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Found in a spamtrap today:

“Remove your bills the Christian way”

WTF?

What follows is a long, disjointed collection of unrelated sentences that I suspect is actually Bayes poison (some spammers have figured out that using natural-sounding language is more effective at making Bayesian filters, well, less effective). There is, however, apparently an image above that, which I suspect contains the real payload.

Now if it were trying to get rid of creditors the Christian way, it might make more sense…

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This has got to be a typo:

About 91 percent of PCs today are infected with spyware programs that send information from your PC to an unauthorized third party.

NCSA (National Cyber Security Alliance, not the National Center for Supercomputing Applications of Mosaic fame) Chairman Ken Watson quoted by CNET in Study: Consumers take cyberattacks lightly.

That’s a staggering number, and I hope it’s supposed to be 19. Even so, considering how many computers there are in the world, it’s still a staggering number.

Spyware, viruses and worse are out there, and they’re all over both business and home computers. It’s worth checking out the NCSA’s website, staysafeonline.info, as well as others like CERT‘s page on Home Network Security, the US-CERT website, or the FTC‘s guide to Consumer Information Security (though I can’t quite get past the turtle logo on that one).

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Today’s recipe:

HUMMUS

1 can (14 oz) chickpeas, drained, rinsed well
2 T unsweetened peanut butter
1 garlic clove
sea salt to taste
1/4 c olive oil
1/2 t cayenne pepper
juice of 1 lemon
1 T sesame seeds, toasted lightly
fresh bread for serving, toasted

Put first four ingredients in blender and blend until smooth. Keeping blender on, slowly add oil and lemon juice. Stir in cayenne peppper. If mixture is too thick, add some cold water. Transfer to serving bowl. Sprinkle cooled sesame seeds over pureed mixture. Spread on toasted slices of bread for serving. Serves 4.

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I’ve seen hummus made with cannellini beans, hummus with eggplant, hummus with yogurt, and hummus with extra parsley (think of a cross with tabbouli). But this is the first time I’ve seen hummus with peanut butter. I suppose if you’re not likely to find tahini in your area, it would make an acceptable substitute. Still, shouldn’t you try to find tahini first? I’d imagine that stores in a lot of areas might be more likely to carry that than unsweetened peanut butter in the first place. Or you could just blend a couple tablespoons of plain peanuts for a while before adding the chickpeas. But the real problem here is that nobody’s going to be expecting peanuts in hummus. And if you have someone who can eat chickpeas but not peanuts, that could be bad.

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I took an odd tech support call at work the other day. Someone called in asking about how quickly she could get a new IP address, because she didn’t want anyone to know where she lived. I tried to explain it was all about the network connection, not the physical location, and no, it wasn’t associated with her email address either, and how are you connected?

It transpired that she wasn’t even one of our customers, and that she wanted us to “block” her IP by putting X’s through everything “like you have on your website.”

Huh?

Well, Continue reading →

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I was thinking about the series of “Rogue Profiles” we’ve been getting every once in a while in The Flash and realized that quite a few villains based their M.O. on a childhood trauma.

It’s been long established that Heat Wave was trapped in a walk-in freezer during a school field trip, and has had a life-long obsession with heat. So when he decided to go into crime, a flamethrower was a natural choice.

The Pied Piper is another one: he was born deaf, and his wealthy parents found a doctor who could give him hearing. Naturally he became obsessed with sound, so sonic tech was his weapon of choice.

The Trickster was born into a family of acrobats but afraid of heights. So he invented “air walker” shoes, which he later used to start his criminal career — by holding up and robbing airplanes. Continue reading →

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Remember Mozilla Coffee? In the first month they offered it, RJ Tarpley’s Coffee raised $400 for the Mozilla Foundation by donating a percentage of the profits.

We ordered it a couple of times, and it was actually pretty good. I even picked up a Mozilla Coffee Mug at one point.

Alas, the website (formerly www.rjtarpleys.com) has vanished. There isn’t even a whois record anymore. I don’t know if the company went out of business or just shut down their web operations.

All I know is that Mozilla Coffee is no more. That, and I seem to have a collector’s-item mug.

Originally posted on my Spread Firefox blog.

Update: Ron Tarpley himself commented on my post at SFX on 12/15/2005:

Hey Kelson,

I just happened to stumble across this entry today. You are right, I did shut down the Coffee biz and Mozilla Coffee with it. It was and still is an awesome idea. My problem was order fullfillment. The roaster thought he could have a program in place to fullfill orders (packaging, labels, shipping, etc.) When that fell through, I ended up doing this in my garage at midnight and 5:00 am while trying to maintain my real job, be a husband, and a father! I held on for as long as I could because the coffee is awesome and folks like part of the profit going to The Foundation. I will explore this again with my roaster (they are expanding successfully in the South) and the great folks at Mozilla. Who knows, if this can be done better this time I think it could be huge. Combining Mozilla (Firefox) and Coffee……what could be better?

Ron Tarpley