truetech

This is the best 419 scam email I’ve ever received. I’m so glad my spam filter didn’t catch it. Bonus points for an original take on a cliched genre. Email follow in its entirety.
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INTERNATIONAL POLICE AUTHORITY UNITED STATES SECTION (IPA)
Region No. 2 New York City
P.O. Box 804 Knickerbocker Station
New York City, New York 10002-0804 USA

We, office of the international police authority (IPA) hereby write to inform you that we caught a diplomatic lady called Mrs. Vernon Wallace at (John F Kennedy International Airport) here in New York with a consignment box filed with United State Dollars.

Meanwhile, base on our interview to the diplomat she said that the consignment box belongs to you, that she was sent by one Williams I. Luis to deliver the consignment box to your doorstep not knowing that the content of the box is money. The diplomat also said that her first transit in the state was at Cincinnati Northern Kentucky International Airport Ohio.

Now, the diplomat is under detention in the office of (IPA) security, and we cannot release her until we carry out our proper investigation on how this huge amount of money managed to be yours before we will release her with the box.. So, in this regards you are to reassure and prove to us that the money you are about to receive is legal by sending us the Award Ownership Certificate showing that the money is not illegal.

Note, that the Award Ownership Certificate must to be secured from the office of the senate president in Nigeria, because that is the only office that will issue you the original Award Ownership Certificate of this funds, this is because the fund originated from Nigeria

You are advised to forward immediately the Award Ownership Certificate if you have it with you, but if you did not have it we will urge you to contact back the sender of the diplomat to help you secure the Award Ownership Certificate if at all you did not have it.

Below is the contact information of the person that sent the diplomat:

Name: Williams I. Luis

Email: williamluis60@yahoo.com

Phone: +23480-88-926-727

Furthermore, we are giving you only but 3 working business days to forward the requested Award Ownership Certificate. Please note that we shall get back to you after the 3 working business days, that if you didn’t come up with the certificate we shall confiscate the funds into World Bank account then charge you for money laundering, but if you forward the Award Ownership Certificate then we will release diplomat with your consignment box also gives you every back up on the money.

Thanks for your understanding and co-operation

Yours Truly,
I.P.A REGION NO:2

DCP. DOUGLAS H. KING

Cc: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION (FBI).

Cc: CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (CIA).

I came home from work to find my son wearing blue jeans and a black mock turtleneck, looking for all the world like a very young Steve Jobs. This, of course, prompted my wife and me to take the following photograph:

Little Stevie Jobs

Yeah, we may need to get out more.

So it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here, but I’ve been busy. The biggest news, of course, is my new job. I started at Manheim Township School District on October 1 after almost twelve years at Etown. Honestly, it was tough to make a change after so many years at Etown, but it’s been good for me and I’m really enjoying Township.

Tim, the guy who hired me at Township, is someone I’ve known for a long time. He was my cooperating teacher when I did my student teaching back in 1995. I should have ben able to tell where my career trajectory was going to take me, because even back, on my first day of student teaching in Manor Middle School, I was helping him run LocalTalk wires for the school office.

After student teaching and graduating, I went to find lots of work as an English teacher. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to secure any of that work for myself. I decided to change paths temporarily, and I took a job as a computer lab facilitator for Lampeter-Strasburg School District. That was an awesome job, the kind of job where I woke up on weekdays and thought, “Cool! I get to go to work today!”

But it wasn’t meant to last. Within a few months, I had been contacted both by Etown and by Eastern Lancaster County School District about tech jobs. Still not the teaching job I had trained for, but it sure paid a lot more than being an aide. My preference at the time was to go to Etown, since my good friend Joe worked there. His boss Dave had recently left Etown to moved over to Manheim Township. But Etown moved more slowly and Eastern Lancaster Country offered me a job, which I took.

For five weeks.

Because five weeks was how long it took Etown to hire me. I started working alongside Joe in February of 1998, and we had a blast.

For about a year and a half.

Because that’s how long it took for Joe to move over to Exeter Area School District. Interestingly, at that point, Dave came back from Township to work at Etown again, where he stayed until the fall of 2008.

In 2000, Dave and I managed to hire Mike, a talented computer tech and network admin. Mike had previously been working for Dave at Township. Are you getting a sense of how cyclical things are?

