A scam with a Middle Eastern twist

Usually, it is the widow of a late dictator from Nigeria or Togo. The poor woman is so hard-pressed to buy food, that she has to desperately find somebody (i.e. you) to help her siphon ill-gotten millions out of the country.

Yesterday, such a scam attempt arrived in my mailbox. This time, though, there was no desperate wife. Just a dying soldier who wanted salvation for his soul.

Read on and enjoy.

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Hello Buddy,

I hope my email meets you well. My name is Sgt .James Clayton jr. I am in the Engineering military unit here in Baghdad in Iraq , with Oesophageal cancer which has defiled all forms of medical treatment,and right now I have only about a few weeks/month to live, according to medical experts. My late 2 colleagues who died last week in a bomb blast and I found a huge sum of $6.500,000 Million USD in Baghdad neighbourhood (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2988455.stm) that we have successfully moved out of the country to INDIA via a diplomat .

I am contacting you because i want you to help with claiming of this Consignment and help me distribute them to charity organizations and homeless people.

I feel distributing the funds would be a way to appease the LORD and also want God to be merciful to me and my late friends and also accept our souls,because we have killed so many in the war, but we where only serving our country.

I have decided to give this sum 0f $6.500,000 Million USD to charity organizations, as I want this to be one of the last good deeds I do on earth.

I will want you to help me collect this consignment and dispatched it to charity organizations like i have said earlier.

I have set aside 30% for you and your time, 20% should be use by you to settle any expenses that you might have incured in the cause of your making the claims for this consignment.

The most important thing is that can I TRUST you Once the funds get to you?, and also would you distribute the rest 50% to charity organizations, Your own part of this deal is to contact the DIPLOMAT on how the consignment can be released and sent down to your home address and also find a safe place where the funds can be kept.

If you are interested I will furnish you with more details.

But the whole process is simple and we must keep a low profile at all times because if the authorities are aware of this funds, it would be seized and used for purchasing ammunitions and irrelevant accessories,whereby we have so many sick, homeless kids dying with hunger.

I am awaiting your urgent response on my private email address: james@sergentclayton.dom-reg.com

IN GOD WE TRUST!!!!

Regards.

SGT .JAMES CLAYTON

The ultimate blizzard

This is my ninth winter in Boston. I should consider myself a seasoned veteran of the cold, snowy months of December to February. I even drove a car to work through the last winter, and thought I had seen just about everything that a New England winter could throw at me.

Boy, was I wrong! Rewind to Thursday, the 13th of December, 2007. Actually, the events are so clear in my mind that I do not even need to rewind.

The forecast had heavy snow from the early evening, late into the night. But so what? The state had seen such snowfall before. They would be prepared. The snow plows would be out in readiness with their salt and sand. All should be well. A bit inconvenient, for sure, but not a big deal.

I set out at 1:45 PM to drop a couple of people off some 10 miles away. No back roads. Just Route 9 all the way, a major arterial. The snow was falling hard; One to two inches an hour, they said. Fine. We were moving along at 20 mph or thereabouts. I got to the destination in an hour and a half.

Annoying, but expected.

Then, I turned the car around. And got back home past 8:30 at night! A mind-numbing 2 mph speed average over a distance of just 20 miles in total! We sat on the road, 20 to 30 minutes at a time without an inch of movement. Two lanes of gridlock, apparently extending a whopping 40-odd miles all the way into the city of Boston.

I shoveled snow off the car at least 5 times during this ordeal, sitting on the "fast" lane of Route 9 all along. I bantered with fellow gridlockers. I cleaned the wiper blades of ice. I listened to the radio. I called friends and family.

And I checked the state of my fuel tank.

The level was dropping visibly, but I was not concerned yet. My cell phone on the other hand, was discharging quickly! Down to the last two bars of power. What would I do if it ran out completely?

I used the phone less. I started killing the engine too. I heard that people were indeed running out of gas and getting stranded in the middle of this serpentine parking lot. Help wouldn't get to them for hours! And we were all stuck behind them.

I cannot believe the state's incompetence. They have seen such snow before. It was also expected, and not out of the blue. Yet, they could not keep one lane moving even at 5 mph! Instead of preparing to plow and salt the streets first, the government asked all employees to head home immediately at about 2:00 PM. The 5:00 PM rush hour was thus advanced to 2:00 PM, and the roads were in no shape to handle it.

The next day, Governor Deval Patrick announced faith in his government's response, and blamed the mess on people who did not leave their workplaces until well after 5:00! We can only imagine what would have happened if even more cars were out around 2:00 PM that day! Actually, people who left after 6:00 PM reached home in an hour or thereabouts.

I am happy that my tax dollars are being used well. Maybe I should trade in my hybrid car for a snow plow! The miles per gallon reading that day would have been comparable to that of the plow.

To kill a mocking mouse

Here is my latest rant against Microsoft: they cannot make their own hardware talk to their own software! The case in point: the Microsoft Comfort Optical Mouse 3000.

I got one of these at work several months ago to replace an archaic ball-mouse that Dell surprisingly shipped with their dual-core desktop in this modern optical age. Microsoft mouse. Microsoft Windows XP. Doesn't get more compatible that this, right?

Wrong, but of course.

Everything was hunky-dory for a while. Then, all the windows fell apart (pardon the pun!). It started with Windows disowning the mouse. But in these early stages of the disease, the mouse would be recognized almost immediately.

"Ka-plink, Ka-plink" would go the speakers. Once for un-recognizing the mouse, and once for recognizing it again. Both in the span of less than a second. I did not give it a second thought.

And then there was only one "ka-plink". You can guess which of the two operations was being performed. The mouse had been surgically removed, and the device went dead. A balloon window helpfully asked me to click for more info. What irony! The only solution: unplug the mouse and reattach. But then, that "helpful" balloon went away too, and I could not figure out the cause.

Some Gooling revealed a plethora of potential issues, most requiring the creation of a recovery point in the operating system, accompanied by much fiddling with the dreaded Registry. I decided to wait and watch.

Eventually, the pointing device simply became so sluggish that a hard reboot was the only way out. This was getting too annoying now. I tried with another device of the same make and model, with similar results. I tried different USB ports. No luck.

A colleague then suggested that I install the original IntelliPointer drivers. The CD proudly proclaimed: "Do not plug in the device until you have installed these drivers." Great! How do I navigate the install program's menus, without the mouse plugged in?

Throwing caution to the wind, I plugged in the mouse and installed the driver. I then tried to download the updated driver from Microsoft's website, and was shunted about endlessly. Apparently, their driver download page works only with IE 6 or higher. Poor me, I had FireFox!

I eventually stumbled upon a page that condescended to work with FireFox, and I got version 6.1. In a few days, I should know if this was all in aid of something.

Santa, are you listening?!