How "free" actually works online

Spam and profile hacking

As part of my small, continual war on spam, I have just discovered that the idiot who works as a massage therapist and used my gmail address as a contact point in their online scheduling system was *also* dumb enough to use the mail address as a login username.

Who wants to guess where he also had the account password reset requests go to?

>:D

Forget the e-mail majordomo crap, this is MUCH better.  I’ve just signed him up to half a dozen additional shifts, requested cancellation of one for tomorrow, asked for some shift swaps with co-irkers and put in a leave request for all of December.  I’ve also locked down his availability to basically 8:00am – 8:05am on Thursday mornings so no new shifts can be scheduled, and because I’m a prick I have just finished changing a few of his profile settings around.  His new display name of Sparky goes well with the nipple pink colour scheme, I think.

I also just found the notification system preferences, so he now gets text message notifications of shifts too, but the don’t-disturb lockout is set from 6am – midnight so hopefully he’s in for a fairly interesting night.  Especially because I also set the notification lead times to 6 hours, so 8am shifts will burst a text at 2am.  I’ve also enabled text notifications for all shift adds, drops, changes, swap requests and schedule updates, and since the system is cloud hosted in the USA it works on their system that charges the SMS *recipient* for the message – not the sender.

Hopefully this will convince Sparky to lift his game, but I reckon he deserves it.  How the hell he got my surname@gmail.com address in his profile will forever be a source of wonderment, considering his profile says his last name is Elias.  *sigh*

Dinner out

Had a nice dinner out last night at The Kitchen Cat, which used to be Fifteen Melbourne.  Tobie Puttock is still running the place and it's still a teaching kitchen, but as it's the one restaurant that was privately owned as part of the Fifteen chain, I have always suspected the owners wanted a bit more out of the place than it was offering.

Starters were an in-house made charcuterie medley with lemon and vingear picked vegetables, assorted breads with olive oil and balsamic to dip, and a spectacular waygu carpaccio with mustard mayonnaise which just melted in the mouth.

For mains I had charcoal rotisserie cooked pork belly with jus and baked nicola potatoes and lemon dressed rocket, Calley had a hand rolled spaghetti bolognese and mixed roast vegetables.

Dessert was baked custard and salted caramel tart and a French cheese platter with fruit jam and Italian breads.

I am definitely going to have a go at reproducing that carpaccio at home.

And so it ends for another year

The dulcet roar of a poorly muffled diesel and the groan of a compactor at work announced the end of the City Of Greater Oakleigh Annual Crap Swap this morning.

Annual Crap Swap (officially titled the bulk and hard rubbish collection) is always interesting.  People produce absolutely mindblowing amounts of rubbish from I have no idea where.  They then stack this on their footpath in tidy piles ready for collection.  Everyone then walks around the suburb and collects about half of it (presumably as ammo for next year?) and strews the rest around the place so the whole suburb looks like a tip for weeks.

What’s interesting is that some people still don’t get the rules around the collection.  The rubbish guys are *not* going to collect that old LPG cylinder, and I don’t care if you have put it out three years running.  I would have thought that carrying it back in the first year after they collected everything else and left it would have been a wake-up call, but at this stage I won’t be surprised at all to see it out next year.

The same goes for paint cans.  Leaving ‘em there for six months afterwards as some sort of silent protest doesn’t achieve anything other than make you look like a twat.  You’re still going to be carrying it back in, but I have no doubt it will be back out next year.

Looks like some damp in that concrete, too.

Ah. Bugger.

Genius of the week

Glad to hear it hurt.

In unrelated news, I am now receiving spam for some idiot ordering from Pizza Hut.  In North America.  If I can figure out how I'm having three dozen pizzas delivered to him soon.

Admit, you would too.

Amazing... for the first time ever I am forced to admit that World Of Warcraft does have some upsides.

More gmail fun

Yet again am I receiving misdirected e-mail meant for someone who can’t quite deal with the idea that there is only one person on the planet with a gmail address of [surname]@gmail.com.  This time it’s some dude here in Melbourne who apparently works part-time as a massage therapist, and the employer has some sort of interesting online shift scheduling system to let people know when they’re rostered to work, allow shift swaps and callin requests etc.

Where the fun starts is that while I can’t log into the web interface without a password, because the system regards my e-mail address as trusted, I *can* do a number of things via reply mail – the majordomo responds to text commands.  http://support.wheniwork.com/kb/manager-basics/email-commands

As such, since I have to put up with the spam, I am therefore fucking with the scheduling as much as possible.  I think that’s only fair.

I work with some smart people

I am absofuckinglutely gobsmacked.

Some space cadet found the $5,000 fully automatic coffee machine upstairs out of beans, and couldn’t quite locate the two whole cartons of beans stored in the cabinet the machine sits on.  So what was their dumb arse response?

(a)     Go out and buy beans

(b)     Try to use coffee grounds

(c)     Fill the machine to the brim with a tin of powered instant coffee then fire it up.

Lock in C, Eddie.

Game on

It’s just gone midnight on 11 September 2011 in New York.  The next 24 hours will be interesting news.

 

 

I suspect the neighbours are going to be a bit pissy when they get home this evening.

Now here's a classy couple

To me the pics suggest that this isn't a first generation thing, either.

http://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/scotsol/homepage/news/3792109/Brother-and-sister-in-lift-sex.html

That's got to be a concentration breaker

"Pick a line you can drive through." - Robert Duvall, Days Of Thunder.

How stupid and out of touch is our judicial system

I read with dismay yesterday that the high court has ruled the government's "Malaysia solution" to boat people as illegal.

I really see this as no more than a knocker, liberal not-hear-to-help-but-happy-to-criticise reaction from a bunch of people so divorced from the real world that you have to doubt their capacity to effectively represent the wishes of the country's people.

The reality is that Australia currently has a problem with people smugglers pushing large numbers of illegal immigrants towards us.  This problem needs a solution, and that solution is not to accept the illegal immigrants, because that sends precisely the answer to the scum who organise the boats that perpetuates the problem.  The only solution is to sent a clear, unambiguous consistent message to the people involved - you will not be allowed to succeed.

Personally I think the root solution is a lot simpler - turn the boats around well before they hit Australian waters.  If the occupants disable the engines, hook on a tow line and tow them back to Indonesia where they come from, cast them off at the 12 mile limit, and send a radio message to the Indonesian authorities that they require rescue while you're steaming away.  If they try sinking the boat, pluck them out of the water, take them back and do the same in life rafts - they're cheap in comparison.

The point of the exercise is that it's not our problem, and as soon as we do otherwise we have decided to take on ownership of somebody else's problem - at great cost, political furore and the effective collapse of any immigration standards, which are already in the toilet.

The liberals of the country will wring their hands together and decry the solution - "You can't do that!  Think of the children!" - but offer no solution themselves.

Personally I think the government should ASAP ammend the relevant legislation to permit the Malaysia solution, tell the taxpayer-funded legal representatives of the illegal boat people who have no right to be here in the first place to collectively fuck themselves, and get what needs to be done, done.