Success: So I was out on my bike today. The excursion was disguised as exercise, but it was mostly just a waste of time because I was too hasty to check a map. Normally I’m not like this, but I was going straight from class and was in a hurry.

I’d just been wondering yesterday where my new Palm off eBay was, until I saw the notice that Canada Post had left for me. Seems it was a big enough parcel that I needed to go pick it up at the Albert Street Post Office. Now I’d remembered seeing one a twenty minute cycle away at the shopping mall, and I’d thought the mall was on Albert. And since the post office on the slip was listed for Albert street, yeah, you get the idea. Turned out the one they meant was just around the corner from where I’m staying. Hilarity… for everyone except me. : )

There was some poor guy at the office mailing out a parcel (lingerie, I think) almost the exact size and mass as mine. His was going to BC by groundmail and was costing over $20. Mine came from Virginia by airmal and cost US$6. Of course, there’s the possibility that I would have had to pay import duties, but I guess they didn’t check it or didn’t care.

Anyways, it’s all picked up and working famously, now. So that’s good. Left a positive for my seller.

Failure: Well, not entirely. But definitely approaching it. So yeah, two weeks ago on Sunday I ordered Star Wars off FutureShop.ca, thinking I could get the first day special price and receive it as soon as possible without having to trek up to the mall to buy it.

Thursday of that week rolls around, and an email shows up in my inbox declaring that there’s a problem with my credit card. Now, don’t get me wrong here, I definitely appreciate that they take the time to validate this stuff and not bill some purchase to me that’s being shipped off to Venezuela. But the fact that I didn’t get a ‘we shipped it’ notice until the following Monday was a little annoying. And now it’s the Tuesday a week after that, and it’s still not here.

Not that I particularly care. I should be studying instead of watching Star Wars anyways. But the great irony of all this is that I’ve actually been at that Future Shop store not once but TWICE in the period since the movie came out. The SMC router that I purchased there at the beginning of the term was garbage — according to online support forums, Mike and I ‘overheated’ it by downloading too much too quickly. Whoops. I think he was on Kazaa and I was grabbing Service Pack 2. On the other hand, it was a $20 unit, with the rebate.

The slightly more expensive entry-level D-Link from CampusTech seems to be functioning well, though, so all is well.

Mike

thinking I’ll hit WCF retreat this weekend

There have always been warez sites out there. Since the earliest days of the internet, long before I was ever on it, people traded naughty or illegal files anonymously through ftp and irc.

Napster was a natural step in this progression — a simple way for joe user to acquire material he’d rather not pay for. I was sympathetic to the ‘try-before-you-buy’ perspective, but then, I was on dialup, so having liked one or two songs, I was far more likely to hit HMV than try to keep downloading. Ultimately, of, course, it was shut down, to be temporarily supplanted by Morpheus, Limewire, Bearshare… and then Kazaa. Sponsored Kazaa. Spyware Kazaa. That one.

It always struck me as amusing that a company would actually try to make money from providing a legally questionable service to its clients. Sort of like selling advertising space on a hitman’s jacket, but not really.

The thing about the internet is that there’s so many people out there who are willing to contribute their time and resources to the global community that it becomes exceedingly difficult to actually charge money for anything. Hence the donation buttons, which I’ve proudly pressed on various sites to give my $2 of support. But is that always enough? Enter: Ad- and Spyware.

DivX was another great irony. The overwhelming majority of DivX movie files out there are illegally reproduced material — dvd rips, animes, tv shows, music videos, etc… and yet they charge $30 for content-creation package. Or $0 and they install you with spyware. Why even bother, when the QuickTime and WindowsMedia ones are free?

A most recent example that I encountered was the program Messenger Plus, an extremely handy add-on for Messenger. The creator, Patchou, is famously quoted as called boycotters ‘idiots’, but whatever he assures us to the contrary — it’s still definitely spyware. Yes, it’s optional, in theory, but the ‘agree to install sponsor program’ page looks deceptively like a normal ‘End User Agreement’ screen.

Out of curiousity, I went to the official MsgPlus forums to see what the discussion was like on the topic. It was a little disappointing to see so much denial and outright mis-information from the creator and his cronies. Yes, it’s still an extremely useful tool, and for that I’m grateful, but honesty trumps anything else. And to insult and dismiss users who object to these policies is not the greatest assurance. Apparently if you uninstall the program, it uninstalls the spyware. BUT, if you’ve ever run Ad-Aware, Spy-Sweeper, or any major virus program that picked up the malware, it locks itself in and is no longer removable by the ‘easy’ method.

