For the past couple of weeks I’ve been getting very strange spam with contents such as $B:#F|$O$J8$K$J$C$F$O$$$?$@ which is really weird. I just tried adding the first 20 or so characters of the email into the web front end to MT and it totally mucked up my keyboard, so I guess its some form of an ANSI keyboard remap or something? All I can think of its some sort of japanese spam (as a lot of the emails are .jp address’s)
Anyone else seen this?
Managed to finally get a winning token with the Cokes, myCokemusic.com service which meant that I was able to download a song (which Kristen decided she wanted.) Why the process had to open 4 seperate windows I don’t know. What I didn’t know was that you can use the service to actually stream in real time the songs aka your personal radio service, but you wouldn’t (or shouldn’t!) be able to record it to listen to again. These one off listens cost 1 credit, with a download or a free win being 99 credits.
Spyware Blaster 3 has been released with new updates to download. Although I don’t use it, there are those who read this blog who do.
A very Useful link on understandin pop3 or imap login strings has been posted which will help. I can work my way around pop3 and smtp but knew nothing about imap. I’ve spent the best part of two days struggling to get our Exchange server back on the internet and working again and I’ll document more about this on Monday. Basically we ended up with not being able to email other Azur or K3 sites but could email everyone else….then I went in and cleaned up Active Directory and couldn’t email anything out unless I kept stopping and starting the smtp server. In the end I deleted and recreated our smtp routing connector and everything worked – just when we were starting to discuss reinstalling exchange 2000 – NOT a nice thing to contemplate at lunchtime on Friday afternoon.
Things have been really hectic and busy round here the past couple of days so I’ve not really had a chance to blog much. As I mentioned earlier, our section of the company was sold off over the weekend, so Thursday and Friday last week was very stressful as I was trying to juggle responsibilities of the old job with planning the merger of the two companies and their networks, in particular trying to plan for an email migration with the minimum downtime and user hassle. Tomorrow the big switch over will take place and we will be cut off from our old company network and we’ll be joined to the new one….so yet more stress 🙂
Saturday evening we went out with some friends of ours to Old Orleans which neither of us had been to before. The evening was different as we were greeted by an extremely hairy chested, back and legged wait(e)r(ess) wearing a dress as it was their 20th birthday and so all the staff were in fancy dress. It really was a mistake in allowing a hairy guy to wear a dress and seat people at their tables and bring the food over – it really was a sickening experience. If we hadn’t have booked a table or been on our own I think I’d have left the restaurant. We had a magician come over to the table and do some card tricks,smutty innuendo’s and balloon puppetry. Kristen kept trying to be clever in the cards, as they were all different shapes and sizes and didn’t do too badly although she pulled the king of hearts out when it should have been the queen of hearts. Credit to the clown though, he carried on without pausing in his patter and took her heckling in his stride. The funniest thing is that he was incredibly hard to understand and our friend had a really hard time. Whenever she was asked a question there was a pause, followed by a “errrmm” and then the answer. It really looked like she was trying to think up a fake answer to her name or where she had come from. The rest of the time we were served by a playboy bunny (with matching outfit) who did a good job of apologising for the delay in the food as apparently “everyone had ordered the main courses at once”. When the food came it wasn’t very good and there was quite a lot of food left on the plates. I did manage to eat all my alligator though (tastes like chicken with the consistency of tuna steak) so thats another exotic meat I’ve tried. Note this was NOT eaten at Jamie Oliver’s Dad’s pub, I do not know Jamie Oliver and can’t come to your school for cookery demonstrations or get you a tv break.
Monday I went to see the Doctor about my knees as they’ve been really hurting since we did a 6 geocache hike and he told me that it was just the knees not being used to the amount of exercise and I’ve got to take Ibuprofen for a week.
Today I had my cancer checkup and was given the all clear, which as usual is good news.
Also managed to clear out the broken glass in the barbeque outside so we had steaks on the grill tonight and they were delicious. Thanks luv!
The good thing about not being able to make any calls since Monday is that our phone bill will be substantially cheaper. The bad news is that the mobile bill will be substantially higher. We’re still without dial out access from home, but can receive calls. BT’s automated “looseyouinaqueueofbuttonpressinguselessness”(TM) phone system is currently stating a fix time of 68 hours. Add that to the 36 hours and we’re hopefully looking at a nice lot of line rental rebate.
For ages now, I’ve been getting the error message “MT::App::CMS=HASH(0x83a8228) Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 2420.” when I post a blog entry. It doesn’t always happen but only sometimes. The last couple of posts are examples of where it happens. This morning I did a bit more digging and apparently it occurs when there is a problem with pings. I’ll do a bit more digging later but at least it doesn’t mean “error out of cheese, formatting hard disk”
Thanks to Neils post on Terrakt I’ve spent some time reading the articles at Code Fish Spam Watch where they run through their analysis of phishing scams they’ve received. Some interesting, although fairly technical, reading – and pretty scary too when you consider how vulnerable and easy these pages are to install on peoples machines.
There was/is a major fire in tunnels underneath Manchester yesterday which seemed to only affect BT phone lines. BT said it would affect a wider network and yesterday we were unable to receive calls at home although we were able to make them. Same thing at the doctors. Apparently the pharmacy opposite the doctors and the job centre had no phones or data lines either. Fortunately our broadband access was not affected 🙂
The company that I worked for completed a buyout to another company so as of Saturday night I now work for Azur Group.