Mortgage junk mail

Official-looking mortgage junk mail

We recently refinanced our home with a new mortgage and that, as expected, triggered a flood of junk mail. Most of these letters are deceptively designed to look like they came from your mortgage company, mailed in an official-looking envelope. Some even include the name of the legitimate mortgage company on the front.

Some of the companies include:

Mortgage Protection Center
PO Box 9001
Burlington, NC, 27216-9925

Mortgage Protection Insurance
PO Box 619056
Roseville, CA, 95661-9978
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Weather is here, wish you were beautiful

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Futzing around with Google Maps this morning, I noticed that the Mount Weather doomsday facility hadn’t been reviewed yet using Google Places. So I had a little fun writing a review:

I sheltered here during the Armageddon and would never do it again! The cots were way too hard, the rations were somewhat tasteless, my room had NO windows, and it was next to impossible to get the generals’ attention when the sheets and towels needed changing. What you see in the brochure doesn’t match the actual experience. Take my advice: the next time the world ends, steer clear of Mount Weather! Go with a Hampton Inn or similar chain. You’ll be glad you did!

Perdue makes emergency landing at RDU

So, uh, tell me again why our governor took the state jet to Greensboro, a city an hour’s drive from Raleigh even without a highway patrol escort? Does she have a clue about how much jet fuel costs nowadays? Is this good stewardship of our tax dollars?

Gov. Perdue’s plane made a safe emergency landing at Raleigh-Durham International airport this afternoon after a plane malfunction, her spokeswoman said Friday. No one was injured.Her plane was on the way to make to make a job expansion announcement when her plane exhibited unusual vibrations in connection with the retraction of the landing gear, and a decision was made to return to RDU, according to Chris Mackey, her press secretary.

via Perdue makes emergency landing at RDU | newsobserver.com projects.

Update: Here’s a state auditor report on the state aircraft operations, undertaken by then-state auditor Ralph Campbell, Jr. in 2005.

Update 2: My friend Warren has pointed out that Greensboro is closer to a 90 minute drive from Raleigh. Guess I’ll cut our governor some slack after all.

Progress to investigate utility pole vandalism

Another missing grounding wire

I reached out to a contact I have at Progress Energy about the thefts of copper wiring from my neighborhood’s utility poles. Marty Clayton, Community Relations Manager, called me back today and told me the utility has had other reports of this crime and would send someone out to evaluate the damage in my area. He said these thieves are taking their lives into their own hands with these thefts, going so far as to break into live substations.

I spent some time today before and after work, tagging some of the damaged poles with red marker tape. I’m finding that about one out of every two poles I check has its copper missing, and some of the missing pieces are only two feet long.

Why would someone put themselves and surrounding neighbors at risk just to steal five bucks of metal? I just don’t get it.

Google redirected me to Lithuania?

I was surfing the Internets at work today, searching for info on solar panels. I put in a phone number for a Google search and got four results. Clicking on the first one, I expected to see the contact page of Westinghouse Solar. Instead I got redirected to the following URL:

http://39008.peachtreepropainters.info/url?sa=X&source=web&cd=1&ved=0IrIEbA43&url=http://www.westinghousesolar.com/index.php/contact-us&ei=2ZEufKTL5qizrI2OzlM08Z21oQ==&usg=z-CCthkp93j-2o-7wI1SJZ&sig2=yIZHjyHJ17arcqFVojVX4B

Now, I know Google usually tracks which search results I click on, and hides this tracking using Javascript. That’s been the case for years and I’m used to it. However, I’m stumped as to why the above URL says 39008.peachtreepropainters.info instead of www.google.com. The IP address for 39008.peachetreepropainters.info routes to Lithuania:
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Copper thieves targeting Raleigh utility poles

This pole on Edmund Street is not protected against shorts and lightning due to a clipped grounding wire (lower left).

I happened to take a glance at the utility poles my dog was peeing on this morning and was aghast to see that many of them were missing their copper grounding wires! I’ve blogged about lightning protection before, and during last summer’s thunderstorm season I had read about how important these grounding wires are to the safety of our homes and the safety of the linemen who work on the electrical gear. Here were a half-dozen poles on this short street that were missing the first six feet of their grounds.

