Author: cosmo

So for Christmas I finally caved to the pressure and agreed to get Kyra a pet. She wanted a puppy, which was never going to happen, and then a cat, which was at least a remote possibility, but in the end I worked with her friend Grace (and her dad, John) to get a gerbil.

The little bugger is really pretty cute and funny… more or less a largish mouse. Kyra named her Pumpkin, and she totes her around the house a lot. Pumpkin clings to her shirt– possibly hanging on for dear life and screaming obscenities in gerbilese. Pumpkin also gets to ride in the Barbie RV, or put in an empty Kleenex box where she occasionally pops her head out to see what’s going on. Fun stuff.

So the DVD drive on my computer died a horrible death, and I decided to order a new one. I poked around Newegg a bit and found a DVD burner that was cheap and had good reviews. And best of all, it had absolutely the longest product name I’ve ever seen:

SAMSUNG Black 20X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 16X DVD+R DL 20X DVD-R 6X DVD-RW 12X DVD-RAM 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-R 32X CD-RW 48X CD-ROM 2MB Cache SATA 20X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe – OEM

I guess it pretty much describes what it does…

Wow, these spammers are getting pretty sophisticated. I found this message from the IRS in my e-mail today:

Sweet! I’m pretty sure I owed them money last year, so it’s nice to hear that they’ve decided to give me a hundred bucks. So I clicked the link (c’mon, who wouldn’t?) and was taken to a page that looks remarkably like the real 2

Since this must be legitimate, I clicked on the Tax Refund Online Form to fill it out. I was a little surprised to see that they want me to enter the amount I’m owed. Nothing ventured, nothing gained– I entered 1 million dollars.

And the last step is, not surprisingly, the part where I have to enter my e-mail address, Social Security Number, credit card number, and bank account information with PIN. Wow, is there any other sensitive financial information they’d like me to provide?

I’m sure President Bush will be pleased when he opens his e-mail and sees his million-dollar tax refund.

Of course I find all of this immensely amusing, but the sad part is that some people will really fall for it, and then they’ll be amazed when they find a bunch of stereo equipment on their credit card, their bank account transferred to the Caymans, and so forth.

Stupid spammers. We hatessss them, yessss.

Oh how I love the command-line. I spend most of my work time either hacking away at stuff in a text editor or slapping together cryptic commands at my shell prompt.

So I just imported a database onto a staging server:

[fixed:zing@stage01:~ > dbl mocapay dump-mocapay.sql.gz]

As if that’s not cryptic enough, I needed to import a second database as well. Let’s be honest: that command above is a lot to type. It’s so much easier to do this:

[fixed:zing@stage01:~ > !!:gs/y/y_ext]

And voila!

I just don’t understand those people who think the command line is complicated… heh heh.

Breaking news from West Chester, OH:

But the best part of the article is this:

Umm… I’m guessing the cause of death was the explosion that shook houses across the neighborhood. But hey, I’m just a programmer guy, not a forensic pathologist…

We just watched the movie Stardust with the kids, and it was fantastic. I couldn’t help but compare it to The Princess Bride, for sheer simple enjoyment and the same kind of mix of fantasy, romance, adventure, and humor. I hadn’t even heard of the movie until my friend Dave told me it was a good one, and he was right.

Happy New Year!

To celebrate the end of 2007, today I’m going to… work on taxes.

Whee! I need to get my corporate finances in order, so I can send them to my accountant (because no mere mortal like me can comprehend the corporate tax code) so he can process them and send them back to me so I can do my personal taxes (with the help of software from the nice folks at H&R Block, because no mere mortal can comprehend the personal tax code either) and in the end, figure out how much I owe. Oh, how I love writing that annual check to the “United States Treasury”, knowing that my money is being spent wisely by our benevolent government.

“And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I’m sorry it’s the case, and I’ll work hard to try to elevate it.”

— President George W. Bush

Tom and I always exchange gift cards for Christmas and birthdays, so in keeping with long tradition I decided to get him a card from Lowe’s, since he’s always working on some new house project.

But when I hit the Lowe’s web site and went to the gift card area, I see this:

What the heck? I want to send him a card via e-mail– not even a physical card or anything– and it says I can’t. Is the internet full or something?

Even today, five days after Christmas, it’s still down. This is really starting to suck. At this rate Tom might have to wait until his birthday to get the dang thing…

So the kids came home from school with some Christmas gifts this week. According to the story (verified by Laralee, who knows all of the “in people” over there), a mysterious benefactor actually bought presents for every kid in the school. And these aren’t just cheesy plastic cups with a snowman on them or something– Zack got an Etch-a-Sketch, Kyra ended up with a nice silver charm bracelet, etc.

There are around 450 students enrolled at Loma Linda Elementary, and about 65% of them are on the “free lunch” program because their household income is pretty much at the poverty level. These are kids who probably don’t have much of a Christmas, and even if they do, Dad probably has to leave to work one of his three jobs to scrape by. So for someone to buy gifts for all 450 of the kids is a really, really cool thing.