new spam/virus variant – warning. (6572)

links to a virus, not the link shown –

To: scottobear@livejournal.com
Subject: Mail Delivery (failure scottobear@livejournal.com)
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 14:40:02 +0200

If the message will not displayed automatically,
follow the link to read the delivered message.

Received message is available at:
www.livejournal.com/inbox/scottobear/read.php?sessionid-25960 [link goes to a virus page, not the link shown.]

source email came from – ip3e838ce6.speed.planet.nl, spoofed to look like livejournal. totally weak.

6571 carnation, forget-me-not, hibiscus, honeysuckle, rosemary, and lotus. (With a hint of lime.)

The life-sensing experiment seemed to work pretty well… I know that the cat out back was weirdly attracted to me when I got home.. though he may have just been talking to the Newtster, and came running my way when I turned the corner. It was a pretty good vibe to remind myself how much of what surrounds me is alive. I found myself thinking about the moss on the sidewalk, wondering about microbes in puddles, people next to me on the bus… It’s a fun mindset to run with.


The Propeller Island City Lodge in Berlin. Round beds, cages, upside-down furniture, padded/collaged walls, rooms with coffins for beds, or sleep on tiny buildings as a giant.


Yesterday I showed CS a link to local privacy laws, which includes wiretapping and eavesdropping. (I’ve seen him recording stuff with his palmtop a couple of times, and thought I’d point it out to him.)

I think it is fairly straightforward

“Twelve states forbid the recording of private conversations without the consent of all parties. Those states are California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington.”

Good to know…of course, I would like to ask a few PI and Lawyer-types just how sound that all is. If someone records you without your permission, and you find out about it.

His reply was a simple “Dude, the law doesn’t apply.”

Ok, maybe it doesn’t, but it sure seems that way to me. I’ve always been under the impression that you could take pictures of whatever you wanted to in public, but recording people’s voices was pretty taboo. If you want me to take you seriously, don’t call me dude.

He also mentioned that he’s actively seeking employment elsewhere, and plans to go back to school to leave the IT industry this August. I think he’s just riding out this gig until the big Kahuna cuts him loose at this point. That’s fine, but he shouldn’t be surfing the hire-pages at work.


Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.


I foresee good things in the month ahead. Possibilities and potential that are mostly hidden, but could bloom nicely. Sunlight reflecting off the moon.

6569 With concentric circles from my forehead like Aquaman…

Ugh, the Miami Herald is becoming a registration site soon. Yet another reason to keep reading the Sun-Sentinel online. I keep a fakey-fake profile, just to avoid giving advertisers good cookie info, and register to a stinky email account used only to collect spam. I’ve been keeping an alias since Radio Shack asked for names and bio info before selling you a simple spst switch. (used to make my first black box when I was 12 or 13.) Not that I’ve been to a RS in ages. I don’t think that they collect info directly like that anymore… but the stuff they sell is so overpriced.

I also discovered SmartTraveler, too.. traffic info and cameras posted all over the place (not just South Florida)


Random Factoid – De Soto brought 13 pigs to Florida ~1525. Today, only China has a greater swine population.


Dan and I babbled a bit about super-group names. not many are worthwhile, but we came up with a couple of goodies.


“…chewed by a rat when Telly was a baby.” (Famous people with missing digits.)


I’m going to play a little mental game with myself today. I’m going to see if I can open up my mind and detect life out and around me…try and “sense” where / what things are, and just try to hear whatever vibe it might be throwing off. see if I can do the aura-vision perception vibe. Sense lizards, the difference between grass and maybe an insect or two… see if I can detect where in the office different bodies are without hearing or seeing them.

I’m pretty confident that I can perceive life in my apartment, but that’s easy. Me, Newton, that’s it. I close my eyes, reach out and see what subconscious cues tell me where he’s located. That is, of course if he isn’t sitting right in front of me, as he is often wont to do… not too difficult to triangulate where the creature that’s purring like a lawnmower and is pressing his forehead against your right hand. What I’m typing here is that it doesn’t take Matt Murdock/Daredevil.


Hmm… quote in my head this morning… “Shift your cargo dearie… show ’em your larboard side…WE WANTS THE REDHEAD!! Strike your colors you brazen wench! No need to expose your superstructure! ” Ah.. Classic Disney.


Until later, dear journal. Don’t take rum, where you can get gold. Mind ye, if they only have rum, take it.