I sent out an email to the neighborhood, urging folks to call in any other broken poles they saw. While I didn’t hear back from my neighbors, I did check the poles on Glascock as I drove to the grocery store this afternoon and saw many poles in the same sad condition.

I don’t know when these thefts took place but it makes me angry that some metal-thieving asshat is jeopardizing the safety of my family just to make a few measly bucks. If lightning hits a utility pole within a few blocks, my home could burn down because of these missing grounding wires.

This is a serious safety issue and there’s no telling how hard Raleigh has been hit. I’m hoping these get discovered before people find out the hard way that their homes are sitting ducks for lightning.

(As pure coincidence, WRAL ran a story today about these utility pole copper thefts occurring in Wayne county.)

High-Tech Border Checks Will Blow Spies’ Cover

Wired has an absolutely fascinating story about how the U.S.’s border security paranoia has unwittingly made it very difficult for spies to use false identities. With biometric checking in effect, the days of a spy entering a country on a false passport are quickly coming to an end.

The increasing deployment of iris scanners and biometric passports at worldwide airports, hotels and business headquarters, designed to catch terrorists and criminals, are playing havoc with operations that require CIA spies to travel under false identities.

Busy spy crossroads such as Dubai, Jordan, India and many E.U. points of entry are employing iris scanners to link eyeballs irrevocably to a particular name. Likewise, the increasing use of biometric passports, which are embedded with microchips containing a person’s face, sex, fingerprints, date and place of birth, and other personal data, are increasingly replacing the old paper ones. For a clandestine field operative, flying under a false name could be a one-way ticket to a headquarters desk, since they’re irrevocably chained to whatever name and passport they used.

“If you go to one of those countries under an alias, you can’t go again under another name,” explains a career spook, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he remains an agency consultant. ”So it’s a one-time thing — one and done. The biometric data on your passport, and maybe your iris, too, has been linked forever to whatever name was on your passport the first time. You can’t show up again under a different name with the same data.”

via CIA’s Secret Fear: High-Tech Border Checks Will Blow Spies’ Cover | Danger Room | Wired.com.

Tony Shin taken to task

It seems that Earle Holland, Ohio State University’s assistant vice president for research communications, also got one of the mysterious Tony Shin Infographics, only Holland didn’t simply post it to his blog unquestioned. Instead, Holland took the time to thoroughly review the infographic, pointing out its numerous errors. [PDF]

Holland writes on his blog:

“Infographics,” first popularized by the coming of the USAToday newspaper, are a quick and easy way of conveying information. Sadly, however, they’re equally useful in simplifying data to the point of misrepresentation. Science as a subject is all too often seen by the public as too complicated to understand. It’s a normal tendency for people to reach out for, and maintain, simpler notions that require less work.
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Red Hat’s OpenSource.Com gets infographic-ed

Looks like Red Hat’s OpenSource.com has been infographic-ed. An infographic from “Education News” was posted today with the following comment:

We often talk about the higher education bubble and it being on the verge of bursting but what does that really look like? How does a “bubble” form and what causes it to burst? The following two part infographic does a great job explaining just that by showing where higher education has been, where we are, and without change where we will be. To me, it further highlights why open source technology and open source principles have such an important role in education reform from lowering costs to demonstrating a better way for educating our youth in the 21st century and beyond.

I’m betting the ubiquitous Tony Shin emailed OpenSource.com and personally asked them to post it.

USPS postage labels receipt scam

Got another phishing email, this one with the title “USPS postage labels receipt.” It comes from the lovely and talented “Alma Parks.”

From: “Alma Parks”
Subject: USPS postage labels receipt.
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2012 15:59:59 +0100

Acct #: 3199501

Dear client:

This is an email confirmation for your order of 3 online shipping label(s) with postage. We will charge you the following amount:

Transaction Number: #1148147
Print Date/Time: 03/16/2012 02:30 PM CST
Postage Amount: $28.32
Credit Card Number: XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX
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