The way I used was stumbled upon partly by mistake, but I figured out the ‘creation date’ of the online casino shortcuts that it made on my desktop and favorites folders. Then I did a search for all files modified in that one-hour period. Surprise: There were subfolders all over the disk in random locations with different names containing files with more scrambled names. It was only after wiping out ALL of these at once that the unwanted IE adbar went and stayed gone.

Had I not thought to use the date-search, I quite likely would never have found them all.

The irony again: A major feature of MsgPlus is to disable the Microsoft advertising box in Messenger.

Mike

I’m spending pretty conservatively at school. I’m aided in this endeavour by the fact that a great deal of food on campus is either overpriced or tasteless or both. In fact, 90% of expenditures have been at Sobey’s around the corner buying more chicken and lettuce and stuff.

But I have got my Mastercard, and therefore, I’ve got Paypal. Having Paypal opens a lot of doors.

Like when my trusty Handsprint met with the unfortunate fate depicted on the right, I dropped by eBay and nabbed another one. Conveniently, the auction ended right between two lectures last Friday morning, so I was able to slip into a lab and just outbid the other fellow in the last few moments. I may have paid more than necessary, but the Visor Deluxe is a great legacy unit — big bright screen, nice stylus, expansion slot (thanks for the GPS, CTW!). I was a little wary of shipping charges, but I sent the guy an addition US$6 to ship from Virginia and assured him I’d cover whatever that didn’t. Turns out that for six bucks, he could have it airmailed here. That surprised me. When I was shipped a handful of Lego pieces from a suburb of Toronto, it was over $5. I guess that’s what a little healthy competition does for a system.

I’ve also taken the opportunity to hit a few sites I’ve enjoyed in the past with small donations. If, for some reason, you haven’t already, do check the Flame Warrior Database for a hilarious ilustrated guide to personalities you’ll likely meet on the internet. Also ActsOfGord.com for the highly amusing antics of a game shop owner and his madcap clientele.

Related to scamming online, if you have a net connection with unlimited bandwidth, do consider parking your browser for a while at the Lad Vampire. It’s a page that leeches large image files off of servers hosting fraudulent bank sites. Many hosting services provide a way to report abuse, but for those that don’t, this is a great way to get those pages offline — eat up all their bandwidth. You just leave it sitting there and the javascript continually reloads the same images over and over again. They so far claim to havetaken down a whopping 96 fake banks.

I pay for a slice of cable TV here, but I’ve only watched about an hour of it in the last two weeks. In that time, however, I managed to catch one of the Axe ads with its incredibly catchy tune. When I looked into it, it turns out that it’s not some 80s classic like I expected, but a recent offering from a UK indie group called Reactor.

They’ve got a video of the song, ‘Feeling The Love’, posted on their front page. It’s a bit PG-13, but the tune is very infectious if you have a moment and a brisk connection. If you haven’t installed RealPlayer for a while, I highly recommend the Real Alternative instead of the whole bloated package.

In spite of the warning from a trusted source, I succumbed to the Force and ordered the DVD set the other day. I couldn’t resist — it was like an online special at FutureShop with a discount and free shipping for one day only.

In the spirit of Star Wars, be sure to check the highly entertaining Double Take scambait where Shiver poses as a representative for Dark Side Industries, pushing THE FORCE super glue.

Mike

I know this is way-old news, but I feel the need to draw your attention to a brilliant and hilarious scam: The P-P-P-Powerbook!

They say that scammers tend to avoid corresponding with victims using Hotmail or Yahoo accounts, since their demographics contain a much higher proportion of users who are children and have no money.

So I knew that when I started using an actual email address at this domain, I was entering a new world. Little did I know that in less than two weeks, I’d receive my first invitations to be a fraud victim. How did this happen? The address is invisible online! There’s only one place I used it outside of a few limited correspondences: Paypal. Googling the address turns up nothing. How did they get it?

I have no time at school for any sort of baiting, much less from an email that could so easily be traced back to me, but I was curious to see if I could find a little more info on the senders.

Not really, but I did find the P-P-P-Powerbook story, and that was worth it. Those are the kind of things that become legend.

Mike

I just updated, but I feel the need to draw your attention to the amazing Google Labs, where they post links to unfinished projects for you to try out.

One of the ones I found the most fascinating is a word association program called Google Sets. My test was to enter in five Ontario towns and bam! it generated a great big list of them. But even with only five as a reference point, it was able to figure out that I only meant Ontario… and that the ‘London’ was not the one in England. When I went ahead and changed the last two items to Edmonton and Victoria, it instantly adapted and gave me major cities across Canada. Unbelievable. Say what you like, but that is very cool.

Perhaps they got the idea from the much more basic, but frequently hilarious Googlism.com. And the obligatory funny link: I’m Feeling Lucky Boxer Shorts.

