Friday the 13th: deadline to enter two week degree program

Hmmm, should one be suspicious of a solicitation from someone named Fernandez whose program shares that name? Or of a solitication from an address at gibblemail.com?

Enrollment Department

From: The Fernandez Higher Education Program

To: rich@richardwiggins.com
Date: Jan 12, 2006 11:21 PM
Subject: Enrollment Department

Just a Reminder;

Our University Enrollment department has been trying to contact you.
We feel you may be eligble for a degree based upon you past work experience.

The date for qualifying for our 2 week degree program is ending on
Friday, January 13th, 2006.

As of now we can only offer you a BA, BSc, or a MA.
If you enroll by the due date then your degree of
choice and transcripts could be sent to you within 2 weeks.

Enrollment Office:
1-206-337-1111

Mabel Fernandez
BSc Education
Administration Office

Phishing or not? Consumer Reports subscription notice seems awfully fishy

If you received this e-mail from Consumer Reports, would you believe it was real?

Click for full-size image.

I was especially concerned when I looked at the From address:

consumerreports@cmet.cr-mail.org

And check out the Subject line:

Consumer Reports Urgent Account Information

Hmmm. All the hallmarks of a phishing attack:

• Sent from an address different than you're used to for the sender.
  
• Has the word "Urgent" in the Subject line.
  
• Urges you to conduct a business transaction online -- Pay Now!
  

And when I checked the Whois database, I found the suspicious domain to be registered to Doubleclick.net.

So I have to confess: I still don't know if this is for real, or if it is phishing.

Google makes bold accessibility statement -- but it's not accessible

Google likes to show seasonal or holiday variations on its simple colorful logo. Today's choice is breathtaking:







(Click to see full-size image)








The logo is the word "Google" in Braille. Click on the logo itself, and you're sent to information about Louis Braille's birthday: http://www.google.com/search?q=louis+braille+birthdate

Very daring, and very cool. A sighted person only knows he or she's at Google's site by looking at the Address bar, and maybe learns a bit about accessibility of Web sites.

But what about someone who uses a screen reader for the blind? Obviously a blind person can't see the image of Braille letters. The ALT tag for the logo image causes this text to display when you mouse over the logo:

Happy Birthday Louis Braille


I wonder how many sighted people were confused by Google's well-intentioned stunt? Did they know they were at the real, authentic Google home page? I wonder how many people with vision impairments were confused as well? Time to ask my friend Mike Hudson to check it out....

Google even made their bold statement on their "results" page or hit list:










(Click to see full-size image)

Apropos of the new year: cool clock visualizes the passage of time

A designer in Japan has an interesting take on what a clock should look like and how it should display the passage of time:



For the full effect, check it out in real time, and watch it until a minute rolls over.

See: http://www.lares.dti.ne.jp/~yugo/storage/monocrafts_ver3/03/

And, by the way: Happy New Year.

French fry Spam casserole -- yum!

While skimming my Spam folder in Gmail, I was surprised to see the new RSS headline offer this link:

French Fry Spam Casserole - Bake 30-40 minutes

Title: FRENCH FRY SPAM CASSEROLE
Categories: Main dish
Yield: 8 servings

1 pk Frozen french fry potatoes, -thawed (20 oz)
2 c Shredded Cheddar cheese
2 c Sour cream
1 cn Condensed cream of chicken -soup (10 3/4 oz)
1 cn SPAM Luncheon Meat, cubed -(12 oz)
1/2 c Chopped red bell pepper
1/2 c Chopped green onion
1/2 c Finely crushed corn flakes

Heat oven to 350'F. In large bowl, combine potatoes, cheese, sour cream, and soup. Stir in SPAM, bell pepper, and green onion. Spoon into 13x9" baking dish. Sprinkle with crushed flakes. Bake 30-40 minutes or until thoroughly heated.

Yum. Time to pre-heat the oven! Memo to Google: don't tie the RSS content to standard folder names. I don't want an ad for trash bags when I visit my Trash folder, and I don't want insulation when I visit my Drafts folder -- and I sure don't want a recipe for Hormel Spam with french fries when I visit my Spam folder!

"The Onion" on new TSA security guidelines

I first discovered "The Onion" in paper form while on a trip to Madison, Wisconsin, where it originates, years ago. It was hilarious but was a tabloid for the Madison market Since then they've grown into a regional print rag and an international Web presence. And they are always a hell of a hoot. So when the Transportation Security Administration came up with new rules allowing scissors with blades up to 4 inches, some people were puzzled... And here's the Onion's take, hilarious as always:
















Click to see full size image




See: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/43716

New movie "Firewall" starring Harrison Ford

First "The Net" and now "Firewall" -- the Hollywood movie machine tries to make a thriller out of things Internet. Ford plays a security executive at a bank who's pitted against an evildoer who steals Ford's identity and kidnaps his family. It's not clear to me that there are many cases involving both identity theft and kidnapping, but what the heck, it's Hollywood.

Click to see full-size image.

I'm looking forward to a whole passel of major motion pictures with Internet-related titles:

• Switch
• Router
• Hub
• VPN
• SSL
• HTTP
• The File Transfer Protocol
• Spam
• VoIP
• Wi-Fi (and its sequel, Wi-MAX)
• XML (and its sequel, XSLT)

And, of course...

