New eBay fraud email

The one asking you to confirm the sale of Item X has branched out, they're now using a variety of products. I'm getting a lot for US Robotics modems, I can't conceive of anyone having a good use for them. ANYWAY, I found this in my junk mail folder tonight:

Dear eBay user,

This email was sent to you because your email address was changed if you did not authorize this please click on the yellow button to revert to your current address.

You can also click on the following link into to revert your address:
http://cgi4.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ChangeEmailConfirm
Your confirmation code is: 22033

If you need additional help, contact eBay's Customer Support:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/contact_inline/index.html

Thank you,
eBay

Naturally the URLs do not point to an eBay site. The insidious thing about this is that most users are likely to use the same password for both eBay and PayPal, so if they got your login, it would be easy for them to drain your bank account through PayPal.

They need to line some of these fraudsters up against the wall and give everyone whom they have defrauded a BB machine gun.

Flyboys, a review without spoilers

Fun. Very simple script. Not so much a buddy film as a coming of age film during war (soon to be a category at the Academy Awards). We both enjoyed it. The dialog was a little hokey, but the aerial combat sequences were just amazing. I'd love to see the Making Of to see how much was CGI. In an additional level of coolness, the cinema multiplex that we saw it at was using a digital projector, so there was no big jump in brightness at reel changes.

It's kind of funny. When I took my portraiture class last semester, my instructor said that you'll notice errors in movies more. She was right. When one of the American pilots is talking to his sweetie in Rouen, the light on his face is harsh and from screen right. When you get the opposite view of the woman (the VERY attractive Jennifer Decker), it's obviously diffused through a scrim.

I'm not an expert on World War I aircraft, but the planes looked very authentic to me, and seeing the zeppelin was VERY cool! (the zep has been shown on trailers on tv, so that ain't a spoiler). Oh, and the squadron mascot was quite neat, I'm wondering if Celeste would like a playmate.

I was given a free CPU upgrade Friday!

I walk into work Friday, and there's an appallingly dirty motherboard sitting on a box that wasn't there when I closed Thursday night. There's also a PC that isn't in one of the cases that I recognize as being one that we use at school. Turns out that one of my co-workers, whom we shall call B, is semi-upgrading the PC of a friend. The PC in question has a strange problem: it has an AGP 8x video port, but due to a chipset problem, it will not work at 8x. Basically it was shipped with a factory defect and never recalled/fixed.

B was going to take the CPU from said defective computer and place it in his wife's former motherboard which had recently been upgraded and then install said motherboard in friend's case. It was a net downgrade in overall power, but it would allow better graphics support, which was a net gain for friend.

So the old motherboard is uninstalled, new but used motherboard is installed, CPU is swapped, and system is powered up.

For about three seconds.

Then it powers down again.

We try test after test. We hook up a monitor, but the system won't power up long enough for even the bios information to display. So we hook up the system speaker. While the system is powered up, the speaker emits one continuous beep, just like a flat-lined cardiac monitor as seen on TV.

It's dead, Jim.

Some time between Friday and when B upgraded his wife's PC, the motherboard had totally died. So back into the cabinet goes the old motherboard, B switches CPUs, taking the old board from a Athlon 2100 to a 2400 (the CPU from his wife's old system). Unfortunately the only place to buy a motherboard in Alamogordo no longer sells the board that would support the CPU, video, and memory of the old system, even though it is only about a year old. Time stands still for no man nor piece of computer hardware.

SO, we have one semi-functioning PC, one dead motherboard, and one Athlon 2100 CPU. As it turns out, the 2100 CPU is identical in pin-out and socket design to MY desktop's Athlon 1800. So B gives me the chip! Saturday evening I install it, and aside from having to go into bios setup to confirm the settings for the new chip, it's a drop-kick installation and now I have a faster machine!


Now here's the best part: the same thing is going to happen Monday!


When the friend's PC was more or less dead and it wasn't possible to get a replacement motherboard without ordering online, MY BOSS GAVE THE FRIEND A COMPLETE PENTIUM 4 PC! It's a 2.8GHz machine that is mildly tricked out that was just sitting around at my bosses' home. He'd bought a new PC and didn't have anything he needed the old one for, so he gave it to the friend!

Which means there's a Athlon 2400 chip available....

So I get another free upgrade Monday!

The only problem is that it shows off how weak the rest of my system is. I really need more memory and faster hard drives, which really means that I need a new computer. But it's really not viable for me to get an old box, and I have no problem running older hardware as long as it continues to do what I need done.

(What I need is a SATA or PATA controller with a pair of 200gig drives, it'd run me $250-300 and give me a huge boost in disk performance, might be easier (though a little more expensive) to just replace the motherboard with one that has an on-board SATA controller. Taking the memory up to 2gig would also do my system a world of good.)