I just stumbled upon these two videos. One of them is almost three months old. Although it doesn’t prove much, it is quite spectacular with its fancy high speed camera at 2700 shots per second.

Chrome versus Potato

The other one … well… it isn’t as spectacular as Chrome’s. Seriously, it isn’t. But …. OMG!!! This is genius. Exactly as scientific as the first one. Not as visually appealing. But tomorrow morning I’ll still be laughing.

Opera versus Potato (Parody)

Well, it seems like all the charade I had during several weeks is nothing compared to what this guy accomplished: he actually managed to ship a lot of worthless heavy junk, at the scammer’s expense, of course. The death threats he received afterwards would make for some of the best tag-lines ever.

It turns out there is a whole Community out there that have made a hobby out of scamming the scammers. Looks like fun!

They even have a brand of laptops to bait the scammers. The name is … wait for it … Anus Laptops. As you can see, just the brand name is more than enough to produce some peculiar conversations. OMG! Simply genius!

If you click on the image you’ll download a MIDI file of a piece that was played on violin at the ceremony. The Super Mario Bros theme, by Köji Kondö. Hey, you gotta love those geeks! ;-)

Congratullations, Alvaro and Lidia! I hope you have a fantastic -well deserved- Honeymoon. Best of wishes to both of you on your new life.

If you don’t know what the joke is about, you’re clearly not watching the Big Bang Theory.

It turns out the game was invented by Sam Kass some years ago. Kudos to you, sir.

Awesome show. True story.

What? You’ve never heard of  Barney Stinson either?

UPDATE: A reader just sent a variant that is even more absurd. Don’t hold your breath: Rock, fire, scissors, snake, human, tree, wolf, sponge, paper, air, water, dragon, devil, lightning, gun.

As I was saying, I received several fishy offers. Note that I’m posting the scammer’s private information on purpose :)

For example:

[...]
Received: from [196.3.183.73] by web59915.mail.ac4.yahoo.com via HTTP;
[...]
From: kerry jones <kerr_jone@yahoo.com>
[...]
Hello,
  am kerry by name am now in united kindom for a
purpose.....am sending this item to a friend in lagos nigeria....i will
like to let you know that am paying you through pay pal....i will want
you to send me the total cost include the shipping cost to
lagos-nigeria..you can also call me on this phone number now
+447024017578..please get back to me asap.

It’s astonishing how many guys fall for it. I guess the phone is a VoIP UK number, but hey, guess what?

This friendly guy that is “now in united kindom for a purpose” is writing from Lagos, Nigeria! GeoIP sure is a nice thing. Which by the way is supported in Cherokee, in case you’re wondering how to use that on a web server. Pretty handy.

Normally I don’t even take the time to answer these guys. Sometimes I even send them a fast response with a local reference, and they stop bothering:

Oh, really?
And how is it there by Leeki Lagoon today? The forecast seems cloudy.

Here is another guy with the same story:

Received: from [41.219.235.64] by web59706.mail.ac4.yahoo.com via HTTP;
Sat, 11 Apr 2009 10:37:09 PDT
From: Michal Benyak <michal.benyak@yahoo.com>
I am in the Uk now and you are shipping to the manager of my store far away
west africa (Nigeria),so get back to me with your paypal id asap so that the
payment can be made.

He even got annoyed when I told him I wasn’t shipping to Nigeria. LOL!

Why? but am going to pay for the shipping.Get back to me with your paypal id
asap so that the payment can be made immediately

ASAP, is that clear? ;-)

As I said, I tend to pay little attention to these guys, but the other day I stumbled uppon one so persistent that I couldn’t resist. I was so amused that I thought it would be fun to mess with the guy. I’ve been having a nice laugh lately thanks to his mails. You can check the whole list of emails sent back and forth (with most headers) on my next post, just in case you want to investigate. I’m only deleting my info, not his. In short, I got to mess with him for weeks with false tracking numbers, and refused to deal with the crew of his fake bank  because they had offended me. Then I got to laugh a little more by “being paid the whole insurance” by the courier company for not delivering the item. And now I think I’m going to make up a false assistant to mess yet a little more. I’ll have to think about it.

Stay tuned for my story with “Dowing Morris” <dowingm80@gmail>, the scammer wannabe that was supposedly writing from Canada. Read Canada as in Kachia (Nigeria), of course.

Alvaro told me about it this morning and I just had to share it with everybody. This is what you will find if you visit http://apache-es.org, a community in Spanish built to talk about Apache and system administration.

The “aviso” part is a warning:

Apache-es.org, the only Q&A site about Apache that is running Cherokee!

As I said: plain genius!

Anyway, I was having my injuries treated at my sister’s when my nephew came by. He’s a three year old, so every answer I gave him about the accident raised another question.

This one was priceless:

Uncle, do you want my training wheels?

I’m curious how I can make Python print text in color.

That depends strictly on your printer. With my hp LaserJet 1200, no way — not even Python’s power can overcome the hardware’s limitations in this regard… it’s a black-and-white printer and that’s all there is to it! If I did have a color printer, then I would have Python produce the appropriate postscript code, or “escape-sequences” in whatever printer-specific language a given printer requires to have it output color text (or, depending on my operating system, printer driver, filters, etc, I might have to send appropriate “escape-sequences” or whatever to the DRIVER in order to convince it to drive the printer appropriately).

Isn’t it great? ;)

UPDATE: Just when I believed it was so obvious, a friend asked me about the meaning of this. And there I thought everyone knew the Starfleet Insignia from Star Trek. I think the one in the mousemat corresponds to the periods between 2351 and 2371. Not quite sure about that. I can’t say that I’m a hardcore Trekkie anymore. Listen to what I’m saying: Sometimes I even forget whole Star Trek races! Unforgiveable!. Luckily every single computer I’ve had since the early nineties has been named after one, so at least those … ;)

What was that again? Ah, yes! Posting about non-computer stuff. There is always a first time.

Yesterday I went to the Teatro Bellas Artes to watch a show called ¡Comicapela!. The group of performers is called b vocal, and I must say everyone had a great time with them. A really comical show with all five team members singing a capella in a Bobby McFerrin fashion. Yes, that’s right. Every single instrument was voice made.

I really enjoyed the evening. They’ve been there since June-11th, and the representation lasts until July-13th, though it is possible that the show gets extended until the end of the month. Here is a link to buy the tickets. If you have the chance and you’re Spanish spoken, the show is totally recommended!