Me Blog!

Apparently it is according to a 419 mail I got this morning. This one is quite a good effort however it does have some fundamental flaws. It begins thus:

This letter is not intended to cause any embarrassment in whatever form, rather
is compelled to contact your esteemed self, following the knowledge of your high
repute and trustworthiness.

I am David Garfield, Chief Campaign Officer of the PRINCIPAL CAMPAIGN COMMITTEE
OF DEMOCRATS: OBAMA 2014 INC ID: C00411934.

The flowery language at the start is *the* hallmark of a 419 but this time around the grammar is rather good and punctuation is aslo good with no rampant capital either until you get to the bit that mentions Obama and the official looking code numbers.

So why are the Democrats in the U.S. sending me advance fee fraud mails? Aha! Here we go:

I write to seek your sincere assistance in transferring the sum of £10M GBP 10
million Pounds sterling.

Stirling? From the Democrat party in the United States? Surely that should be dollars? And where did they get the 10 million from in the first place?

I discovered my office has some excess funds amounting too 10 million Pounds
recovered from donations and grants from democrats around the world during our
election campaign and pleas for support for our incumbent president Barack
Hussein Obama, According to plans, The excess funds was to used in clearing
debts owed by Mrs Hillary Clinton during her campaign programs,I taught there is
a better way of expending this funds.I want this money to be used to alleviate
the poverty and sufferings of children in Iraq and Africa and donate to Charity
organizations around the world.

Yeah right! Unfortunately what started out gramatically quite decent has started to break down slightly with all this philanthropic talk. Anyway why not just give it to charity? Why should I launder the money?

My plea to you is that you assist me get this funds out of the United Kingdom
where it is presently lodged safe and for your assistance ,you will have a fair
percentage of the total money and all investments shall be under your
supervision.

This simple transfer process could be arranged in less than 3 working
days.Ensure your response is sent to my personal e-mail address xxxxxxx@gmail.com

I sent a mail to gmail alright. Straight to Google’s abuse department to get that mailbox shutdown along with another gmail account used in the signature. BTW the signature itself is pretty funny. I wonder if the 419er did this intentionally? Probably not. Anyway note the UK telephone number:

419 Rating – 5 out of 10

It did arrive claiming to be from a democrats.com mail address and started out quite excellent but left itself down badly in the plausability stakes with references to Obama and Hillary Clinton. And of course claiming to be from the Democrats while using gmail accounts, references to Stirling currency and a U.K. mobile telephone number mean that I can only give it 5 out of 10.

Out if interest, the mail itself arrived from a mail server in Indonesia and was sent using IMP webmail which is part of the Horde Application Framework.

As illnesses go the flu is a nasty bugger. I haven’t had it myself in years as I used to get regular vaccinations at work. So for the first time in years and for exactly a week now I have been freezing cold one minute, roasting the next. I’ve been shaking, coughing and wheezing. Unable to stay awake, unable to to go to sleep and finally one entire week later I’m starting to feel a little bit better.

I haven’t left the house in that length of time either. I wonder if much has changed?

Anyway back to the flu. I have no idea if it was swine flu or not as I didn’t bother with any doctors or health professionals because I simply cannot afford them. A visit to the G.P. and a prescription would cost me in and around €100 which is half what I have to spend per week. Ironically of course I haven’t spent anything in the past week anyway other than getting someone to buy me the odd packet of cigarettes so I might have as well got myself checked out.

I’ve already mentioned alternating between being roasting hot and freezing cold, so what else can you expect? Absolutely aching bones and joints for a start. My hips were so sore I could barely walk at times. This started to fade after about the fourth day. Another thing is the dizziness. At times while sitting it was like the whole room was spinning around. Close your eyes and it felt like being in a washing machine. A week later and I’m still having dizzy spells and pounding headaches although not as frequently thankfully. I’ve discovered that lying down on my right hand side seems to stop the dizziness for some reason. It doesn’t work if you lie on your left

Oddly one thing that hasn’t been affected is my appetite. On the contrary I have been constantly hungry and no amount of food is satisfying. There must be some truth in that “feed a cold, starve a fever” adage.

The worst thing (apart from the suffering of course) is the boredom. Any of you following me on twitter may have read recently about the television falling off the wall, well the second T.V. is constantly tied up by my mother recording bloody soap operas so that ruled that out. Staring too long at a computer screen resulted in a few dizzy spells so that ruled that out as too it ruled out reading for the same reason. Still I’m on the mend at last so time to get through some of the bills and other letters that have been piling up while I’ve been laid up.

I see from a cursory glance that college are looking for €1,500 that I don’t have for a registration fee so I guess I will be finishing up there next week and my NCT is due as well.  I guess I should have stayed in bed.

