AndrewVieau.com

I’ve been trying to sell my car on Craigslist, and I got this scam email.  I cut & pasted a few pieces of the email & googled it, but nothing came up.  I’m posting the whole letter here in case anyone else is in a similar situation.  This is definitely a scam.  It came from robot@craiqslisf.org, and if I hadn’t been looking carefully, I might not have noticed that the T has been replaced with an F.

DEAR Andrew,

IMPORTANT – FURTHER ACTION IS REQUIRED TO PUBLISH YOUR (cars & trucks – by owner) ADD ONLINE – HUMAN VERIFICATION!!!
YOUR POSTING IS NOW HELD FOR VERIFICATION!!!
REPLY US THE WEB ADDRESS (LINK) FROM THE MESSAGE YOU RECIVED EARLIER WITH SUBJECT LINE POST/EDIT/DELETE

Here are the steps you need to follow:

I can’t remember exactly when I bought this thing, but I think it was around 2002-2004. It’s worked well for me all this time, 7-9 years and counting.  It cost about $50 then, and it looks like that price hasn’t changed much.

My dad got a piece of mail about Google Tags, and I had some questions.  The brochure they sent had a phone number, so I decided to call.  The first thing I wanted to know was if the businesses at his outlet mall could somehow share a tag, since they’re all at the same address.

She spent about 45 seconds telling me why this couldn’t possibly happen.  I listened to her whole spiel, then in what I thought was a friendly tone, said “Thanks, that answers my question.”  I had a few other questions I was going to ask, but she responded to this by sarcastically saying “ooooooooKAY!” and proceeded to hang up on me.

I should probably be offended, but I found it hilarious.  It’s one thing to be rude to angry or otherwise difficult customers, but someone who’s genuinely interested in purchasing your product?  That’s a sales tactic I had never considered.

I’m going to be helping Alex with his brewery’s website.  I’m planning on using the Beer theme by Jeremy Mosely as a framework.

I just finished this today, and all I can think is that the show would’ve been much better if it had just ended with Season 4.

Dexter, Breaking Bad, and Deadwood are some of my favorite shows that share the same major flaw: one character who is so crappy that they damn near kill the show for me.  In Breaking Bad, it’s Jesse.  In Deadwood, it’s Calamity Jane.

In Dexter, it has always been Deb.  I hated Deb so much that I started to hate other characters based on the amount of screen time they shared with her.  And until Season 5, I was able to blame everything I hated about the show on her.

And as much as I’d like to complain about the specific things I didn’t like about Season 5, that’s not the point of this post.  The point of this post is that I knew Season 5 was going to suck, but I watched it anyway.

Why would I do this to myself?  Why would I watch Lost all the way through?  Why do I keep drinking coffee?

If I were a better writer, I think these questions would be the beginning of the post, rather than the end, but I think I’ve connected the dots I wanted to connect.

My site is undergoing some changes.

Then I didn’t.

Now I think I do again.

As much as I hate to complain about the handheld device which allows me to access the sum of all human knowledge, I need to complain about my Samsung Omnia.

Browsing the web is a huge pain. I don’t even know where to begin. Pages take forever to load.  The controls are inconsistent; sometimes a slight nudge will send me scrolling uncontrollably, other times the page will bounce back to it’s original position, making scrolling impossible.  Sometimes the menu bar refuses to show up, which doesn’t allow me to change pages. Other times it refuses to go away, and takes up half the screen. It frequently clears or just fails to activate my saved passwords.

It’s major saving grace is the camera.  Even though it doesn’t have a flash, it still takes pretty decent pictures indoors & at night.  Daytime pictures are great.

I thought it was weird that a game store would have a regular poker game.

I actually considered going to this for a few minutes.  But I really should’ve seen this coming:

I ran into some trouble while trying to modify my dad’s twitter background, which lead me to this thread at Twitter. Here’s the text:

Update: 9-18-09 – We believe the image upload issues that users are experiencing are not a problem with how Twitter is handling images. For profile images, be sure that your image is less than 700k large and also be sure it is a supported image format (.jpg,.gif. not animated .gifs, or .png). For background images, be sure that your image is less than 800k (same formats apply).  If you are positive that your image is fine but the upload will not take, we suggest you try again at different times of the day, preferably during low-traffic hours.  For more info on profile customization, please visit: http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/15357.

What a useless first sentence.  Nobody cares what the problem isn’t, we want to know what it is.

I tried five different images, and after 20 minutes of trying to get the fifth one to work, the second one randomly appeared.  It’ll work for now.