Don’t you just hate it when your mail merge falls completely apart?
That’s a piece of lovely scam email purporting to be from Verizon, which it actually isn’t because my Verizon account’s linked to my other email address. Oh, that and the links you see there don’t actually go to Verizon’s website. (I wonder if “ridgecrestcommunitycalendar.com” knows they’ve been hacked. Hmm.)
So, if you ever wanted to see the guts of a phishing scam message, well, here you go. Enjoy.
Given that I’m probably going to be retiring some of my hosted sites soon, BlogBooker is the most useful link I’ve seen in weeks.
Not owning cats certainly hasn’t kept me from enjoying the webcomic Two Lumps. Likewise, not owning guns seems not to be interfering with my enjoyment of the newest enterprise from the same creative team: Failure To Fire.
If you like guns, you’ll probably enjoy it even more than I do. Give it a look-see, won’t you?
Well, I almost let an entire calendar month go by, didn’t I? Whoopsie. So much for getting back on the horse… again.
So! Notable things about this month? One, I managed to take an entire calendar week off from work for the first time since I started work. (This doesn’t count stretches of unemployment, mind you.) Last time I scheduled a week-long vacation, my boss got canned and I spent half the week in the office anyway. This time? Peace and quiet.
What’s really cool about the time off is that I didn’t actually waste it all. Instead, I used half the week to de-junk my living space a bit. A couple bags of trash went out, sure, but the really big part involved having Green Century come by on Thursday to haul away several 17-gallon bins’ worth of computer paraphernalia. I’d accumulated 15 years’ worth of working-in-IT and taking-my-work-home junk, like old PCI cards and cables and drives and drives and cables and plastic fiddly bits and empty chassis and printers and you get the picture. Finding, sorting, piling, and staging all of this took up the first two days of my vacation.
A lot of work to do on a so-called “break,” yes, but utterly worth it. I reclaimed a lot of storage and floor space, found some nifty things during the sorting that I wanted to store more safely, and my physical possessions total a few hundred pounds less now than they did before. Sweet!
The second notable event this month? My son turned 20, mid-month. Twenty years old! It’s amazing, and he’s turned out to be pretty damned cool. I have the best kids, I tell ya.
I should be at work right now.
I’m not, because I spent all night gulping down pain medicine and trying to find a position in which I could sleep. There’s a knot in my back at my left shoulderblade that hurts like [censored]. There hasn’t been a minute in the last 15 hours in which it hasn’t hurt at all. I occasionally slept through it, when I became too exhausted and when the meds kicked in for a while, but it never lasted long.
There are important things to do. The Kaseya server needs some attention, most importantly. I haven’t even entered my time from yesterday. I hate letting the company down like this. I almost got up and went to work anyway, but finding myself on the verge of tears merely from sitting up in bed put the kaibosh on that idea.
So, I’m going to spend the rest of the day trying to find a comfortable-ish position from which to grit my teeth and endure until this knot goes away. Wish me luck.
I had time to kill last night, between finishing “game night” (came in a strong second at “London” and kicked Mike’s ass at “Stone Age”, hah!) and starting on some client work, and didn’t feel like being On The Computer. So I put in the first disc of my recently-acquired set of the BBC/A&E “The Scarlet Pimpernel”.
Now, I’d last watched the show when it first aired back in the late 1990s and remembered (vaguely) that it was a cheesy, breezy little adventure yarn. You know what? It still is, and it hasn’t aged as poorly as I might have expected. Richard E. Grant is still a brilliant lead, playing the Bruce Wayne / Batman dichotomy as well as anyone could ask. Elizabeth McGovern is still pretty, somewhere under all that pancake makeup and somewhat-ratty wig. Buckles are swashed, entendres are doubled, and so forth.
The Internet, of course, begs to differ. Apparently what I watched last night is “atrocious.” You see, liberties were taken with the source material. Heaven forfend! So-and-so wouldn’t behave like that! They killed whats-his-name! After all, the only good translation of novel to film is a completely and totally literal one, right? I mean, really now. Those “Lord of the Rings” movies clearly suffered from the loss of all that dratted Bombadil-ish and elvish and hobbitish poetry & song every dozen pages, right? Right.
Now I’ve made the Tolkien nuts mad at me. I can live with that.
There are some gripes with “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” but they’re mostly just quibbles, regardless of how you rate Liz McGovern’s acting talents. (Seriously: The vitriolic posts I’ve seen online almost all mention one or more failings on her part. Does she have a history of drowning kittens and kicking puppies that I didn’t know about? Because, sheesh.) One scene comes to mind involving the sharpening of a guillotine, which is supposed to sound ominous (scrape, scrape) except the stone’s being dragged across the broad side of the blade instead of anywhere near the edge. Weird details like that, where someone just wasn’t paying attention, jar you from time to time.
But, you know what? The good guys won, the hero rescued the girl, love triumphed over evil, yadda yadda. Some days, that’s all I really want.
(Yes, there’s a rant coming later about the current state of modern high fantasy novels. Hint: I AM SICK AND TIRED OF GRIMDARK. STOP IT.)
So I’ll be watching the other discs in my boxed set, even if I have to do it alone. I’m okay with that.
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