Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

More on the “AMD wrist watch model” email

Thanks to Technorati’s search capability, I found a few more places where the strange email I mentioned below popped up.
Sledgeblog
DOHIYI MIR
sam o’rama
And Lindqvist has been following this for some time.
I wish I was near Woburn, MA, so I could go check out what that location is. Anyone nearby able to help?
I’m sure it’s probably just a address check for bounces by some spammer, but you never know what kind of story lies behind this spam.

It’s my birthday, It’s my birthday

Today I turn 36. Woot!
I would like to take this time to say thanks to all the loyal cruft readers for your comments and email throughout the year. If there was no one reading this page, it wouldn’t be much fun. Thanks for visiting!
Time to head off to work now. I’m a bit worn out from yesterday’s party, but that’s nothing a cup of coffee won’t fix. 🙂

Weird spam

Yesterday I got this email:

Hello,
I’m a time traveler stuck here in 2003. Upon arriving here my dimensional warp generator stopped working. I trusted a company here by the name of LLC Lasers to repair my Generation 3 52 4350A watch unit, and they fled on me. I am going to need a new DWG unit, prefereably the rechargeable AMD wrist watch model with the GRC79 induction motor, four I80200 warp stabilizers, 512GB of SRAM and the menu driven GUI with front panel XID display.
I will take whatever model you have in stock, as long as its received certification for being safe on carbon based life forms.
In terms of payment:
I dont have any Galactic Credits left. Payment can be made in platinum gold or 2003 currency upon safe delivery of unit. Please transport unit in either a brown paper bag or box to below coordinates on Sunday July 27th at (exactly 3:00pm) Eastern Stand Time. If you miss this timeframe please email me.
42.4845467 & Longitude -71.1576157 and the ground is 101.3′ above sea level.
Although those coordinates are a secure guarded area, these channels through email are never secure. Unfortunately it is the only form of communication I have right now. There is a good chance that sombody will try to redirect the signal. The unit must be teleported directly in a way that nobody will be able to interfere with the transference.
After unit has been sent please email me at: info@federalfundingprogram.com
with payment instructions. Do not reply directly back to this email.
Thank You
uncertainty
g bab iert ayottsn bfnh

Huh? The lat/long mentioned is Woburn, Massachusetts
Is this just another form of email harvester? Anyone else got this particular spam?

Weekend ends

It’s late on Sunday night and I have a few minutes.
On Saturday, the grils and I took the new Gold Line train to Pasadena. It was opening weekend and the train was super crowded. After the train ride, we drove to Toluca Lake and saw Rapunzel at the Falcon Theater. The 5 actors did a great job and the girls loved it. We’ll be back.
Today, Michele had a party for my birthday and friends and family came over. As usual, it was a good time. The highlight had to be 300+ lb. Martin doing a cartwell on the front lawn. Pictures below.

The girls waiting for the train ride.
The main crossing

The train approaches from Pasadena.
Cartwheel baby

Martin doing a cartwheel on the front lawn.
Blue

Zoe and Casey after eating blue candy.

I’m tired. Time for sleep.

More on John Wright

After John C. Wright, author of The Golden Age & The Phoenix Exultant, commented on my brief review, he and I exchanged a few emails. I thought other fans of his work would like to read the information and news. With permission, I quote from our emails.
I wrote:

Thanks for posting on my web site. I usually write brief reviews of the books I read, but this is the first time an author has commented. Last night I posted my brief review of The Phoenix Exultant.
I finished the book this weekend sitting outside keeping an eye on my daughters playing in the pool. As I turned to the last page and realized that you once again left me in a cliff hanger, I loudly said, ‘Damn!’ My daughters looked up concerned and I had to reassure them it was a good damn and not a bad damn.
I hope your books get the recognition they deserve and the sales roll in, prompting you to write many, many more books.

Mr. Wright replied:

My dear Mr. Pusateri, naturally, I am dismayed that any exclaimation caused by my cliffhangers startled your daughters!
Allow me to shift the blame to my publishers: I wrote and submitted GOLDEN AGE as one manuscript, but my editors (wisely, I think), decided no reader would pay forty dollars for one monstrously thick novel from an unknown author, but might buy the same tale in two or three slimmer volumes.
The original plan had been to break the story into two volumes, not three, and so the author’s note at the end of GOLDEN AGE, promsing that the story would be “concluded” in PHOENIX EXULTANT, went to print before the decision was made further to separate PHOENIX EXULTANT into two volumes, and the promise was made false.
However, the end the story is written, and I sent off the final galley proofs yesterday, so even if I am run over by a street-car, you will still find out how the tale concludes.
Last I heard, the planned release date for GOLDEN TRANSCENDENCE is November of this year, not March of 2004.
I also wrote and sold a fantastic novel set in the modern day, LAST GUARDIAN OF EVERNESS; I am told my publisher has also decided to buy ORPHANS OF CHAOS, a tale about five orphans raised in a strict British boarding school who begin to discover that they may not be human beings. If all goes well, over the next two years, these books may grace the bookstores to tempt any future readers who may be amused by my humble works. These are both fantastic books (and may not sell as well as science-fiction), but I am writing another SF space opera even now, a tale of war and intrigue set among several very alien species, set in the same background as two of my short stories.
Rest assured that I intend to write many books, whether the sales are generous or niggerdly; but my creditors, and my beloved wife, would prefer the sales be generous. Thank you again for your encouraging words.
Yours, John C. Wright

From what I can tell you can pre-order The Golden Transcendance. I don’t think that The Last Guardian of Everness or Orphans of Chaos are available anywhere to pre-order yet. The publisher, Tor Books, doesn’t have any info. Perhaps a phone call is in order.

