Monday, December 22, 2014

Spam for Christmas

It seems that the dark elves responsible for pumping out unwanted spam of all kinds have the Christmas spirit of giving right now. Unfortunately, they completely misunderstood the true meaning of the season and are bent on raking in money for themselves.

Whether it be email or Blogger referral spam, the filters have been tested to the breaking point in December. Earlier, I posted an update on seoairport suddenly returning with a flood. A new approach that I haven’t seen outside of emails showed up too and that’s what I’ll be covering in this post.

I hope by now that everyone knows not to open an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) attachment from a stranger when they get one in their inbox. This has been a way to deliver trojans and viruses onto PCs for many years.

Easy Aromatherapy Spam 01Easy Aromatherapy Spam 02

So it was surprising to see referral spam that linked to PDFs including one hosted on Amazon’s cloud service which arrived as s3 . amazonaws . com / pdf-1ydO / qyR20YHDImN9.pdf on my Blogger stats page.

Why would anybody use such a discredited way to get hits? Another referral and a little digging provided me with a theory.

Remember to not click on links such as these, leave it to security pros and madmen to investigate. In my case, it is the latter though a virtual machine and an anonymous routing service were employed to keep my PC uncompromised.

SEO Spam or Fear the Penguin

One of the most irritating con jobs on the Net is selling links to people desperate to get traffic to their websites. This is part of what is known as “black hat SEO” with SEO standing for Search Engine Optimization. So it was rather interesting to get two false referrals from seoairport . com / site / product / in my Blogger stats today. UPDATED: December 2014 has seen a massive amount of hits from seoairport . com / site / recommended with no end in sight. New screen captures added at the end of the post.

SEO Airport Spam 01

Firing up the trusty virtual machine, I checked it out. Remember folks, don’t click on strange links and leave that to daredevils or those of us with more than one operating system on a machine. The name told me what to expect out of the site and I wasn’t disappointed.

The home page above is of basic design, which will be important later on.

Thursday, December 04, 2014

So I Was Driving Along a County Road…

And I saw what looked like a dead cat with a kitten nestled up to it near an intersection. A half mile or so further down the road I turned around when I saw nothing moving in the rearview mirror. Stopping the car and getting out revealed no dead cat, but three kittens huddled together for warmth right at the edge of the road. They were completely lost and crying for their mother.

Concerned for their safety, I managed to corral two and carry them across the road to the farm where I suspected they belonged. The third eventually followed me to the safety of familiar territory while one jumped off me when the dog residing there started barking. However, one was just fine with me carrying it and was comfortable nestled in my arm.

Talking to the surprised owner of the property it turned out their barn cat mother had taken them hunting. His surprise was my carrying them, since he had tried wooing them and never been able to lay a finger on the critters.

Looking at the purring kitten looking back up at me, I realized that another four legged denizen was going to be added to our household.

Kitten 01

Not the best picture, but I had the wrong settings on the camera again. He’s a pretty little cat with a face like a bobcat and quite a bit bigger than his siblings. Fairly sure he’s a he, since it is the old semicolon ; rather than colon : formation in back.

Friday, November 28, 2014

Paint it Black Friday

Normally I like to post something about being thankful around Thanksgiving, however I’m in no mood to do so this year. It has been the kind of year where every blessing has revealed a Faustian twist behind it souring things considerably. Suffice it to say that actively working on being grateful has been a task and as of this week I’m completely depleted of the emotion.

A large part of my foul mood has to do with having been ill for several weeks with an upper respiratory bug that only now is clearing up. Much more aggravating is continued problems for Dad involving a leaking feeding tube. It was replaced on short notice Monday and now is worse as of yesterday. So he isn’t able to feed at all at the moment while we wait for a return call from the department involved.

Well, it looks like we have to go in, no surprise. I’m suspecting an infection thanks to discharge I just saw. Going to be another long day if we can get out in the first place. Tractor path is going to get used, methinks.

Monday, November 17, 2014

The Pipes are Freezing, Danny Boy

Struggling with an upper respiratory infection made last week difficult, yet the cold weather has been just as frustrating. Today’s fun was finding the hot water lines frozen, the fan used to duct air from the basement into the crawlspace broken, and a window mysteriously out allowing wind directly in.

How that window came to be lying outside is baffling, for there is no way the wind could have sucked it outside, frame and all. We’ve had the opposite problem with windows blown in before which makes sense. I’m wondering if a varmint came in through the cat door and couldn’t figure its way back out. That’s a longshot, a Twilight Zone kind of improbable, due to the location having nothing to climb up to the window in question.

With the temperature at 10 degrees F (-9 C) and a wind chill of –1 F (-18 C), it will take a long time to thaw the pipes. In fact, the thermometer is dropping with the sun setting so it is going to be very cold tonight with wind chills of up to – 20 F possible. Hard to believe it is the middle of November.

I may have to make an emergency run for a fan tonight if things don’t improve within the next couple of hours. If this is what autumn is going to be like, I don’t look forward to winter.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Snow and Other Discomforts

A short guide to configuring a LG 27MP33HQ monitor for a better picture follows after an account of how I ended up having to do so. Not what I was planning to write, but what else is new?

Yesterday morning greeted the residents of rural Yucatan with a small accumulation of snow. As I type this, more of the white stuff is falling leaving the yard a patchwork of green and white. Winter has shown up early in Southeastern Minnesota and shows no signs of letting go in the immediate future if the forecasts are to be believed.

That wasn’t the only sight to rudely greet me yesterday. Turning on my computer monitor revealed waves of green rolling through the right side of the screen. Having seen this before, I knew it was hardware failure. Still, doing all the right things to eliminate software driver and cable issues were undertaken to no avail. In fact, the not terribly old Asus VH236H decided to get worse by the minute.

Saturday, November 08, 2014

Beautiful Pictures

Sorry, there will be no photographs in this post. However, the title is appropriate as will be revealed.

The last couple of weeks have been physically taxing, hence my failure to keep updates on what has been going on. I was lucky to get even one Halloween themed review up this year. Between a short notice visit, election night precinct results madness, a cold, and a lengthy day at Gundersen’s East Building, it has been a tiring pace for a CFS sufferer.

Ah, I should explain the post title. It comes from that day at the clinic when Dad was put through the PET scanner to see if cancer had come back. Going in the tube involves a long process starting with imbibing the tracing dye, waiting for it to go through the system, and then the scan itself.

Even after that ordeal, we had time to kill before seeing Dad’s doctor. Suffice it to say that my Nook HD’s battery has rarely ended up as depleted that Thursday afternoon. Too many crossword puzzles took its toll on it and me.

Eventually we got to see the good doctor and when she walked in she couldn’t wait to show Dad his “beautiful pictures.” That will probably be the first and last time that phrase will be used about pictures of him. Although, I have heard him described as a cute old man.

Don’t tell him that.

Of course this meant good news. No tumors were visible and the blood tests showed no signs of cancer. Officially, my father is in remission.

That is a ray of light in what has been a dismal year, not just for us but for other people I know. For some reason, 2014 has had a brutal character about it. May it improve for others too is my fervent hope.