a couple….

Watched some of the opening of the British Parliament on C-Span last night (yeah, my life is real exciting) and I enjoyed being reminded that no one does pomp and circumstance like the Brits. But what gives with the Lord Chamberlain turning his back on the Queen after giving her the speech? There were times when that would have meant ‘off with his head’.

I love The Amazing Race, its easily the best reality show on TV, but this season’s teams seem a little contrived. What’s up with all the models – is this the only way for pretty boys and girls to get assignments these days? And I know we all watch for the conflict but in previous seasons, tension developed during the race, some of the guys in this Race seem to be in it for trouble from the get-go, to the point where it seems staged (a scripted reality show – no way!). I’ll still be watching it, if only for the two sisters, but wouldn’t it be nice if next show they had some teams where the women were the jerks and the men were the ones saying “she really is a nice person, they just get this way when they are stressed”.

Finally, the NBA Brawl. I can’t believe how ESPN, team coaches etc are defending the players for their behaviour. One of the players said that if he was walking down the street and throw a cup at someone he expected to get hit. That might be true but I am sure he would also expect to have that guy thrown in jail, whereas here the players are saying they can be justified in hitting fans. Apparantly we don’t know the pressures they are under – I disagree, the man walking down the street, probably wondering how he will be able to afford to retire, pay off student loans etc is under much more pressure than someone earning $6M a year. Another player said he plays for the team, he doesn’t care what the fans think of him. You need to wake up – you play for the fans because they are the ones who make the team money, and the team is not there for the glory of the game, its there to make people rich. Perhaps 20 years ago it was different but today all I see is a bunch of whiny egos who care about nothing but themselves. I hope Artest and the others (including guilty fans) spend a little time in a jail to think about that.

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.

So I call BankONE to report the card abuse and during the process to establish my identity I am asked to give my old address in South Carolina. Well, I’ve never lived there, never even visited the state. In a classic tale of “its says so on my computer so it must be true” we spent the next 10 minutes arguing about whether I was the owner of the card. In the end she froze the account, not because of the transactions, but because she believed I was not the owner of the card. When I was finally able to tell her about the transactions she marked them as disputed for me but reminded me that I would not get a new card until I could give my Carolina address. I told her she should just cancel the card as there was no way I was staying a customer after this treatment. She said she couldn’t do that until I could verify I was the owner of the card!

Un-freaking-believable.

Ok, so the last few posts have gotten too serious. Here are some random links that have me smiling for a variety of reasons.

This poor guy shares the same name as the lead singer of Maroon 5, lives in LA and has his phone number in the book. Tired of being called by fans all day long, he’s started posting mp3s of some of the more interesting ones on this site.

Looking for some Flash games? This site has them in large buckets. Its not Roller Coaster Tycoon but you’ll surely find some that amuse you for a few minutes.

There may be nothing to see here but I don’t recommend viewing it at work or if you are offended by lingerie ads.

Well, I guess thats it for now.

I never had much faith in the US media before I came to the US but the more I view it the less respect I have for it. Take the latest video of the marine ‘executing’ a terroist. Ok, its not a nice thing to have happen but its a war and these things happen. Compare this with a ‘news’ program at the weekend discussing the new ‘beheading’ video being sold by the Virgin recordstore. The presenter was clearly outraged that such a thing exists and certainly would never show such a thing – so how come its ok to show the US marine over and over again. The host for the ‘beheading’ video was superb, dealt with the presenter with great skill but made one great point: people should see the videos that terrorists make of beheadings and other executions/terror, then the true context of the marine ‘execution’ will be understood. But the US media would rather let everyone think that the terrorists are the good guys in all this. Thank heaven for the BBC News