Author: Nick

Back to the Grind

So it looks like I took a goodly amount of time off, not only from work, but from blogging. I buried myself in holiday celebrational activities like eating and visiting with relatives and playing games and programming at 3pm in nothing but a bathrobe. The highlight of all this fun?

I put a ball and chain on layaway.

That’s right, I’ve become engaged to the lovely and oh-so-talented Elz. It’s looking like a long and entertaining engagement what with all the hurdles (legal and otherwise) that must be overcome but I wanted to make my intentions known to her and the rest of the world. She’s a wonderful lady and a delicate flower (not) who shares many of my interests and accommodates many of my idiosyncrasies with aplomb.

There’s really naught else to discuss. My other happy gift is a USB-enabled turntable. I’ve been ripping vinyl for some time and am considering putting some of the more esoteric stuff up on my home server for downloady goodness. Lots of jazz lately but I am hoping to stop doing piecework shortly and just start the A-Z rip of my 13 shelves of vinyl. This project will probably take years, but what’s a good project without long-term commitments?

Public Service Announcement

I was a bit intrigued by a certain referrer in my log file who has been drifting at the bottom for the past week+ but suddenly shot up into the top 5 yesterday. The link ostensibly goes to http://tvsetmp3.com/ but gets redirected to http://ismymovies.com/. The page is constructed to look like it throws a system dialog box—if one were running XP in the default blue theme.

The dialog box asks you to download a codec to view the movie. The image is dressed up like a dialog box even going so far as to enabling you to drag it around. The ultimate clue being you cannot drag it outside the browser window’s boundaries. Clicking the “Cancel” area on the image map throws a Javascript dialog asking you to click “OK” to download the exe file. Clicking “Cancel” here throws another dialog that insists you click “OK” to download the exe file. Clicking “OK” brings you back to the previous “Click OK to download the codec” pop-up.

Clever. I never did go so far as to try to view the embedded Flash Video file underneath. I mean, it’s likely that there has to be a video file to cover the social engineering that just occurred if they did manage to get the fake codec installed on you machine. Still, they steer really hard to get you to the place where you download that putative codec.

Like I said. Clever. The social engineering continues to get better.

Bad Day

I know it’s probably landed in you inbox once or twice already but Elz forwarded this one to me today. Particularly prescient given what’s been going on at work since I walked in the door this morning. Sometimes a plugin upgrade isn’t really a great idea. Then again, you never know until you test it out.

Flippin’ Atlassian. If their stuff wasn’t so good otherwise I’d probably be pissed right now.

Server Hiccup

UPDATE: 2007-12-20T22:26
And now? She is fixed. Lucky to have a spare box laying about with a functional power supply. Next one that goes requires a trip to newegg though.

In my head:
Sorry folks, the server’s closed. The moose out front should have told you that.

Translated:
The box sitting next to my desk that serves the media files behind The Millionaire’s Holiday is currently down. I’ll take a look at it when I get home.