6568 Blasted drills give me a headache

I totally forgot about Calliope fest. Site Meter

Missed going into work today… the landlord had to come by to make repairs, and I don’t trust him in my apartment alone. My main concern is Newton getting out, of course. The repair-guy showed up at about 8:30, and is still at it. I’ve had to keep the feline in big-closet lockup for his own good. Fortunately, he’s got his litter box in with him, but he’s still not too happy about his confinement to one small room over the entire lay of the land inside. I’m guessing it’s going to take another two hours or so before he gets finished.

Pesky thing is that I have the day off, but really can’t do anything… almost like being on call. Hard to read or write much with all the banging and drilling going on. He’s kicking up a *lot* of dust in the front doorway, too. If I’d have known, I would have tossed a sheet over my electronics.

Pic, just shown to display haze

post-haze

And… The obligatory picture of Newton taken this morning right after my last post.(About 7:45am)


Thinking about mi amor… wondering what she’s up to today. I’m sending her good thoughts, and hope that she gets hit by the vibes as swiftly as I broadcast them.


Another host for that Chernobyl cyclist’s photolog. Some amazing shots in there… houses open and abandoned for nearly 20 years now. (the angelfire site bleeds out sometimes)


Google’s new look is pretty sharp, I think.

6567 PSA – Virus E-mail

A clever version of the latest virus is going around, that tries to put bad mojo on your machine… I received it in this format –

From: jlb@kp.net Add to Address Book
To: scottobear@livejournal.com
Subject: Mail Delivery (failure scottobear@livejournal.com)
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 12:32:04 +0200

If the message will not displayed automatically,
follow the link to read the delivered message.

Received message is available at:
bad address link

Norton picked it up right away, but folks should still be careful.

6566 Do they still make lemon Fanta?

Diet Pepsi slurpees are a happy medium from milkshakes. 0 points, nice and cold with a good mouth feel. Not as good as a milkshake, but I got a caramel turtle as a consolation prize, plus a couple more for after din din.(I also picked up four more buckets to sort/store stuff.

Really attacked the rest of the apartment… I’ve packed up, thrown out, or donated away anything that I haven’t made use of in four months, and don’t foresee needing to trot out before I move into a new place. Many books boxed, and the accumulated hair of the ages under the futon and behind the bed (enough to make a lovely sweater or three, I imagine) swept into king size tribbles and disposed of properly. All of my DVDs and CDs are in proper places for the first time in an age, and there isn’t any floor-clutter at all. All the buckets are filled and stored under the futon, save for one that’s being used as a litter bin in the kitchen.Site Meter

I kicked up a *lot* of dust, as is the happenstance of spring cleaning. You wouldn’t think an apartment couldn’t accumulate so much… but man… I could have used an ionizer or something to yank the particles out of the air. I ran the A/C just to suck any residual stuff up as fast as possible.


Spoke to bro… It’s looking now like he might still get 3 years probation… or an equal chance of six months in jail. (minus time held, which will be getting close to two months, and possible time off for good behavior.,, maybe time served as soon as May 25 or so.) Of course, the convicted of a felony thing will be true, and follow him through life. Not liked he ever voted before, but in Florida, ex-felons are deprived of the right to vote. (As news sources all over the planet pointed out in the 2000 election)


Lyric in my mind at the moment-

if I could be a superhero
I would be awesome man
I’d fly around the world fighting crime
according to my… awesome plan
and if I saw criminals trying to lie
hurting other people, and making them cry
I’d haul them off to jail in my awesome van
’cause I would be awesome man.


Heard briefly from Danny last night.. he gets his spring break a week from Thursday. I guess that means Easter is in two weeks. He can use the break… fourth quarter always chews him up pretty hard.


I love the Tech Sgt Chen character on Galaxy Quest. “That’s right again… group hug.” in the engine room, and eating cheese crackers on the shuttlecraft. “It’s the simple things in life you treasure.”


Probably not legal, definitely a whole lot of fun: Bubblegum Machine, weekly mp3s with a cheeky “if it’s ever been on K-Tel or Ronco, it’s in” philosophy. (If it features hand claps, cow bells, syrupy orchestration, walls of sound, wrecking crews, sha-la-las, toothy teen idols or candy-based metaphors for carnal acts, it’s in.) Batman & Robin Themes on Week 13 are groovy, though a little outside the design of the site. No complaints from me. via


Peace, Love and Happiness, dear journal. *shadow dances*

In post 6565… if Scotto is still alive…

He’s the king of the jungle jive…Lookit that caveman goooooo….


leftyrok has helped to raise a question in my mind recently, about LJ and what the place is like now. He was waxing a bit nostalgic about the “good ol’ days” of LiveJournal… 2001/2002 era. (I’m pretty amazed that my fourth anniversary is coming up in month or two. So much has changed for me since then, and a lot has remained the same. Maybe I’ll take some sort of inventory of residences, acquaintances and jobs I’ve held since starting this thing when the four-year point finally rolls around.

