Live from Austin!

Total current budget for Maine nuclear inspectorate: $276,000/year.

Number of employees: 2.

Salaries: $71,000/year for nuclear safety inspector, $76,000/year for his advisor.

Year when safety inspector job was supposedly eliminated: 2005.

Total nuclear facilities in Maine: 0.

[source ]

Salary of Clerk of Court in Pasco, Florida: $136,576.

Number of days you have to fail to bother to turn up in order to be sackable: 44.

Resulting number of days of work required per annum: 8.

Number of days you have to be retired to get full retirement benefits: 1

Additional income the current Clerk of Court gets because he retired for a day during one of his absences: $6,242.34 per month.

[source ]

From AP via Slashdot and Yahoo:

A break-in targeting State Department computers worldwide last summer occurred after a department employee in Asia opened a mysterious e-mail that quietly allowed hackers inside the U.S. government’s network.

In the first public account revealing details about the intrusion and the government’s hurried behind-the-scenes response, a senior State Department official described an elaborate ploy by sophisticated international hackers. They used a secret break-in technique that exploited a design flaw in Microsoft software.

Consumers using the same software remained vulnerable until months afterward.

Donald R. Reid, the senior security coordinator for the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, also confirmed that a limited amount of U.S. government data was stolen by the hackers until tripwires severed all the State Department’s Internet connections throughout eastern Asia. The shut-off left U.S. government offices without Internet access in the tense weeks preceding missile tests by North Korea.

Awesome. Meanwhile, Microsoft lobbyists successfully killed a bill in Florida that would have opened the path for official use of OpenDocument standards instead of proprietary Microsoft Word documents.

“CAPCOM to Nowak, prepare to begin pre-launch procedures.”

“Copied loud and clear, Houston.”

“Astronaut to confirm all required equipment and supplies have been loaded and stowed.”

“Trenchcoat—check… Wig—check… $600 in cash—check… Adult diapers—check… Rubber tubing—check… BB gun—check… Pepper spray—check… Steel mallet—check… 4″ knife—check… Latex gloves—check… Large garbage bags for disposing of body parts—check.”

“Checklist confirmed, you are cleared for 900 mile drive to Florida.”

The John McCain Suspension of Habeas Corpus / Ignore the Geneva Conventions Bill was getting me down this morning, but suddenly things have turned around. From AP news:

In a scandal guaranteed to anger parents, a prominent House Republican has resigned after the revelation that he exchanged raunchy electronic messages with a teenage boy, a former congressional page.

Rep. Mark Foley, R-Florida, who is single, apologized Friday for letting down his family and constituents. [...]

ABC News reported Friday that Foley also engaged in a series of sexually explicit instant messages with current and former pages, all male. In one message, ABC said, Foley wrote to one page, “Do I make you a little horny?”

In another message, Foley wrote, “You in your boxers, too? … Well, strip down and get relaxed.”

Foley, as chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus, had introduced legislation in July to protect children from exploitation by adults over the Internet. He also sponsored other legislation designed to protect minors from abuse and neglect.

“We track library books better than we do sexual predators,” Foley has said.

Wow. Even for a Republican, that’s pretty rich, and nothing gets my schadenfreude going like seeing someone nailed for rank hypocrisy.

Update: He’s a Scientologist. Jackpot!

Which contains more bacteria: the ice in your soda at a fast food restaurant, or the water in the toilet at the same restaurant?

A schoolgirl in Florida decided to investigate. You can probably guess the outcome: on average, you’d be safer to drink from the toilet.

I just got a phone call from someone claiming we had won some sort of prize. Specifically, one of the following:

1. A Ford Explorer.
2. $2,500 cash.
3. A 7 night cruise in Florida and the Bahamas.
4. A 27″ Panasonic TV.

Obviously right away I was suspicious. Decades of experience have taught me that mathew winning valuable prizes is not the way the universe works. As a young child I had a bunch of Premium Bonds; ERNIE never picked me, but my cousin won something several times. (Bitterness begins at an early age.)

It wasn’t totally out of the question, though. I do fill out opinion polls and customer feedback forms, and they often claim that I have some remote chance of winning something as a result. Not that I ever do.

The word “cruise” fired some neurons which cascaded to the part of my brain responsible for identifying scams. It had definitely heard about situations similar to this one, and suggested that the word ‘timeshare’ was likely to come up in conversation fairly soon. However, the guy was polite and low pressure, so I humored him.

My anonymous benefactor told me that I absolutely did not have to buy anything, and that I was guaranteed one of the four prizes. I got the various details of how to claim my prize jotted down, and gave him my e-mail address so he could send me more info. (Assuming it gets past my spam filters, which is frankly doubtful.) Then I hung up the phone and went to Google.

As far as I can determine, it’s the usual scam—you’ve almost certainly encountered it if you’ve tried to walk down the strip in Vegas. You’re guaranteed a prize from a list, with one small catch—you have to go somewhere inconvenient and listen to a 90 minute pitch about timeshare property.

Your prize is determined ‘randomly’ via a scratch card. And that’s where it becomes scammy, because apparently everyone on the web who has written about their experience with one of these companies, ‘randomly’ won the cruise vacation. What are the odds?

Oh, obviously the cruise vacation doesn’t include the airfare; you have to pick up the tab for that part. Furthermore, the company running the promotion is apparently having terrible trouble finding a print shop, because according to accounts on the web they always seem to have run out of vouchers just before the presentation. Instead, they take the lucky winner’s name and address again, so they can send the voucher to cash in for the vacation by mail.