I think the main key for me will be to hit the sack at a decent hour tonight so I’m awake for Linear Algebra For Engineers at 8:30 tomorrow morning… followed closely by Calculus For Engineers, Mechatronics Engineering, and Chemistry for Engineers.

So yeah, I actually napped a couple hours this afternoon — the toga party went pretty late, and then I was up early for Church. It seemed like Ron Turner was right, that the women would try to look good, while the men would pretty well just try to look stupid… lots of pine-branch wreaths here. Anyways, it seemed like a nice mix of music. A little r&b/rap, for the people who dig that, and then lots of classic/semi-classic stuff as well. R&b, for me, anyways, has a sort of smooth to it, but there’s not much to actually get into. Once Song 2 and The Anthem and Funk Soul Brother came on, though, I was into it. So my shoulders hurt a little now.

The picture over there is my laundry — now clean and sunlight-fresh. Yeah, I did some laundry. Didn’t want to have to face that in the middle of the week.

Mike

So we were having a faculty lunch on the lawn in front of the Math building and its giant pink tie. There was a group there that had converted a main campus vehicle’s engine to run on either pure ethanol or pure propane, changable with the flick of a switch. Ethanol is theoretically a renewable resource, but the fact is, they told me, is that to power every car in Canada with it, we’d have to cover something like half the earth’s surface with corn plant. And we’d have nothing to eat but mashed-corn-with-ethanol-extracted at mealtimes.

What really stole their thunder, though, was the Waterloo Motorsports booth. The had a fantastic car there that they’d built with the engine block of a Honda bike. Everything but that was hand-crafted and welded in the machine shop. All the sparks and injections were controlled from a computer that could monitor the exact position of the engine with a rotation sensor. Talk about an opportunity to fine-tune. All four wheels had rotation monitors as well, so that if the drive wheels ever lost traction, it could automatically release the gas. The thing was very cool. It was great seeing it rip up and down the pathways they’d blocked off.

*

Briefly looking about the internet, it appears that the main purpose of a toga party is to consume copious amount of various… beverages. Being that it’s frosh week at the Wa, ours will be completely dry, so I’m not entirely sure what the planned activities are.

In spite of the many toga-party-fan-sites out there, I had a great deal of trouble finding actual step-by-step instructions on toga-creation. One thing did seem quite clear, however, and that was that bedding is not the best choice, since the piece of cloth is supposed to be long and narrow, not a square. So I popped up to the local Waterloo fabric store (the girl on the phone informed me she was a toga professional…) to buy some fabric. I ended up going with four yards of the blue you see on the right. All that was just $8, although I think it was a clearance sale. Something like denim would have been very cool, but also significantly more pricey.

As it is, I’m facing the horrid prospect of book-buying this week… an expense I’m not entirely sure how to cover, given the ’student’ limits on my charge and credit card. Maybe I’ll just write them a giant personal cheque. Don’t think that’s accepted anymore, though.

Mike

… to chocolate milk: It’s not very fun to clean up a spill. Not that OJ or white milk would necessarily be any better, but they way they talked about this stuff at the health seminar, it was like I could run a moped on it.

Monday evening I bought a 4L jug of 2% and a 4L jug of chocolate. The chocolate is 2/3 gone, and the milk is 3/4 full. (I had three bowls of Shreddies)

The other main thing they talked about was STDs and the on-campus availability of emergency contraceptives.

Apparently chocolate milk has the same nutritional value as white milk with no more sugar than a glass of orange juice. Who knew?

Mike

The school is terrified of a scandal, I suppose, so before each ‘task’ the tough-guy senior students (Educational Committee: Edcom) inform us that all the frosh activities are completely optional.

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p>Which is good, cause I sure didn’t feel like staying up until past midnight watching a lousy Ben Stiller comedy. We had a ceremony to get our construction hats. The real engineering symbol is the ring, of course, but the hat is a status thing for now, I guess. And apparently other students may attempt to steal them at any time, so we were encouraged to wear running shoes about campus.

Irony is cruel. I left a house where I ’shared’ the internet computer with my siblings, and moved to a house where I share a single connection with the fellow in the next room. I went out today and bought a router for us, so the problem’s solved, but still. Pfft. And why is it that the router was $25 and the 50′ cable was just over $50? is there some excuse for this, or is it simply the nefarious means by which the company profits?

My computer isn’t entirely stable, although I’m fully up to date with Service Pack 2, and I downloaded the free AVG anti-virus. It took longer than twenty minutes to install it all, so I hope wasn’t compromised in the time interval. (I ran ad-aware just to be sure — seemed okay)

So yeah, Waterloo. I’m excited. Classes start Monday.

Mike