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A fun Cartoon from 1948

A friend sent me this cartoon this morning.

It’s done in the classic animation style of the late 1940s. In all honesty it is a propaganda film that serves to do a little education about our system of government.

Propaganda has become a dirty word, but all propaganda isn’t necessarily by definition evil.

This cartoon reflects the sexism of the time (Sorry Ladies).  It also speaks of “Church” on Sunday, I’ve always though of “Church” as an inclusive term denoting worship of your particular deity, not just a Christian activity.

I mention this because some of the folks commenting on the youtube site took Church to mean just the Christian flavor. It’s strange  how very narrow and focused our perceptions are now days.

Here without further ado is a blast from the past.

Something to think about in this election year.

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Wow! I can’t write

I’m on the tail end of a cold.

I’ve been trying to write a few different blog postings and I can’t believe how unbelievably shitty my writing is.

All three of the pieces are absolute crap and never seem to get to the point.

Obviously my head is still screwed up.

Patience folks… It may turn into a blogging frenzy next week.

 

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Another computer related Heads-Up

I dont’ mean to be a Mr techie in this blog but I can’t really help myself.

Especially when I know there are readers of the blog that are not technical and who might get hurt by nefarious people using computers to do bad shit.

This morning I got two bits of email that caught my attention.

Your Order Page 1 copy

This first one appeared to be from Dominos.

It looks pretty good except for a couple of mistakes.

The most obvious is that the time is wrong. I received the email at 8 am according to my email program but the order says it’s 11 am. This is a time zone issue.

The second problem is that that email they sent it to was never used for anything that might result in being added to a mailing list. And I don’t use that email address at all anymore.

The real sting for this one is that all the links that you’d click on to find out why you were being sent a pizza that you didn’t order, actually go to a web page that appears to be hosted in Thailand.

I can’t imagine why dominos would outsource their automated pizza order clearing to a server in Thailand.

The easiest way to check stuff like this is to put your mouse pointer over a button (HOVER) but DO NOT CLICK.

Often, your email program will display what the link address is. In this case hovering over the Click Here to Track displayed nnsg.osea2.go.th

Giving credit where credit is due, this is clever…

Think about it.

You didn’t order a pizza, so you think oops this is a mistake and you click to find out if the pizza is on the way or if you can cancel it.

Every single link on the page tracks back to the nnsg.osea2.go.th address.

I’m not listing the exact page, the image here is just a jpeg it’s not going to take you anywhere bad.

Email1 copy

The next email this morning is old school!

This one comes from an address that I don’t recognize, it’s got no subject line, and contains an RTF Word document.

Need I say DON’T Ever open email that looks like this. And NEVER open the attachment!

Without getting into the dirty underbelly of email headers and all that stuff that would probably make the average non, to moderately technical person bleed from their eyes. Let me just say this;

This email is wrong on a number of levels.

When I look at the header information I’m pretty sure this is a spoof. What that means is this.

The XXXXXXX@bellsouth.net email address has been grabbed by some evil fuck and is being used as a disguise.

XXXXXXX@bellsouth.net is probably a real email address. It’s probably someone who at this moment is getting a ton of angry emails from people that they don’t know. This is probably some person like you who’s just trying to get through their day without a lot of drama.

The RTF file looks like it’s got some suspicious code in it. I haven’t done an in depth analysis and don’t plan to.

It looks like the real point of origin is an old style yahoo email server. But I’m not even sure of that.

What I’m pretty sure of is that the originating server is somewhere in Asia I’m guessing Thailand.

I say this because BOTH of these emails track back to the same place.

Asia Pacific Network Information Centre

This center is actually located in Australia but would handle traffic for lots of places in Asia.

I’m betting that someone in the Australian center did some maintenance over the weekend or installed a new server and it’s security isn’t fully online. The Aussies are pretty good about minimizing spam and other nuisance email from passing through their servers. I’ll be sending examples of the emails to them so that they can track the culprits down.

The point of my rambling here is to just remind folks to be careful online.

Be circumspect when you’re opening your emails, things are not always as they seem even emails that appear to be from someone you know might be tainted with something nasty.

And for goodness sake make sure your anti-virus software is up to date and functioning.

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I woke up wet…

IMAG0159

No! Nothing like Homer Simpsons recent urinary problems due to guilt.

I’ve picked up another nasty cold. This is the second one in 8 weeks. On the up side… Supposedly you can only catch 600 colds in your life so I guess I’ve only got 598 to go. On the down side I’M Fucking miserable and easily go from mostly OK to being a bastard in a matter of minutes.

This one started on Friday morning as a slight tickle in the back of my throat. Within hours it was a constant burning then came the coughing and sniffles.

A particularly fun torture of this cold is that if I”m sitting or standing I’m coughing violently. If I’m laying down I’m not coughing but I can’t breath because my sinuses wad up.

To add a special Joy it’s been snowing which means that I’ve been outside clearing decks, stairs & such.

So when I woke up this morning soaking wet I was CRANKY!

Obviously I’d been running a fever and it must have broken. There is nothing quite so disconcerting as rolling over and having a soggy wet spot that starts at the back of your neck and goes down your spine to your ass.

There are other “wet spots” that all men have encountered. Usually we try to make our partner sleep in THOSE. There’s a BIG difference between the two. How the wet spot came to be is usually a lot more enjoyable for instance.

The bedding will be in the wash for another hour or so. Then perhaps I’ll crawl back into bed and sleep the rest of this crappy cold off.

I did get to watch the sun come up. That was neat.

2012 03 18 06 44 21

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When it rains it pours… And speaking of rain…

This week has flown by and not in a good way. It’s not been a bad week either just full.

