Tuscany Industries phishers persist, switch numbers

Despite being hung up on Friday, another Tuscany Industries (or Upgrade Now) car-warranty-expiring phishing call just came in, this time from 208-839-2686. This number, according to Google, is the mobile phone number of a man in White Bird, Indiana – an unlikely phisher. Falsifying their CallerID. Geniuses, real geniuses.

Since you clowns are most likely are reading this, let me tell you your days are numbered. You had a good gig while it lasted but I’m on to you. You’ve pissed me off and I will find you and I will turn the whole state and federal law enforcement teams on to you if that’s what it takes.

Roy Cooper’s office and I will have a conversation about this today. Count on it.

Google Earth Flight Simulator

The latest version of Google Earth has a crude flight simulator as an Easter egg. Simply hit Command-Option-A in the Mac version and a flight simulator dialog will pop up. After you’ve “discovered” the Easter egg, it will appear in the Tools menu for future flights.

I tried flying it and was wildly unsuccessful. Didn’t try it with a joystick or with my yoke or pedals. I still prefer the freeware flights that Flightgear provides. Still, its kind of cool flying around with picture-perfect scenery, even if you wind up crashing into that scenery a bit too often.

(h/t, Marco via Boing Boing)

Sunday Wrapup

We had a good time at the New Hope Valley Railway this morning. We got there around 10:30, which is normally enough time to ride the first train. Today was a mob scene, however, and we spent thirty minutes just waiting in line to buy our tickets. It seems the railway can’t sell tickets fast enough and that leads to delays. I suppose it doesn’t matter, though, since they only have one train and one track.
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New Hope Valley

We’re on our way to the New Hope Valley Railway this morning to ride the train, since its the first Sunday of the month. Kelly will stay here and get some of her new editing project done.

The weather this morning is fall-like, the first cool morning in recent memory. It should be a fine time to ride a train through the dry, dying woods!

Nice Lake Gaston Sail

We drove up to the Naylor’s lakehouse yesterday for an afternoon of sailing. The winds were a little on the light side, but steady for most of the day. We took the opportunity to sail as far west as we can: to the old Seaboard Air Line railroad trestle over the lake. There we got stuck in the shallow water, not having a chart (nor an accurate depth sounder). A few gentle pushes later and we were headed east again. The wind had died down a bit for the trip home and we had invested a lot of time just getting west. Thus, we cranked up the outboard for most of the trip back.
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A Short History Of Nearly Everything

I just finished the Bill Bryson book, A Short History Of Nearly Everything: a fun, fascinating review of all the science you never paid attention to in school. Bryson has a lot of ground to cover, bringing to life discoveries in the atomic world, genetics, geology, physics, astrophysics, and many, many others. He whittles these complicated subjects down to their human stories, while keeping the science real. I found it very entertaining, as I mentioned here before.
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MT.Net DNS Changes

MT.Net may disappear from the Internets momentarily over the holiday weekend. Have no fear, I’m migrating DNS servers.

If you lose us, check back in a day or two and all should be well again.

More Phishiness

I had a call come in from “Tuscany Industries” this morning, number 702-520-1117. I answered and decided to play their little game. A recorded female voice warned about my car’s warranty expiring. If I was not interested in renewing it, she said, press 2, otherwise press 1.

I pressed 1 and their phone switch said “transferring to the operator.”
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Brief MT.Net Outage

There was a brief MT.Net outage yesterday when my Xen VM ran out of virtual memory. It seems the pre-built CentOS image I began using did not mount a swap partition, nor did I think to check it for one. Thirty seconds of sysadmin work later and the problem was solved.

So far I’m digging the service. Like I said previously, the days of the absolute need to run on bare hardware are now over. Funny how the early days of computing revolved around time-sharing and the promise of the PC was to free you from such sharing. We’ve almost come full circle, eh?