The end of October is almost here but despite the evenings getting cooler and the nights closing in, our garden is still in bloom. This afternoon Lucas was pointing at something on the floor and it turned out to be a Ladybird. I picked it up and he was fascinated watching it crawl around my hand. I decided to return it to the garden and took the following shot:

Click for Bigger

I was absolutely delighted with the colours. But regular readers may know that this is not the first time I have been playing with macro photographs in the garden. I have also taken this bumblebee and another macro of water drops on a flower.

Photo of Lucas in the garden yesterday. I asked him to smile but I think he overdid it a bit!

Click for bigger

Edit – I’ve made a complete and utter balls up of this post. Lucas is on the bottom left of the photo. And the ship is the MS Julia not M.V.

Was up in the city today. While herself was off shopping, myself and Lucas were left to our own devices to wander about the place. Ever since it docked I have been meaning to go up and have a look at the M.V. Julia which will soon be sailing on the Cork – Swansea route.

The quality of this picture isn’t great as I took it using my N73 but you can see Lucas in his buggy on the bottom left corner for scale! Incidentally it is one of the largest ships I have seen in the city centre. Donncha has plenty of photos on his photoblog from which you can appreciate the size of it that little better.

Click for bigger

I’ve been meaning to take a photo of this boat that is tied up at Harvey’s Dock here in Youghal.

Anyone notice anything odd? Click for bigger.

I’ve been obsessively poring over my log files again. I always find it interesting to see what combinations of operating systems and web browsers visitors to my sites are using. I’ve recently resurrected Sawmill to analyse reports from my reverse proxy which gives me a nice overview of all visitors to all my hosted sites.

So from the 17th August to today here are some interesting (I think) stats:

30.3% of visitors are running Windows XP
12.2% are using Windows Vista
10.2% are using a Linux Distribution
6.7% are using MacOS

The web browser stats are probably more interesting:

40.2% are using a version of Firefox
25.1% are using a version of Internet Explorer
8.2% are using Safari (Google Chrome is included as Safari)
2.2% are using Opera

I have my reverse proxy configured to reject libwww-perl as it is only ever used for something dodgy but from the logs it shows that there were 1,399 rejected libwww-perl useragents making up 0.8% of all browsers.

Next up are spiders. Again I have some of these blocked either by useragent or by IP. For example I have all of Amazons EC2 netblocks dropped on my firewall because again nothing good ever comes from there. However the ones I have not blocked by IP will still appear in my logs albeit having been served a 403. As expected the busiest crawler is Googlebot:

42.8% of spider traffic is from Googlebot
27.4% is from MSNbot
26.3% is Yahoo!’s Slurp

While on the subject of search engines:

98.9% of search engine traffic to my sites came from Google.
1.0% from Yahoo!
1 single solitary visitor came from AOL search!

I already mentioned dishing out 403s based on useragents, well 1.9% of all server responses were 403 with a total of 641 unique IP addresses.

The last time I posted about visitor stats was back in November 2007. Back then as expected the vast majority of visitors were using Windows XP and the most popular browser was Firefox for visitors to my wiki and Internet Explorer on my blog. Windows Vista has also been released by then and was only making up between 5 and 7% of all visits. This time around it is interesting to see that Windows 7 despite being a release candidate and not officially launched yet accounted for almost 3% of visitors.

It’s going to be interesting to watch the uptake of Windows 7.

The lads from Lagos must be hard up. They aren’t even making a decent effort at scamming us decedent Westerners anymore. At least if this gem is anything to go by:

Dear Friend i verry happy to inform you about my success in getting those

funds transferred under the cooperation of  your help in UNITED KINDOM in our

last business and i hope i am contating the write person.Presently I signed a

cheque of ($850.000.00.USD) which i kept for your compensation for all the

past efforts and the  attempts you render me in this matter. I realy

appreciated your efforts at that time very much.

finally remember that I had forwarded instruction to the DHL OFFICE on your

behalf to contact you on how to  receive your cheque containg the funds i

kept for you, so you are to get in touch with DHL OFFICE with your full name

and contact address on their email on how to send you the parcell

Email claims_dhldiliverydepartment@hotmail.com

Phone +2348032185491

My Regards To Your Family
Mrs.Brenda Howell

Oh dear, dreadful spelling, probably as a result of being a non-native English speaker. Why DHL would have a hotmail address is anyones guess.

419 rating – 2 out of 10.

I would have given it 1 out of 10 but that phone number is genuine Nigeria so I give it an extra point for being a genuine 419 and not some cheap knock off from Ghana.