The original plan was to edit and write.

I’d planned to have my car serviced.

While the car was having it’s fluids changed I was going to go to a friends place and see about getting my fluids drained. Both of us could use a nice long session of sweaty naked ugly bumping. Me and my friend, not me and the car… although i suppose we could bump uglies IN the car hummmm sounds kind of fun. I’ve got a squeegee and the leather seats would clean just fine.

That’s not happening this week.

Soldier generic pic getty images 148013242 SM

My Godson is home from the military and I wanted to spend some time with him. He’s a different young man now. The changes I’ve seen, are good ones. I’m absolutely sure that he’s going to continue growing into a fantastic man.

Surveillance cameras

One of my best friends had a little incident at his business. The incident was captured on the surveillance system and you’d think that getting the video off said surveilance systems would have been cake… So I opened my mouth and said yeah sure when I got asked to pull the video.

I found out quite by surprise that my friend was in the hospital when I got to his business. Needless to say I was worried but my Godson was at the hospital with him so I figured the best thing I can do is get the video so it’s one less thing for them as a family to worry about.

This is an example of the typical story of my life. Getting the video was anything but easy. It took two computers. The one that I was able to successfully use to get the video was my netbook.  I’m not complaining because it worked.

It was a lot like pulling teeth with a pair of rusty pliers in a barn, with the zombie apocalypse happening while you have explosive diarrhea.

The netbook has a processor that is about half as fast at the processor in my smartphone. And my netbook only has 2Gig of memory… Can you say SLOW? “Good children, I knew you could.”

Techie digression… Non Techies, well I’d suggest you skip ahead a bit.

Don’t get me wrong, My Netbook is more than enough for email, the occasional word processing document and surfing the web. But this application was pushing at the fringes of it’s ability.

The single most annoying thing was that the manufacturer of the surveilance unit goes to great lengths to tell you ON thier web site and in their manual that they write the video in H264 format. This is pretty much an industry standard and my Mac has all the stuff necessary to read this format directly.

What they don’t tell you is that you can’t do something as simple as plugging a drive into the USB port on the side of the surveillance base station and say Copy this file, or copy from this time index to that time index. Nope they make you view the event through their web interface or through their application. BOTH of which require Windows and that you either BUY a 3rd partys software or that you find a time limited freebie to actually COPY the video that you see.

Personally I HATE with a passion a vendor that says here’s our software… Then when you load it they tell you it’s necessary to load something else from another vendor.  If you’re like me and your goal is to keep the amount of changes to your operating system to a minimum then that kind of makes their software useless doesn’t it? Unfortunately there was no other alternative.

Now I have to clean up two machines instead of one. My windows XP machine and my Netbook both have this vendors crap software and the 3rd and 4th party software on them. Grrrrrrr!

The Win XP machine kinda worked but the image was doubled and the color was all wrong. There was no error per se… The system thought it was doing everything correctly and If I hadn’t checked the file I’d have said “Done” then delivered something completely useless. Which led me to using the Netbook and Windows 7.

The added frustration was that the surveillance unit isn’t on a network. It will be! I guarantee that! I had to create a private network with fixed IP addresses and  a small switch. Not a big deal unless you have to keep switching IP addresses in Windows so that you can talk to the Internet and then talk to the private network and then back again because the 3rd party software you’ve had to download doesn’t actually download everything you need until you’re actually installing it.

Techie Comment… Non Techies skip this or you’ll start bleeding from your eyes.

Windows can become a stone bitch when you’re messing with IP addresses. XP practically demands that you reboot every freakin time you change an IP. (Yeah, I know it’s not every time but it’s inconsistent enough that you might as well reboot. All us techies just love ipconfig telling us the ethernet adapter can’t obtain an ipaddress.)

After battling with getting the files onto my computer I figure I’m home free. The files are converted to AVI in the process of saving them to a hard disk. WRONG Wouldn’t you know it, the CODEC for AVI playback is either not installed on my friends machine or the files are in an almost but not quite AVI format. (Hair Pulling, grumbling, Grrrr.)

So I play the video on my Mac, it’s grainy but it’s the same quality that you get watching the surveillance monitor live. The problem is that I’m playing it for My friends wife and she’s noticing things that I thought nothing about. Suffice it to say these are things that she’s going to have a discussion with him about. Folks… You really need to tell me if I’m supposed to edit your video content!

It’s a classic reminder that stepping into an office to scratch your balls, rearrange your tackle, or flat rub one out…. DON’T forget to check for nasty little cameras.

220px DVD Video bottom side

As I’m writing this, my Mac is humming away writing all the video to an industry standard DVD. And before I deliver the DVD I’m going to test it in every player I have here at the house. I’m really wanting to get this project off my plate.

I guess I need to make sure that none of my porn collection got built into the DVD too… Hummmm.

I’m about a week behind in the hard copy editing of the book. So I really need to focus on that.

We’ve got a storm coming in over the weekend that is supposed to drop a foot of snow or more on us but the weather reports are confllicting. I’ve gotta batten down the hatches just in case.

Then last night… I’m getting ready for bed and my Muse scratches his fingernails across my brain. It’s essentially the same sound as fingernails on an old style blackboard but LOUDER!

So at 12:30 am I’m at my computer writing a short story. I finally got to bed at 3 am, I’m having a slow start to my day but I like the short story. It needs a couple of tweaks but i was pleased overall with the result.

So today, I’m going to be busy with laundry, poo patrol cause it needs to get done before the rain, snow or what ever. Maybe if I’m really lucky… I can tend to draining my own fluids.

Nahhh I won’t be that lucky!

Off to get the rest of the day started.