These days, I read about 60 lj’ers (very few post daily), 10 communities (mostly pictures and skim-worthy stuff) and about 25 feeds (mostly comic strips, pictures, or news blurbs.) That generally boils down to me looking at LJ for about an average of 45 minutes a day. sometimes a little bit more, some times a little bit less.

My blogroll has another 50 sites on it, though I’d say I only hit about 6 of those daily (though my roll pings them fairly often, to put smiley faces by new updates), and that accounts for another maybe 15 minutes of my time. On the weekend, if time permits, I’ll spend maybe an additional hour looking at other blogs, folks that link to me, that post stuff I can’t view at work during my break,

I probably spend another hour at or so at night just surfing the ‘net, reading newsgroups and ricocheting off of links thrown at me via email or the blogs I zip over. It’s during that time that I toss in a few of those found links into my notepad for later posting into the journal.

This is sort of my equivalent of TV-time. I don’t watch a lot of television, though I will have stuff on in the background as entertainment-noise… Discovery / History / TLC seem to be the most likely candidates for that job, and the best at luring my eyes from the monitor to the boob tube. Cartoon Network and comedy Central are ok, but suffer greatly from rerun-itis.

I used to be able to read a great deal more online, but I now work a job where I actually have to pay attention during much of the day. I miss the times when I could surf the web for an hour or two on FMM’s dime.

Oh… so the question. Were things better then than they are now in LJ? Um.. different. I like the new features, like phone posting, and so on.. I don’t know how crazy I am about people I know reading it these days, and of course, I wish that the authors I prefer would post more often. I need to work on posting more than just links so often… this is a good place to hone my writing skills. I’ve gotten writer-lazy lately, and need to get back on top of that. I don’t suffer from LJ drama too often, aside from a little spam here and there, and the down time is a lot less frequent. I miss some of my old LJ pals, but have made a few new ones…. I’m thankful for bandwidth, considering how many photographers have been added.

The bottom line is that LJ is still good in my opinion, but not as small-town, down-home as it used to be.


Forgot if I mentioned that I heard from bro Thursday night. Not much happened, he just reiterated to me what happened with court. We’re talking civilly now, and that’s a good thing.


Wow. I just saw a commercial for Carvel ice cream cakes, and my mouth actually watered. I haven’t gotten feedback from an ad in years. MMm… Ice cream cake. It’s the little chocolate crunchies that make it so good!


Smokey and the Bandit is somehow better with Swedish subtitles.


A year ago – bro got me some Godzilla movies at the gift store up the road. I wonder now if they were purchased, or picked up with a five-fingered discount? Is every memory of him going to be recolored by what I know now? Probably, until my mind comes up with a fresh tint for him, later on in the game. I know that my memories of other folks are surely in varying shades, too.

two years ago – minority report poll, breakfast with Danny, grabber rabbit meme spreads, Words describing animal traits, Ketchup packet bear, Klaatu’s speech, scary dream, link-to poll

three years ago – babelizer, lovey-feelings, book-burning


Off for some midday walkies, perhaps a milkshake one the pretense of getting more free buckets… until later, dear journal.

6563 Wha? I handle Sin City and it’s environs, now?

Ack… somehow I got put in charge of all of Nevada. I got an email from the Big Kahuna after doing some major spring cleaning today. The email would be landing in my lap on Monday morning, but I yank my work mail in over the weekend.

In addition to my other duties, I’m going to be calling other states now, because I can put on a good phone voice (when I don’t want to sound like a little kid on the phone, which is my normal MO. That usually puts people at ease, too…not everyone wants a call from some kind of booming tones of a Brian Blessed / Santa Claus hybrid.)

Sometimes it seems that they reward the incompetent by taking away responsibilities, and punish people with skills by loading more work on them. She commented that I may have to stay late due to the time difference. Um, Nope. Not without more warning. I’ve already made appointments for other things next week… If it’s not done by the time I have to leave, it’ll wait until the following day.

A fun part is that since I’ll be dealing with Nevada, I’ll get to talk to the Reno Police department, and whatnot. I wonder how they feel about Reno 911? Since Nevada is going to belong to me, I wonder if I’ll get all the goofy Police promotional goodies that ultimately find a way back? I wouldn’t mind having a Las Vegas PD Ball cap / Mug or whatever. I won’t ask for any, but if the loot is offered, I’ll accept most graciously. I hope I don’t have to travel out there too often…I don’t think I will, since we’ve got it pretty much open now, I’ll just be running maintenance.