But the curious thing is, nobody ever seems to have received one of the vacation vouchers by mail. Obviously some kind of conspiracy on the part of the US Postal Service. I saw postings from a few people who have tried to follow up, only to discover that the sales office has disappeared like something out of The Game.

A little more Googling turned up a web publication calling itself The Timeshare Beat. They had heard of the company in question—“Vacation Network Inc.”:

For an upfront fee of several hundreds of dollars, VNAC et al will allegedly assist timeshare salespersons to convince you, the consumer, that the timeshare you are about to purchase will rent for lots of money and that you can count on this money to pay for the down payment or the full purchase of the Timeshare or Vacation Membership. This is a complete and utter lie of course, and no consumer we have spoken to has ever received so much as a phone call from them (let alone any rental money) after they paid for the service. This show for the closing table has been going on for years, especially in Mexico.

So apparently they’re a bunch of crooks after all. Still, there is one way I could get a prize out of them—I’m on the Federal and State “Do Not Call” lists, and I see that Vacation Network has already had several DNC judgements against it in various states.

But frankly, I can’t be bothered. They haven’t annoyed me enough. Now, if they call a second time…

I also got mail from Publisher’s Clearinghouse this week, for the first time ever. They would be the Reader’s Digest of the USA, if it wasn’t for the fact that Reader’s Digest is also a US invention. Apparently they started out selling discount magazine subscriptions, but now they seem to have moved on entirely to selling assorted household tat like electric fruit peelers (yes, really) and bookmark flashlights.

The 17th National Skunk Show is in Orlando, Florida this weekend. I’ve been checking the web for last minute travel bargains, but I can’t find any. And now matter how cute and fluffy they may be, and no matter how much I might want to go see skunks on show, I can’t justify spending $800 on it right now. Gotta go to Austin next month.

eBU is in Las Vegas for the first time. Previous years it has been held in Orlando, Florida, in Disney World; and also in a European city, Berlin one year and Barcelona the next. The move to Vegas has allowed IBM to consolidate and have everyone from around the world attend one huge show.

To be specific, there are 17,000 IBM people in Las Vegas at the moment. That’s enough to fill the conference facilities of the MGM, Mirage and Venetian, with a few hundred excess people at the Paris and a couple of other hotels. Walk the streets and you’ll see IBMers everywhere.

And no, this is not the IBM of the 1950s, 60s, or even 70s. There are no suits and ties. The Brazilians are in party mood: they smashed their sales targets, so they’ve all been wearing bright yellow IBM T-shirts with the Brazilian flag on the front, sitting together in blocks, and starting Mexican (Brazilian?) waves. They look like the Brazilian football supporters who flood the streets of Somerville whenever Brazil wins a game.

There were other people in Las Vegas on Sunday, though. It was also the last day of the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, America’s top porn tradeshow. As I found my way back to my room, I saw a woman with melons the size of… well, melons. And I’m talking watermelons, not cantaloupes. She was wearing a black leather outfit that had presumably been reinforced with kevlar to take the strain, and the rest of her body was somewhere between trailer park and heroin chic. I’ve no idea if she’s famous, and if there are naked pictures of her on the Internet I don’t really care to know where.

A question from Dan

What are the top ten places you want to visit before you die (they can be places you’ve already been, if you want to go back)?

Well, I don’t keep a list, so I might miss a few important ones, but here are ten…

I’d like to go to Japan. I think it would probably require that I be accompanied by someone who spoke some Japanese, however.

Paris again.

Rome again, particularly the Pantheon. I could give the Vatican a miss second time around. Generally the Roman stuff in Rome is the stuff worth seeing.

I’d like to go to Dealey Plaza, and visit the book depository. Bill Hicks did, and said that it was obvious that there was no way even a marksman could have shot JFK from there, which intrigues me. I expect there’s not much reason to go to Dallas, though.

Amsterdam, to check it out as a possible place to escape to. [Done!]

The Moon, or at least low Earth orbit. I suspect I’m going to have to learn to live with disappointment, however.

When I was younger, I always wanted to go to Colorado, particularly Boulder. I’m not really sure why, I just did—rather like how I always wanted to go to Canada, and people would always ask me why.

I’d like to go to a Skunk Show. There’s one in Ohio and the big one down in Florida.

Las Vegas. Just to get the full-on USA experience. [Done!]

Question from Dan

What’s the last dream you remember having?

Well, I dream practically every night, and I remember most dreams for at least a few hours, but most of them are pretty mundane. Last night’s was mostly concerned with a party my parents were having and trying to make some decent coffee for two of the guests, sara, and myself. I assume you’d like to hear about something more interesting.

The last amusing dream I had started with a UFO crash in Florida, which had happened some time in the past. I was part of a loosely associated gang of hackers and political ranters with an interest in such things, and we eventually discovered that an alien in human form had survived the crash and made his way north.

After much convoluted plot and some espionage action, we discovered that the alien had reported back to his planet, and a full-scale invasion had been planned. However, rather than take on the might of the USA directly, the aliens had opted to infiltrate and take over the record companies and the Recording Industry Association of America.

Their plan was sinister and brilliant: they would persuade the US government that the 70%+ of citizens swapping files on the Internet were dangerous copyright terrorists, and get them all locked up in jails—at tremendous profit to the private security firms running the jails, which they also controlled.

Once that was done, the full-scale invasion would proceed—because the landing ships would easily slip by the nation’s missile defenses, and by then there wouldn’t be enough citizens free to defend the nation on the ground.

On discovering this plot, we did our best to bring it to the world’s attention by engineering media events. Eventually we managed to goad the RIAA into taking off the mask and bringing in the dropships early to colonize the Earth with their evil alien spawn.