Phishers are getting at least a little more crafty.  Instead of the usual Nigerian and V1@6R@ crap they're now sending messages titled "Contact Form Results" and "Message from eBay Member."

The latter saying things like "I haven't received my package yet" or "Please give me your shipping information" with a real-looking eBay reply button.  What a SHAME MailWasher shows me exactly where those bogus links are going.  And what a SHAME those messages always seem to arrive well after my most recent transaction is all done and feedback has been left by both sides.

Thbft.

Oh, and if someone wants to send me an email through the contact form on my blog or web site...  it doesn't come to me with the subject "Contact Form Results."

Zoe sure is a skittery kittery.  Today I'm wearing my alpaca wrap and she leaped off my lap in a panic when I moved it.

I ordered a USB 2 card for the Mac.  It arrived today, and I got a bit worried when the instructions that came with it only mentioned various varieties of Windows.   But naturally when I plugged it into the Powerbook it worked fine (although getting it into the slot was a bit dicey).  It even comes with a little cable that can plug into another USB port to provide power if needed.  Never saw one that worked like that before.

Just because Bette Midler doesn't pronounce the E on the end of her name doesn't mean I do the same.  Library "your book is ready to be picked up" phone callers take note.

Ripping another movie to iTunes format.  Then I'll really put the new USB card to the test.  Corollary:  podMama II appears to be working perfectly.  I ordered a new battery for it.  When that arrives I will take the pod apart and get rid of the little bit of something or other that appears to be in between the screen and the case.  It's irritating, but not enough so that I want to just take the pod apart to get rid of it, because that will mean major disassembly.  But if I'm going to be putting a new battery in anyway, taking out a few screws and prying up the screen isn't that much more work.

F'zer was at work at the crack of dawn today, so that means we can do a few things this afternoon before he falls asleep in his chair.  :)

Blinkie noticed that my nice magnetic copper bracelet is beginning to turn my arm green.  I guess it's time to go coat it with lacquer.  Can't have a green arm to go with my green shirt.

And now, off to all the libraries who called me to say they have my books.

Mallard Fillmore tells it like it is:  A conservative is just a liberal 40 years too late.

It took time, and a lot of stealth, but I was finally able to get a good look at the bird that's been nesting on top of our porch light.  A brief cruise through one of our bird books and I found out that what we have on the porch this year is a black phoebe.

Yeah, the light itself is disgustingly dirty, but Mama Bird takes precedence, at least for a while.

I'm sure my kids will understand immediately why I thought this was so funny.

So, the battery on my trusty Palm Zire 31 is slowly giving up the ghost.

I bought a new battery for it before I took it apart.  If I'd taken it apart first I would have seen that the battery leads are soldered in.  While I certainly have the skills to unsolder and resolder a battery, what I don't have is any inclination to do it.  :)

So I guess it is time for me to think seriously about replacing the Zire before the battery bites the dust for good (I get about 30 minutes out of it now).  I want to stick with Palm, both for ease of use and for ease of data transfer.  I don't need a lot of bells and whistles (as is evidenced by my long-time satisfaction with the Zire 31 and the fact that the Palm Centro is the only smartphone that has ever gotten a second look from me).  I'm sure there are PDA features that I don't now have that I will love when I get them, but truthfully other than a larger screen I can't think of any right now.

And, of course, I have the family budget to consider.  As always.

So what should I be looking at?

Cross-posted with my other blog to try to capture a wider audience.

Sick again.  Feels like the same thing I had before my recent travels.  I'm coughing my head off and my throat is sore.  Sigh.

Got a message via ICQ containing a link.  From someone using only a numerical ID, one I'd never seen before.  Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.  Yeah baby, sure, anyone would go ahead and click, wouldn't they.  *snort*

We heard the tele-vultures hovering last night and Vengeant went out to see what was going on.  This.

Got the car back from the mechanic and the bill wasn't as ghastly as I feared it would be.  Phew.  The Buick sure does ride differently with the newly aligned front end and new tires.