Poo… It looks like I got stood up by the hippies tonight. Ah well, no biggie. If I don’t hear from them by 8:00, I’ll order some takeout.


Random Scotto factoid – all of my non-allocated (not in set aside armies) mage knight figures fit in three three-gallon ice cream buckets (available *free* at kilwins!) All of my heroclix just fit in one three-gallon bucket.

6563 Wha? I handle Sin City and it's environs, now?

Ack… somehow I got put in charge of all of Nevada. I got an email from the Big Kahuna after doing some major spring cleaning today. The email would be landing in my lap on Monday morning, but I yank my work mail in over the weekend.

In addition to my other duties, I’m going to be calling other states now, because I can put on a good phone voice (when I don’t want to sound like a little kid on the phone, which is my normal MO. That usually puts people at ease, too…not everyone wants a call from some kind of booming tones of a Brian Blessed / Santa Claus hybrid.)

Sometimes it seems that they reward the incompetent by taking away responsibilities, and punish people with skills by loading more work on them. She commented that I may have to stay late due to the time difference. Um, Nope. Not without more warning. I’ve already made appointments for other things next week… If it’s not done by the time I have to leave, it’ll wait until the following day.

A fun part is that since I’ll be dealing with Nevada, I’ll get to talk to the Reno Police department, and whatnot. I wonder how they feel about Reno 911? Since Nevada is going to belong to me, I wonder if I’ll get all the goofy Police promotional goodies that ultimately find a way back? I wouldn’t mind having a Las Vegas PD Ball cap / Mug or whatever. I won’t ask for any, but if the loot is offered, I’ll accept most graciously. I hope I don’t have to travel out there too often…I don’t think I will, since we’ve got it pretty much open now, I’ll just be running maintenance.


Poo… It looks like I got stood up by the hippies tonight. Ah well, no biggie. If I don’t hear from them by 8:00, I’ll order some takeout.


Random Scotto factoid – all of my non-allocated (not in set aside armies) mage knight figures fit in three three-gallon ice cream buckets (available *free* at kilwins!) All of my heroclix just fit in one three-gallon bucket.

6562 Never put off…

Procrastinating… don’t much feel like doing chores yet today. Surfy-surfing, messing around with the orange boy, listening to reruns of MadTV or shuffling mp3s.


I would like a black t-shirt with “Henchman” on the front in white block lettering, to wear with a black knit cap, and a domino mask.


EwwWw. Dirty-undies money safe.


Louisiana police no longer need search warrants?

The 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled Thursday in a Baton Rouge case that authorities don’t need an arrest or search warrant to conduct a swift sweep of private property to ensure their own safety.

Any evidence discovered during that search now is admissible in court as long as the search is a “cursory inspection,” and if police entered the site for a legitimate law-enforcement purpose and believed it may be dangerous.

Hm… sounds like a slippery slope. Beware of camera phones and stuff, guys.


Top doc backs picking your nose and eating it Continue reading 6562 Never put off…

6560 – via the sun-sentinel, right up the street!

A 544-foot-long cargo ship ran aground on a underwater shelf about 600 yards off East Las Olas Boulevard early Friday morning, the Coast Guard said.

The Eastwind ran aground at 2:10 a.m. near the area where ships wait to enter Port Everglades. Large seas and winds as strong as 25 knots made conditions difficult in the ocean overnight.

The grounding occurred at low tide en route in to the port, the Coast Guard said.

A Coast Guard marine inspector flew over the ship to inspect the situation before being lowered to the vessel from a helicopter to oversee response operations.

There was no damage to the ship and its hull was not breached. At this time there are no signs of pollution or any injuries to the crew, a Coast Guard spokeswoman said. The spokeswoman said officers are inspecting the ship. She said no attempt will be made to refloat the Eastwind on the next high tide until the inspection is concluded and the OK given.

A commercial salvage company has been contracted and will be placing pollution response gear in as a precaution. It is also making preparations to refloat the freighter.

The Greek-flagged vessel is carrying bauxite, an ore from which aluminum is extracted, along with paper and steel. It also has approximately 241 tons of heavy fuel oil onboard.

The Eastwind’s last port of call was New Amsterdam, Guyana. Its crew is mostly Greek and Filipino.

Current weather conditions at the scene are six to eight-foot seas with 20-25 knot winds.

The incident is under investigation.