November 29, 2003
Posted in General
at 7:04 pm
by Chris
A friend forwarded this to me and asked if I thought it was a good deal:
> http://www.cdcheap.biz/foryou/
>
> Windows XP
> Professional 2002
> $50
> Retail price: $270.99
> Our low Price: $50.00
> You Save: $220.00
These guys appear to be selling pirated software or even worse, collecting credit card numbers.
I dug through my archive of ‘Spam’ and found several messages from them. Several things tell me something is wrong with this deal.
Biggest is their pricing. While Windows XP for $60 is almost believeable, Office XP, Photoshop and Pagemaker at those prices isn’t.
Another is the way they create their links. Rolling over the link with my mouse in my email program shows a link like this:
http://drs.yahoo.com/codfishshanty/syllable/
=mockupperclassmen/*http://www.cdcheap.biz/re/clean.php
Notice the beginning of the link looks like it is a Yahoo store, a nice respectable business. However, you end up at the chcheap.biz sitting out there at the end of the link. Why would they try to hide that?
A third way is a little more technical, I looked up their cdcheap.biz registration information. You can go to http://whois.sc/ and enter cdcheap.biz in the look up box. It returns the name and address of the company that registered that domain. In this case, it is:
Registrant Name: Alexander Popov
Registrant Organization: CDATLOW
Registrant Address1: Parking St
Registrant City: New York
Registrant State/Province: NY
Registrant Postal Code: 12345
Registrant Country: United States
Registrant Country Code: US
Registrant Phone Number: +1.18002560912
Registrant Email: cdatlow@mail.ru
Several things wrong here, can you spot them? No street address for Parking St. Zip code looks a little suspect, what are the chances that they are in zip code 12345? And I happen to know that mail.ru is a Russian equivalent to hotmail.com, why would a legitimate business be using a free email service from Russia?
Lastly, I can’t connect to their website, I bet someone else has complained to their webhost and they’ve been disconnected.
As a rule, I ignore all offers from spam or unsolicted email. I get too much that is like this, looking very much like a scam, to even trust ones that look legit from all angles. Unless you get an offer from a company you directly signed up with, I’d reccomend trashing it.
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November 28, 2003
Posted in General
at 2:19 pm
by Chris
I did a little cosmetic work around here. What do you think?
I also added a few new random images for the top and side. Hit refresh a few times…
I have a ton of pics to post from Wilbur and Lisa’s visit, those will have to wait a bit yet.
Rod Hall placed third in class in Baja, not too bad considering the H2 had only one or two races under its belt. Update: Sam didn’t co-drive this race though he was originally slated to, he helped drive chase. They started out strong, staying right with the rest of the class, but were delayed when they broke a suspension piece. They eased up a bit for the rest of the race. Now they’ve gotta look into how they can reinforce that suspension piece while staying in the stock class… Their teammate Chad Hall placed first driving the original Hummer, thats a vehicle Sam has worked on quite a bit in the past but hasn’t been in his shop lately, the new H2 has been keeping him busy.
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November 21, 2003
Posted in General
at 2:44 pm
by Chris
The Baja 1000 started this morning. I snagged a couple of pics out of the Off-Road.com photo gallery, they show the H2 waiting for the race to start in Ensenada on contingency row.
I’ll be following the coverage on Off-Road.com and will post anything interesting on Sam and his team as it comes by.
Wilbur, Lisa, Jake and Levi are going to be in town for the weekend, I’ll have plenty more pics to fill up the site.
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November 19, 2003
Posted in General
at 5:44 pm
by Chris
My brother Sam is in Baja this week to help Rod Hall International take team Hummer H2 across the Baja 1000 finish line.
Off-Road.com is following the race and has posted a pair of articles (1), (2) on team Hummer H2’s progress on taking a stock H2 and transforming it into a vehicle capable of finishing a grueling race like the Baja 1000. What they don’t tell you is that after the engineers were done with the H2 in Arizona it has been in Sam’s shop (in between races) getting outfitted with what Sam and the Halls (Rod, Chad and Josh) feel is necessary to win races.
Sam was in town showing off the race H2 for the SEMA show a few weeks back, I got to visit and snap a few pics of their race H2.
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November 18, 2003
Posted in General
at 11:25 pm
by Chris
More pictures of babies! On the left is my uncle Joe holding his grandson Seth, on the right is my sister-in-law Christine holding her daughter Isabel.
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November 16, 2003
Posted in General
at 12:43 am
by Chris
I finally got to see my niece Isabel, my sister-in-law came down to visit some friends and I stopped by to say hi and take a few pics.
Me and Isabel and Becca, my sister-in-law’s sister + A proud papa and his daughter + a live and kicking (literally) Isa + the classic pic!
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November 14, 2003
Posted in General
at 11:01 am
by Chris
Ran into a few people I know last weekend at the convention November 8th and 9th. Unfortunately I forgot to take pictures of everyone I wanted to.
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November 11, 2003
Posted in General
at 11:42 am
by Chris
Spybot Link.
I run it occasionally to clean stuff out and I would reccomend it to others, especially if you are having random popup ads or your computer is behaving a little more strange lately.
Lots of the free software you download comes with extra programs that help the software author get a little money even though he is giving his software away. These install along with the main program and run in the background, usually collecting statistics on what sites you visit or popping up ads occasionally. These extra programs are labeled spyware because of their stealthy nature (if you are notified at all it is usually at the bottom of the legal agreement you ignored when you installed the software) and their tendancy to send information to companies about your web surfing habits.
Spybot will remove these, along with common advertising cookies and maybe a few other things. Some of this spyware tightly integrates with Windows networking components and removing it can cause problems, while I’ve never encountered a problem running Spybot or the like I know some have.
A related program is Ad Aware. While these products mostly overlap in their capabilities, it is best to run both to be complete.
Both Spybot and AdAware are updated regularaly, like your antivirus program. You’d do well to keep up to date with these as well.
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November 10, 2003
Posted in General
at 11:22 pm
by Chris
For years the answer has been an emphatic NO to the above question. Microsoft was kind enough to make life difficult for anyone who wished to maintain a semblance of site compatibility across the various browsers they have released. If you upgraded your browser to the latest and greatest (or not so great, considering the still remaining rendering bugs and security issues), you couldn’t use the last version that the millions of unwashed masses were still using.
The workaround was to partition up your hard drive and install multiple copies of Windows, one for each version of IE you wished to run. Or you could shell out a few hundred dollars for virtualization software like VMWare or VirtualPC and configure those to run multiple installations of Windows, each with its respective version of IE.
Finally this is no longer necessary. Joe Maddalone of Insert Title Web Designs (among others) deduced that some relatively simple changes would allow assorted versions of IE to run alongside each other. Even better, Ryan Parman packaged up all the necessary files and made them availabe for download.
So that folder full of files was tightly integrated into Windows, unable to be removed?
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Posted in General
at 12:13 pm
by Chris
Yeah so I never get around to updating any more. Its cause I’m busy now…
Got to hang out with a few of my cousins that I haven’t seen in a while. Had quite a bit of fun.
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