• Blogger

All coming soon to a theater near you.

Sun-Times uses "Ebert" as menu item; Endgadget uses "Paris Hilton"

For some time I've been amused that the Chicago Sun-Times includes something unexpected alongside the usual News, Sports, Entertainment, Classifieds, etc. links you'd expect from a newspaper: "Ebert" is a main choice. Usually menu choices correspond to a section of the paper, not an individual writer. But Roger Ebert is so incredibly popular that he probably accounts for a huge fraction of the visits to Sun-Times.com, so they must have figured "What the heck, he's big enough to be his own section." (Insert rude remark about Ebert's girth here...)



Tonight I stumbled on this: Endgadget, a site that reports news and rumors about consumer electronics, has their own special menu item:


Yes, that's right: right there with cell phones, Ipods, and gadgets, we find Paris Hilton. What does Paris Hilton have to do with consumer electronics? I can't think of a direct link, but I bet a lot of the gadget nuts who click on this site are also prone to click on that link, driving up Endgadget's ad revenue. Sort of like the ads for strip joints in the sports section of the newspaper.

_________________________________________________________________________

But now, there's more...

An old song from the 70s posits that "Everybody Plays the Fool -- Sometimes" ... and my colleague Justin Thorp has outed me as the fool. I followed a Google search to Endgadget, a site I thought I'd seen before. But the authentic gadget site is Engadget.com.

Google reveals 37,000 fools like me, out of 7 million who link to the real site.

It might be worth Engadget's effort to buy, or anti-cybersquatter halt, Endgadget. Or maybe they think we fools should be left to our own devices -- so to speak.

Rumor: New Apple laptops won't support Firewire

There's a rumor out there that Apple will no longer support Firewire in the next generation of laptops, due early in 2006. Apple and Sony pioneered the standard, which provided high-speed transfer between camcorder and computer.

The PC industry had finally promulgated USB, but it was shockingly slow compared to Firewire. Hence we ended up with computers and devices that support both Firewire and USB.

But the rumor is that Apple is dropping support for Firewire.

Good grief, what's next? Apple computers running on Intel processors?

Careful with those captions

Tonight a local TV station, Channel 6 in Lansing, showed the sportscaster with a graphic in the background showing a baseball pitcher in mid-throw. The caption said:

ON STEROIDS



I thought I recognized the pitcher. It's John Smoltz of the Atlanta Braves, a native of Lansing. Huh? This guy has a totally clean image.

Turns out Channel 6 caught up with him when he was in the area watching Michigan State play basketball. And the interview was Smoltz' opinion about steroids, specifically baseball's new anti-steroids policy, which Smoltz endorsed ringingly.

I wonder how many people misconstrued the story to be that Smoltz himself was "on steroids"? Pays for the caption guy in the control room to choose words carefully.

Emily the Cat Part Deux: the Feline Flies Home

The intrepid cat from Wisconsin made her way home, courtesy of Continental Airlines, which provided Emily and her handler a business class seat. A very clever move on Continental's part.



In case you haven't experienced business class on an international flight: it is far superior to "first class" on a domestic flight in the U.S. The gourmet meal happened to be salmon. Emily wouldn't eat it. She preferred the French cat food that her handler had with him. Now that is a spoiled cat. I doubt that Pet Supplies Plus in Appleton offers imported French cat food.

Surely this story will bring a Disney movie. News outlets from the UK to Australia to South Africa picked up Emily's story. I think people are hungry for happy penguins and other good news.

I laughed when a Wisconsin TV station got the story wrong. They reported that Emily flew from Paris to Milwaukee. Continental Airlines may have given Emily and her handler $12,000 worth of business class seats, but they didn't create a new direct flight from Paris to Wisconsin. Emily flew to Newark, and took a 50 seat connecting flight to Wisconsin.

Video showed dangers of turkey fryers pre-Thanksgiving; news footage shows reality

Several years ago Whirlpool recalled millions of microwave ovens, including our Sears-branded model, for reasons not made clear. I did a bunch of digging and found that a filter tended to cause grease to accumulate, and there had been something like 17 cases of the microwave emitting smoke -- zero injuries, zero property damage.

In the last few years turkey fryers have been popular items on the market -- standalone frying baskets on stilts. Before Thanksgiving, Underwriters Laboratories (UL) distributed video demonstrating that these things are incredibly dangerous. You've got a vat of hot oil perched precariously. If it tips, you have a fire. If you put an unthawed turkey into it, it explodes. They warned that these things could burn your house down, and they provided vivid video evidence.



See: http://www.ul.com/consumers/turkeys.html

No doubt UL made this video available to TV networks and local stations prior to the holiday. But no one covered it. They covered "the busiest travel day of the year" and "the busiest shopping day of the year."

It turns out that in at least one city. the turkey fryer nearly destroyed a house, causing over $150,000 damage.



See: http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/5421668/detail.html?subid=22100484&qs=1;bp=t

Question for national and local TV producers: do you really think about, and analyze, new stories, or do you just pull up last year's Thanksgiving stories and recycle them?

Question for the Consumer Product Safety Commission: do you really think through relative risk of product safety? I can't imagine how the microwave recall that affected me and millions of people saved a single life. But it seems clear that these cheap fryers pose a clear threat. How do you rank risk? Why haven't you acted on this obvious risk?