January 2006 Archives

You may recall I was previously having trouble with people on myspace hotlinking to my LJ icons like crazy. Previously I redirected the image requests from the hotlinking sites to a 5120-pixel-wide gif in order to mess up their layouts.

This, however, doesn't seem to have discouraged hotlinking much. I suspect the problem is that many of the myspacers have page layouts which are already so fubar they don't notice when my gif image screws things up further. So a couple of days ago I went to step 2.

Step 2 involved me changing the redirection to a copy of the infamous tubgirl image (If you haven't seen it before, for the love of God, don't Google it). It's amazing how quickly the hotlinking disappears when people suddenly find they have one of the foulest images in existence on their web page.

I saw this number plate today and it confused me a bit. In computer games, "gib" is the term for a piece of an exploded game character after, say, they step on a mine, while "FXR" could be interpreted as a contracted form of a particular piece of leet speak which could lead one to translate the number plate as something entirely inappropriate.

But the vehicle it was attached to was parked on a construction site, so a more likely translation is "Gib fixer" or "one who neuters male ferrets"

I'm not even sure I know quite what this one is proposing...

GROUP VILLAGE ORGANIZATION Of EXTRACTION Of GOLD MOROVIA LIBERIA
WEST/AFRICA.

Mister/Madam,

PROPOSAL FOR GOLD SALES In our search for reliable associates in addition to-me, we obtained your contact by the Internet and we are impressed of your profile from there our interest in the management of the businesses with you. We are very sorry as this letter can surprise you. We are minors of group of village organized in gold based in the west africa in Republic of LIBERIA .

I'm shocked. What sort of people use minors to mine gold. Only adults should be miners!

Because of the difficulties of the government of liberia give a licence to the protocols in transactions of sale of gold and for the safety of our goods, we have successfully transferred (65kilos) from gold to the metal which is (purity of 99 % of 22 carats), being stored in the Agency Company for Safety Extracting in Ouagadougou in the Republic of Burkina Faso the West/Africa. Currently we seek the honourable foreign purchasers who will be able to accept and respect the agreement of trade and to treat the business with us. the case so more necessary.

Ummmmm... Tilt. There's a French version of the email included as well, and I suspect that the English version is simply the French version run through an autotranslator (the "minor" goof is present in both language versions). This portion of the email appears to suggest they couldn't get a mining licence and want to sell their gold under the table.

However our price is (6.500 $ per kilo) and the system of operation is after the analysis; the pleasant part of the quantité is paid to us here while one of our representatives will accompany the goods with his final destination for the balance payment or if possible with satisfaction, the quantité can be paid suddenly. The customer will be responsible for all the tax payments in Burkina - Faso in % well pleasant during the payment. The customer is welcome visit us in Burkina - Faso for the full insurance and the modus of operation. We will be happy to have joined and any of your favorable interested associate. You are welcome and hoping to receive news of you at his possible time more the first.

Translation: You give us $6,500 per kilogram of gold, we run away very fast with your money before you realise there is no one coming to give you the gold.

BEST REGARDS
MR.AMOS ZONGO VILLAGE LEADER

And oddly I got another email from Amos Zongo about an hour ago, now claiming to be auditor general of the Bank of Africa and wanting to offload 16 million dollars. Gets around, does Mr Zongo. Interestingly the second scam email was addressed from "OUAGADOUGOU, BURKINA FASO" - the Bozeman, Montana of Mr Zongo's scam emails, evidently.

Thunderbird 1.5 is a pretty cool email program which keeps getting better. 1.5 has a spell checker which underlines misspelled words as you type them and allows you to right-click and fix your spelling. As I make a lot of typos, this is very helpful. However, there's a couple of words missing from their dictionary...

Hee hee hee! :)

I was waiting to come out of the driveway this evening, signalling that I was going to turn left, when a van nipped past and parked directly to my left (on a yellow line, I might add) completely blocking my view of the oncoming traffic to the left. Way to go, dickhead!

I'd have gotten out and given them a piece of my mind or (more likely) snapped a picture and sent it off to the proper authorities, but (a) it was raining and (b) there was a somewhat impatient person in a van right behind me also waiting to emerge.

Sheesh.

PS, and this is completely unrelated: To the person using rfetch to grab my atom feed: You don't need to refetch it every five minutes - I don't post that often. :)

1. Fiddled with the format of my weblog. I don't know if I'm going to keep it, depends on whether it grows on me or not.

2. Made more Star Trek: Voyager Livejournal userpics, to bring the total to 55. Samples:

3. Managed to win another battle on BlogExplosion, bringing my total to 3 wins, 11 losses. That's sorta sad. :)

Vodafone apologised for their misleading txt last week:

2 clarify last wks TXT from Vdfn, International TXT increases from 20c to 30c frm 25 Jan 06 for Prepay customers only. Sorry 4 any confusion. 4 mor info call 222

If they were reeeeeally sorry, they wouldn't be raising the price. ;)

Since I now have a WAP-capable cell phone, the obvious step of making a WAP version of tetrap.com occurred to me. But what to put on it? Phone wallpapers? I googled and searched, but no one seems to have a list of what resolutions are common for cell phone screens. Interweb, you have failed me!

I found the same question had been asked on Wallpaper Junkie with the response "128x172". Looking at free wallpaper sites yielded various different sizes: 120x160, 132x176, 208x176, 276x132. My own cell phone appears to take wallpapers which are around 128 by 128 (Though it crops the top and bottom and prints "Vodafone" in big letters on it, so more like 128 by 96).

While I suspect it would be nigh-on impossible to get hold of statistics regarding which models are most widely used, gallery.mobile9.com has a handy feature where you can select a make and model and it'll provide you with wallpapers in the correct resolution for your phone. I took the liberty of looking at which dimensions were most prevalent:

This leads me to conclude that I couldn't go far wrong in providing wallpapers in the top 4 or 5 resolutions.

I bought a new phone from Bond and Bond on the weekend. It has a camera, WAP, polyphonic ring tones, etc, etc, and so what better way to celebrate than by posting some blurry phonecam pictures of construction?!

Lower Hutt Mitre 10 MegaHarvey Normans, by Melling Bridge. They just started recently.

Pak n Save, which I photographed before, and which is opening the middle of next week.

Not hugely great picturewise, but OK for taking random photos of silly things.

For a moment before posting this, I had a feeling I'd written about it before, but Google revealed nothing... So here I present to you the results of trying to update a PC using Windows Update:

"Security Update for Windows (KB839645) Could not be installed because of an unknown error."

Perhaps they'd care to elaborate?

Also on the subject of broken stuff, my PC crashed earlier on today. After rebooting, I found that Mozilla's FireFox and Thunderbird had both completely lost their settings. Not only that, but Thunderbird had completely lost all of my email. The mail was, I'm glad to say, still on the disk, but the configuration file which told Thunderbird where it was was snafu. This appears to be because Thunderbird keeps the file permanently open while running, and it wasn't closed properly during the crash.

Fortunately I was able to recover the data and get my email back, but I doubt the average user would be able to do that.