Mike moved onto IU13 in 2007, but Dave I kept working together until his departure from Etown last year.

Then, about two months ago, Tim called me. This wasn’t terribly surprising since we had kept in touch over the years. He had moved out of the classroom and into technology. He had also moved from Penn Manor over to Township shortly after Dave left Township to go back to Etown. Confused yet?

Tim said he was looking for a new webmaster/database administrator and asked if I’d be interested in applying. I said yes and got my paperwork together. The funny part is that I wasn’t looking to leave Etown. Etown had been far from a perfect workplace over the years, between administrative scandals, leadership upheavals, and various technology-related situations that I’ll never be allowed to talk about but took quite a toll on us personally and professionally. But in reality, in 2009, things were better for me at Etown than they had been in a long time. Still, I felt like it was the right time to move on when I got Tim’s call.

And move on I did. I’ve been at Township just over a month now and I’m really enjoying the work and the people.

Truth be told, though, I do miss my friends at Etown. I’m blessed to have been part of a great team at Etown and to have worked with some amazing people. Some great tech people I’ve worked with over the years at Etown: Dave and Mike (of course, mentioned previously), Tom, Dan, Ted, Christine, Kathleen, Brian, Gayle, Amy… and the list goes on.

Some of you may be wondering what happened to Kodiak, the student information system I had developed for Etown. Honestly, Kodiak kept me at Etown for a long time, through several job offers, one of which was particularly tempting. But Kodiak was retired in July, 2009. It had a good run, but Etown understandably decided it wanted a commercial product. With Kodiak put to rest, I felt more comfortable moving to Township, since Etown’s SIS no longer depended solely on the knowledge in my head and my head alone.

So, long story short: Yeah, I actually left Etown. And yeah, I’m happy.

It’s almost as if Microsoft knows how bad Internet Explorer is. This must be a ham-handed attempt at (1) making people hate it less and (2) slowing the trend of people abandoning it in favor of better browsers like Safari and Firefox. Heck, even Opera. My translation: “Hey, look. We know IE sucks. So how about this deal. You download a copy and we’ll feed a hungry person. Sound good? See, we’re not evil! We’re all kinds of philanthropic!”

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think corporate (and private) America should be doing far more than the status quo to help people in need. But making someone download IE8? Weird.

As much as it pained me to put Tangelo out of its misery, I have to admit that updating my weblog from my iPod is pretty cool.

I’ve really done it.

I moved my blog to Wordpress.

Why? Well, as you probably know, I’ve been using Tangelo, an application of my own creation, for my blog for about four years or so. But I haven’t updated Tangelo in a very long time. I haven’t had a public release since 2006, I believe. So I decided it was time to stop fooling myself and let go. Tangelo is dead, and that’s okay. I can stop working on it.*

And that’s actually quite liberating. Because now I can stop worrying about developing my blog application and focus more on writing, which was the whole point to begin with.

So why Wordpress? Because it’s powerful and ubiquitous. It’s built on open standards and it rocks pretty hard.

The cool part is that I still have all my posts. That’s impressive because I started this blog on Blogger back in 2002. From there I migrated all of my posts to Movable Type a couple years later. Then when Tangelo was ready for testing, I moved all my posts again. And the other day I exported them from Tangelo and into Wordpress. That’s really quite a journey in weblog terms. The only thing I lost was the old Haloscan comments, and while I could probably salvage them, I don’t see a reasonable way to link them back to their original posts, so adios.

At any rate, here we are. Enjoy the new digs while I get things situated.

* If you’re a Tangelo customer, sorry. But I’m guessing you probably saw this coming. If you need help moving from Tangelo to Wordpress, drop me a line and I’ll be happy to help out.

Nowadays I like to think of SQL Server and Oracle as the Death Stars of the relational database universe. Extremely powerful. Monolithic. Brilliant. Complex almost beyond the ability of a single human mind to understand. And a monumental waste of money except in those rare situations when you actually need to destroy a planet.

– James Devlin

Although I’ve only used it for a short time, my first experience with the Windows 7 beta suggests that Microsoft has not lost its focus or swerved from its original vision:

It’s happening! It’s really happening!