I stopped by the grocery store on the way back from the mechanic's last night.  When I came out, circa 9:15pm, I could not believe the number of families with young children (grade school age and younger) headed in.  What ever happened to the concept of BEDTIME?  Ye gods, folks.  Leave the kidlets home with one parent and the other one can go shop in peace.

NASA will let you send your name to the Moon.

Next best thing to being there in person, at least for now.  :)

Wow, HP just sent me an email offering me a Mike Rowe special laptop.

You know what, guys?  I don't need a new computer right now.  But if Mike delivers it in person I might just change my mind.

Whee!  Pat Fish design skins for phones, laptops, and more!

hothothot here today.  Got up to 101^o in the back yard.  Fortunately, we closed up the house early, so it never got above the mid-80s inside.  The house had that nice summery smell to it.  It's good the first few times, but I bet we'll be tired of it by the time this year is done.

F'zer went to a talk on making one's yard wildlife-friendly.  Even though we have a mostly concrete back yard we've actually done some of the right things.  We have birds, and the occasional opossum and raccoon.  We have a birdbath and a hummingbird feeder and all those grasshoppers in the rose bushes.  F'zer now has some ideas on how to make the yard even more wildlife-friendly without spending a lot of money, which is a Good Thing.  Just as long as we don't get coyotes or skunks.

We can smell smoke from the San Gabriel fire and the occasional ash flake comes down.  F'zer and Vengeant used to hike up in that area when they were active in the Boy Scouts.  I hope it wasn't some idiot hiker with a cigarette who started this.

Gonna cook hot dogs on the grill as soon as F'zer gets done talking with his mom.  It sounds like she's having a good day today, so that might take a while.  I seem to have mastered the technique for cooking bacon wrapped hot dogs both inside and outside.  Undoubtedly none of us should be eating them, but they sure do taste good.

Maybe I'll take a Vespa ride after supper.

Nuts.  Vespa's battery appears to be completely dead.  Not even so much as a click out of the starter and kickstarting it doesn't work either.

Guess I have to figure out some way to haul its ass to the dealer to be looked at.  Grrrrr.

Gonna be hot here this weekend.  Not sure how hot, since Channel 5 has decided not to display temperatures for any city even close to here on their weather reports any more.  Oh well, I shouldn't be relying on a weatherbunny for the forecast anyway.

Blinkie will be pleased to hear that I washed the Vespa this morning.  Gonna ride it to the post office in a little bit.  And maybe take a spin through the park this afternoon.

iTunes was doing some weird stuff this morning.  I was editing my primary playlist and it suddenly decided to un-select everything in it.  So I had to go through song by song by song and re-select the stuff I wanted to sync.  It also for some reason de-selected TWIP! in the podcast list, so I had to tell it to go get that, too.  Yeesh.  Software that makes me think this early on a Saturday morning, I dunno if my brain can handle it.

There seems to be no way to disable the flashing blue light on my earhanger.  Thus, I leave it turned off most of the time, because (a) the light runs down the battery and (b) I've got it hanging on my miscellaneous-electronics-catchall on the desk and the flashing drives me nuts.

Fry's has 8 gig Memorex flash drives on sale for $38 today.  Tempting, except that (a) it means a trip to Fry's on a Saturday and (b) I'm not using all the small capacity flash drives I already have.  On the other hand, though, I could look for the Mac-to-VGA adapter too.  Decisions, decisions.

I installed WordPress 2.5.1 on two of my four blogs yesterday.  I don't like the new interface at all, but I suppose I will have to get used to it.  Now I need to focus on reading all the blog-security articles I've saved over the past month or so, and actually take their advice.

I emailed David Gerrold and asked where his website went and he wrote back and said "Argentina?"

Wonder what else needs to get done today?

Anyone know a good place to buy jewelers' tools in the Burbank-Glendale-EagleRock-Pasadena area?  I need a new ring mandrel, and they're heavy, so it'd be nice if I could buy one locally rather than paying for shipping from somewhere else.