Linked & Tracked

The page I wrote a bit ago about Trackback got linked to again. This time by Dave Winer on his Weblogs At Harvard Law page. So I’m seeing an increase in hits to the page.
I’m glad to be of service. I wonder what other explanations people need that go unanswered on the net. What question has always vexed you?

More SoCalWUG

7:21PM I’m at the IHOP in Pasadena for the SoCalWUG Meeting.
7:41PM Just finished my chicken caesar salad. Mmmmm. Time for bacon…
7:43PM They are saying that 802.11g is the suck.
[time lapse]
At this point the meeting broke up into discussion and many people came over to look a the cantenna I brought along. I didn’t have much time to blog so I’m actually sitting at home now.
James went and chatted with the guy who wrote Macstumbler. Martin and I hung at the table talking to people about the cantenna and other stuff.
Talking to people about things was fun, but we were kinda boxed in by all the people and didn’t get much chance to wander around and see things.
At the end of the night, I head outside and bumped into Sean Bonner, who had been talking to James earlier. Sean mentioned he was going to blog the meeting so when I got home I googled him up. It seems he’s also connected to Wil Wheaton in some way. Small world.
Yeah, a sucky meeting report, but you already know how geeky I am.
On Tuesday I went with Brad and Yoshi to see Cake and Devo. Cake was great but only played for 45 minutes. They played good stuff and tried to get he crowd involved. Unfortunately the crowd was mainly a Devo crowd and they weren’t so into singing along with Cake. I knew every song and enjoyed singing along with the band. For my first live Cake show, I was happy.
Devo came on and blew through a great set of hits in a rapid fire succession. I like Devo, but have never been a huge fan. I was suprised that I knew every song that Devo sung as well. The crowd reacted well and was on it’s feet the entire set. Devo encored with Freedom of Choice and it was excellent.
The people at the show were my people, the Generation X. We are now in our 30s and while we still want to be young, hip, and good looking, we aren’t. I had time to look around and my generation is aging. Our hair is thinning, we are getting wrinkles, and the middle age spread is upon us. As Mick said, “What a drag it is getting old.”

Gotta wait

The Phoenix Exultant – John C. Wright
The Phoenix Exultant is the second book in the Golden Age trilogy. The beginning of the book finds our hero, Phaethon, about as low in his utopian society as he can get. There is appears to be little hope but for a single phrase whispered to him before his fall into exile.
The book spends less time examining society and more time on action with Phaethon trying to figure out exactly who his enemy is and what it wants. The author, John C. Wright, takes page from Heinlein and we see Phaethon pull himself by him bootstraps by his skill and cunning.
The characters of Atkins and Daphne are more fully rounded out and you begin to see that the Utopia is not so idyllic as it seemed at first glance. Without giving much away, the time spent on Atkins and the role of warfare in the future will be crucial to the final book in the trilogy.
My only disappointment in the book was realizing that I have to wait until the third book is released next year. The book is fantastic and right within the classic space opera genre.
I was surprised to see a comment in my previous review of The Golden Age by the author himself. John C. Wright somehow stumbled across my brief comment and took the time to taunt me with word of the galley proofs of the third novel. I was quite suprised to read John’s comments.
I would pay good money for a copy of the third book, even in galley proof form. The final novel is due out in March 2004, eight long months away.
I look forward to more novels by John in the future and hope these efforts are recognized by the various Sci-Fi awards groups.

Hack the Planet

I’ve playing around with a few things on the geek side of things lately.
DVD Player
Michele asked me to swap a different DVD player into the bedroom. Our first DVD player, the Apex-600A has trouble with several of the more recent DVDs. I brought in the Apex-1500 fromt he garage.
I sat down to fold some laundry and put on a DVD. The picture looked horrible. The brightness was off and it wasn’t adjustable. The picture kept getting brighter, then darker. I knew what it was, it was Macrovision. Macrovision is a technique used on VHS tapes and DVDs to prevent people from copying movies. Basically, Macrovision makes the sync signal of the picture vary enough that it’s almost unwatchable. A good TV can pull the signal out of the mess, but VCRs typically can’t.
The TV in bedroom is Michele’s 13″ from her college days in the 80s. It can’t handle Macrovision. I turned to the net to solve the problem. I hoped there was a keycode sequence or something I could do to turn off the Macrovision.
What I found was a way to flash the firmware in the DVD player and make the Macrovision go away forever. It took about 10 minutes to burn a CD with the needed file and flash the player. I put the movie back in the DVD player and amazingly, the picture looks great.
w.bloggar
I stumbled on to yet another MovableType client application called w.bloggar. w.bloggar let’s me edit my posts an dpost them to the weblog without having to be connected to the net.
I found the tool is quite good and simple to use. I could see using it on the laptop and even at my desktop since saves some of the time I usually spend writing HTML code.
More reports on w.bloggar as I use it more.