Author: John
May Day 2005
May Day was last weekend. This weekend is Mother’s Day, but I might write a different article about that later. It’s just incredible that it’s May already. The weather here, however, seemed to have slowed time, as it was unseasonably cool, even cold. Every night for a week we went out and put sheets over the garden to protect the young sprouting veggies from frost. Yesterday it was more like spring in Kansas, and today it was, well, mixed. Some hot sunshine, some cold rain. Becky’s already harvesting handfuls of radishes, by the way. Today we bought tomato plants.
Cinnamon was limping all week favoring right front leg so I took her to the vet Thursday. He said it was probably due to aggravated arthritis in her shoulder. He said it would probably clear up after awhile, unless she aggravates it again. He wants us to get a bunch of blood tests for doggie “old age” things like kidney function and diabetes, etc. I was starting to consider it, but then he used the “guilt” routine. People who really love their pets and care about their quality of life as they enter “old age” would want to know this information. Well, that alienated me. Now I don’t know what I’ll do about it. I took her back on Friday for bath and manicure. She seemed pretty happy afterwards, despite the limp. She licked my face and said, “My quality of life is pretty good, long as you keep me clean.”
As we were thinking about weddings we’ll be attending between now and Christmas, we got to thinking about Christmas and how much vacation time Becky will have left at that point. So, I’ll just mention that it could questionable whether we can make another trip to CA for Christmas. If anybody else has Christmas priorities affecting their travelability, they might bring them up so I can try to weave them into the fabric of my thought processes.
I probably have some pictures it would be nice to include here, but it’s also getting kind of late so I’ll hold off on that for now. However, I got one of those new Yahoo 360 accounts. Actually, I got two of them. The first one was under “harpshot” and the Yahoo URL for that won’t work, because Yahoo has the ID as harpshot in some places and as HarpShot in other places (different capitalization) and there doesn’t seem to be a way for me to coordinate them. So, you can also find me using http://360.yahoo.com/jcliff54. If you get there, there’s a photo album started, with five photos, woo-hoo.
If anybody else needs or wants an invitation for a Yahoo 360 account, let me know. You can only join by invitation but, once you have one, you can send invitations to nearly everybody you know.
Enough for tonight. Tomorrow is Mother’s Day! Whoa, wait a minute. She-Spies is on!
P.S. Check out my recent website project, Pryor Oil Company vs. EPA. Still in progress but it’s shaping up.
Spring
Suddenly Spring is here, except last night we had frost warning and tonight it’s freeze warning. Becky and I spread sheets over the garden, since lots of tender young sprouts have sprouted.
Becky has us getting out a little more, picking up free tickets for things at work. A weekend or so ago we saw a play, Miss Saigon. It was good, except I didn’t think they needed to kill off the mother at the end. Most people who know about plays and stuff would no doubt agree it had to be done in order to make the point, or something. Last night we went to a concert at KU. The opener, Hometown News, was excellent. The main act, Kevin Sharp, was good, but we liked Hometown’s music better. Sharp is a cancer survivor and this was a benefit for a thing called Camp Quality. They’re both “Country Music” genre, but it didn’t really seem like Country. Maybe there’s Country and there’s also Country & Western? Or Progressive Country? Anyway, we liked ’em.
Nothing really new in our lives to report. Each of us a year older than a year ago which seems like it wasn’t very long ago.
JC Penney – Spammer
May 18, 2005
General, Rants
3 Comments
John
Today I got spammed by JC Penney. At first, I thought it might be a phishing scam. The link to click in the email was to jcpenneyem.com instead of jcpenney.com. When I checked the “whois” information, however, the domain jcpenneyem.com was, actually, registered to JC Penney. Instead of clicking on the provided link, which included lots of scripting code in addition to the domain, I just entered jcpenneyem.com in the browser address window. That resulted in a “Page Not Found” page. Suspicious. Then I cut and pasted the link out of the email, deleting the part with my email address (the address they used, by the way, is one of my spam addresses – it’s a very old address that has no purpose in the world except it’s on all the spam lists). And guess what — JC Penney, unless somebody went to an awful lot of trouble to duplicate the whole JC Penney website. The first page did have a section to “access your JC Penney account”, but when I investigated, it was the same page (more importantly, the same URL) as my bona fide JC Penney account page. The spammed email address, incidentally, is not the address that JC Penney has on file for my account; nor is it an address I’ve ever given them. The only way they could have that address is by acquiring one of the aforementioned spam lists.
I’m not sure how Becky is going to feel about the fact that henceforth we will never buy anything from JC Penney, but that’s my rule about spammers. I wish everybody who uses the internet had the same rule, and that this marketing decision would put JC Penney out of business. But, sadly, it seems mainstream business has now been sold on the marketing value of spam.
Sigh.