 "Making a mockery of computer programming" |
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"That's the trouble with computers, always think in black and white. No aquamarines, no blues, no imagination."
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The Doctor
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Welcome to T.M.R's Workstation, the "online residence" of me, fairly commonly known as T.M.R, sometimes as The Magic Roundabout, Jason, " oy, git face!" and assorted other titles which are probably far too rude to be repeated in polite company. Or any other kind of company for that matter. This page is the latest three installments from my blog and, for the more masochistic amongst you who feel the need, click here to read the remaining drivel.
Today i've been spending some time writing a new CV; i'm not specifically planning on any jobs to go hunting for (well, there's one i'm going to send it towards once i've proof read it and got the Boss to take a look) but it might be time to go hunting for more... well, lucrative employment. It's been rather weird writing a CV after a decade of not needing one and i've been putting it off for a few weeks because of that. i'm finding myself wondering what exactly i need to include, how far back in my employment history to go and so forth. The education history was amusingly brief, four GCSE C or B grades, one for a subject that doesn't exist in the modern curriculum ("Computing", back in the olde days when they taught BASIC programming in schools) and all about as unrepresentative of myself or my current skills as it's possible to get! And i'll be honest, i've had to either look up or pretty much guess a few dates because i can't remember that far back any more...!
i've decided that it's time that my build server was rebuilt as well. i'm never keen on rebuilding computers (at least, not the ones i use personally) because it always takes me an age to "settle in" afterwards; this machine was rebuilt recently and i've still not finished straightening the start menu out and so on... |
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So i was checking my emails earlier and in my spam box was a reasonably well done forgery. It purported to be from PayPal and stated that a £100 transfer of funds from my account had been cleared for a subscription to a website called Play And Connect... that was something of a surprise since i've vever heard of the bunnies i'd apparently given a ton to and only ever had that much money in my PayPal account twice and neither was this year!
So despite it already being filed as junk, i did some digging around; Play And Connect haven't got a site up right now but there's a note saying they've nothing to do with the emails, that meant a little digging around through the email itself to see where the "trick" was. The sneakiness laid within the "cancel" link, the text version pointed to PayPal.com but the actual link read PayPal.co-uk.***.pl (i've not posted the full domain, but it was only three characters long) followed by a legitimate-looking command string. Presumably the less tech savvy readers would either not look at the real link or if they did merely see the PayPal at the start of the link and miss the .pl domain.
One little twist is that the reply address points to a parked domain, PayPals.co.uk (note the plural) and i assume that's because if they'd forged a straight PayPal address it would've been picked up by the spam scanners far more quickly. |
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In fact my work box decided to constantly say that it was "unable to run" just about everything so i pretty much took it as read that the nearly three year old installation of Windows 2000 had finally eat itself. But we can rebuild it, we have the technology and it's been lying around waiting for a few final parts for a couple of weeks now; the new version of the machine known as Ikaruga goes from 1.5GHz up to 2GHz and now has three (count 'em) 80Gb hard drives... and none of my development software so i've got a couple of days installing to get through before it'w workable! [Sigh] |
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