General Updates

I'll try to elaborate more on one or two of these a bit latter but for now:

I am now on Centrelink's Newstart Allowance (AKA "the dole") and looking for a full time job. I hate the whole thing, the sooner I get a job, I don't care what, the better. This may have a detrimental effect on my degree by putting completion out another year.

I am taking driving lessons, all going well I should have my license in 5 or 6 weeks. Why 5 or 6 weeks? That's because after one and a half lessons my instructor decided I am capable of passing the test. So this week we are booking the test during my lesson (that alone costs in the order of $50!), but Vicroads has a waiting list of about 5 weeks, hence the wait.

S302 has been bought by El Zorro and will probably be seen in action working infrastructure trains around suburban Melbourne.

Macintosh has switched it's full lineup of iBook and Powerbook computers over to Intel Core Duo processors and are now known as Macbook and Macbook pro respectively. Also they have dropped the 12" iBook(Macbook) model, so it looks like my plans for one of those are down the toilet, they are now 14" only.

I could always get a second hand one at some stage though. But then again those black Macbooks are sexy...

Spam

For the first time today I got some spam that is actually purportedly from a bank I am a customer of, the contents are as follows...

Dear Commonwealth Bank of Australia member,

Due to recent hardware failure and partial loss of our database we decided to review
our customers account information to prevent security problems . If you
could take 3-5 minutes out of your online experience to verify your
account status , you will not run into any further problems .

Update your NetBank Account : Click Here

Thank You ,
Commonwealth Bank of Australia Management Stuff

Please do not reply to this confirmation email, as this message was sent to all Commonwealth Bank members.

Now for starters I'm behind the times and don't actually use NetBank, but that's not all. Oh no, if you were reading carefully or even just skimming you should have picked up a few glaring errors that give this piece of correspondence an air of rank amateurishness, they are:

1.

Dear Commonwealth Bank of Australia member

Since when does a bank have members?

2.

Thank You ,
Commonwealth Bank of Australia Management Stuff

I mean I agree that banks are full of management stuff, but this is just unprofessional even for a spamer.

Another dead give away, as with all these sorts scams is the presence of a URL with lots of .'s in it. And no I'm not including it for obvious reasons.

I should mention my method for dealing with spam, which is that my ISP flags messages as spam and I have a filter set up in Thunderbird to sort it all into a spam folder. The reason I send it to a spam folder is partly out of habit, partly out of the fact that the occasional legitimate email gets flagged by mistake and partly because I don't completely trust my ISPs spam filter for the afore mentioned reason. When it's in my spam folder I scan the sender and subject before doing a "CTRL-A, Delete" maneuver. And I must be doing something right because I'd be lucky get more than 10 or so spam emails a day. If it was worse I'd probably use a spam filter like mailwasher (that's the only one I can think of off-hand).