Sorry the frequency of posts here has been so low recently. I’ve been kinda busy with a new thing for work which launches its public beta tomorrow with a new web site, a new service and software for four different platforms (downloadable for free). Stay tuned for details tomorrow, and hopefully after that I can get back to posting more things here too.
Lots of progress this week! The roof is finished; the fences are up, the railings are up on the deck and the two faux balconies and the front area is graded and has sprinklers installed ready for the grass & plants to go in.
Inside the floors are down in most of the downstairs area too, though they’re all covered at the moment with protective boards so can’t really see how they look.
Seen a lot of in-store equipment recently that has crashed and is either in the state shown in this photo where Windoze is trying to reboot and failing, or it is stuck trying to install/upgrade something.
Seems that people still haven’t learnt not to rely on Windows for something that needs to keep running, although in the case of the Dell console at Costco I guess they could be forgiven there since they’re selling Windows boxes. Hope the ones they sell keep running better than the console though 🙂
While most news sites have been talking about all the people lining up for sales that opened at 5am or 6am and finished around noon on the so-called Black Friday, it would seem that nobody has been thinking of the manikins. These three, in the Serramonte mall’s Macy’s, clearly had a stressful morning.
I have been receiving a steady stream of phishing emails targeting Amazon recently. All of these are basically the same, and contain some particularly amusing sentences. First there is the possibility that they may be in need of copies of your photo ID:
Amazon may also request in an email message scanned/faxed copies of one or more photo ID’s.
Next, if you got this email and you’re not an Amazon customer then you might be committing a crime by representing yourself as one:
If you received this notice and you are not an authorized Amazon account holder, please be aware that it is in violation of Amazon policy to represent oneself as an Amazon user. Such action may also be in violation of local, national, and/or international law.
An interesting way to handle the fact that they may send the email to some people who are not Amazon customers!
Finally though, my favourite of all:
Amazon will request personal data (password, credit card/bank numbers) only on our home site, wich is securely incrypted with SLL.
Must be something new that SLL incryption. Wonder if Amazon has the patent on it too 🙂
More seriously, if you ever get these things either delete then immediately or forward them on to the company’s anti-fraud email address. In the case of Amazon, that address is stop-spoofing@amazon.com. Here’s my basic tips for detecting phishing emails:
If you have any concerns about the email, call the company’s customer support line or look up the address you can send spoof emails to in their customer support pages and forward the email. DO NOT REPLY TO THE EMAIL, OR CLICK ANY LINK IN THE EMAIL.
Pretty much no change visible inside or out this week. We were also told that there is a construction delay, caused by late delivery of materials, of about a week that will push our move-in date out 🙁
I’ve been getting a lot of Google Alerts about Microsoft’s new Zune media player recently. First it was an iPod killer, then it wasn’t, then it was coming soon and finally it arrived. I’m sure you’ve read it all elsewhere, so I’m not going to comment anymore on the device.
Instead, I am puzzled by the website that accompanies the device and will act as the marketplace for buying or subscribing to media. A few weeks back that was announced too, but rendered really badly on my laptop. I assumed this was a temporary thing, but it appears that was not the case. The device is on sale, the site one assumes is live, and yet I still see a page that looks like it was put together by a novice just learning HTML. I’ve seen MySpace pages that look better than this (actually, most MySpace pages look better than this).
I assume that nobody at MS uses anything other than IE. Some of us out here in the real world do use other browsers though, and as somebody that creates web content I know enough to at least check that it renders roughly how I want it to in the top 4 or 5 browsers. The problem seems to be that they totally omitted the CSS that would make the page look right. There is no style sheet information embedded in the page, nor linked to it.
The scaffold is gone!
Big change from last week; we now have the top coat of exterior paint, and tiles on the roof (although it looks like there’s a little more work needed on the roof).
A through-the-window shot from Satuday showing the kitchen cabinets and island. In the background, is the family room (and you can just see the top of the fireplace). Still a lot to do, but definitely progress!
Remember, remember the fifth of November. Today is Guy Fawkes day, and people across the UK would have been celebrating the foiling of the plot to destroy the Palace of Westminster in 1605. Here in California, this celebration of an early success against terrorists went unnoticed by most people.
To put that date into context, it is two years before the first English settlement in North America (Jamestown, Virginia, founded by Captain John Smith in 1607).