David Gerrold's web site seems to have vanished.

I think I will give Scrivener a serious try.  I have a project in mind for which it would work splendidly.

Apparently, I am my mother's literary executor.  I have no idea what that entails, exactly, but I bet it means that if I want to rewrite one of Gran's books I can do it, this time around.  Which is where  Scrivener comes in.

I think, though, that I will need to use my regular keyboard and monitor for it to be most effective.  I guess that means I need to go in quest of a dvi-to-vga converter.  Got the KVM switch already.

Several grocery store chains in LA County are giving away free reusable grocery bags in honor of Earth Day.  Although Ralphs, Vons/Pavilions and Albertsons stores are participating in the giveaway, not one store on the list is in Burbank, Glendale, or Pasadena.

F'zer's company's building is celebrating by collecting old cell phones for the Cell Phones for Soldiers charity.  It took me quite a bit of digging, but I managed to excavate four old cell phones last night, so F'zer was going to drop them off today.  That's a bit less e-waste in our garage and storage room, and it's going for a good cause.

I walked to the post office to pick up my new glasses this morning, doing my bit to save the environment.  Although given the number of people standing outside various businesses smoking, I doubht the air pollution in the area would change much if a dozen people walked that distance today.

I remember when Earth Day got started and it was roundly scorned as being a bunch of hippie crap.  Now that so many corporations need to improve their images, it's amazing how "green" they can pretend to be.  I'd give the hippies a slight edge on this one.

So, Zoe got real interested in Vengeant's dinner plate tonight.  What was she after?  Steak?  Fish?  Chicken?  Curried cat food?

......baked beans. 

Ate some with every evidence of enjoyment, too.

We officially have a Very Weird Cat.

Ralphs markets in SoCal have kosher-for-passover Coca-Cola (with real sugar instead of corn syrup, I knew the rules of kashrut made sense) in 2-liter bottles.  Look for the yellow bottle cap.  And if you hear anyone say they can't taste the difference, offer them condolences on the long-ago death of every taste bud in their head.  I don't dare consume more than one small glass, of course, but oh boy, am I enjoying every sip.  I wonder how well this stuff stockpiles?

I learned today for the first time that those bluetooth earhangers have rechargeable batteries.  I don't know why I assumed they ran on button batteries.  In a few hours, thanks to a delivery from buy.com, I too will be one of those idiots with an  earhanger.

Corollary:  It took me about 15 minutes of excavating in the catch-all-electronic-junk drawer in the living room, but I did find an adapter to go between the mini plug on the regular-phone headset I just bought, and the somewhat larger socket the office phone offers.  And that headset works great except for two small annoyances--no feedback through the earpiece (sounds dead when you talk) and you use the headset by pushing the speakerphone button, but if you should happen to push that button again (say, because your son is talking with his uncle on the phone in another room) you can't turn the headset back on again by pushing the speakerphone button again during the same phone call.  I've got the manual for that phone somewhere, gotta see if the no-second-push business can be changed.

My new glasses arrived today but alas, I was out at the grocery store when the mail arrived, so I will have to hoof it to the post office tomorrow morning to pick up my registered package from Hong Kong.  I am really looking forward to having the new glasses, because the ones I've been using are just enough not-right to be annoying.

I was grousing that none of the grocery stores carry the instant espresso powder that so many of the better chocolate cake recipes call for.  And then I drove home past the international market that might very well carry it.  Oh well, I already ordered some from the King Arthur catalog, which I've been meaning to do for ages anyway. I'll just use instant coffee for now.  Pity the dark-roasted premium instant that might have subbed for espresso powder is $11 for a small jar!  House brand crystals at $3 per jar for me, mate!

I can't burn a Mac disk image on the PC.  At least not with any of the low end burning software I've got.  Foo.

I don't know if anyone ever heard me say that my kids are amazing....  but they are.