Even More Rich Email!

07.08.2004

I originally got mail in January that offered to cut me in on part of $10.5 million. In March, somebody else died and I was eligible for $12 million. Within 2 days of each other last week, I got 2 more emails, one for $17 million, the other for $10.4 million. That means that since the beginning of the year, there's over $49 million waiting for me. In Nigeria.

The latest 2 emails hit a little closer to home, since they refer to the deaths of Roy Spears and Robert Spears. It's obvious that Nigeria is no longer safe for anyone named Spears, especially if they have more than $10 million. I'm in a quandry, since if I went to Nigeria to pick up my earmarked $49 million, and I have a last name of Spears, I would definitley be dead. Curse you, my quandry!

For the joy of those that like reading these things (and picking them apart in your spare time), I present my latest additions to my personalized Nigerian scam letters:

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Email #1:

International remittance Dept,
Global Bank Nig. Plc,
Corporate Office,
136 Adeola Odeku road,
Victoria Island,
Lagos - Nigeria.
29th june, 2004

Hello, YOU CAN REPLY TO dr_simon01@yahoo.com

I am Dr. SIMON OBIORA a banker, staff in the office of the director international remittance department, Global Bank of Nigeria Plc, Lagos -Nigeria .I have urgent and very confidential business proposition for you.On June 2001,an American Oil consultant/contractor with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation,engr. ROY SPEARS made a numbered time (Fixed) Deposit for twelve calendar months, valued at US$17,000,000.00(seventeen million Dollars ) in my branch.Upon maturity,I sent a routine notification to his forwarding address but got no reply.

After a month,we sent a reminder and finally we discovered from his contract employers, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation that Engr. Roy died from an automobile accident with his wife and three children.On further investigation,I found out that he died without making a WILL, and all attempts to trace his next of kin was fruitless I therefore made further investigation and discovered that He did not declare any kin or relations in all his official documents, including his Bank Deposit paperwork in my Bank. This sum of US$17,000,000.00 is still sitting in my Bank and the interest is being rolled over with the principal sum at the end of each year. No one will ever come forward to claim it.

According to Nigerian Law, at the expiration of 5(five) years, the money will revert to the ownership of the Nigerian Government if nobody applies to claim the fund.Consequently, my proposal is that I will like you as a foreigner to stand in as the next of kin to him so that the fruits of this old man's labour will not get into the hands of some corrupt government officials. This is simple, I will like you to provide immediately your full name and address so that the Attorney will prepare the necessary documents and affidavits which will put you in place as the next of kin, your direct phone number for easy communication.

A bank account in any part of the world which you will provide will then facilitate the transfer of this money to you as the beneficiary/next of kin.The money will be paid into your account for us to share in the ratio of 60% for me and 40% for you.There is no risk at all as all the paperwork for this transaction will be done by the attorney and my position with the bank guarantees the successful execution of this transaction.If you are interested, please send the informations to me. Upon your response,I shall then send to you an application which you will fill and forward to the bank requesting the release of the fund to you.Please observe utmost confidentiality, and be rest assured that this transaction would be most profitable for both of us. +234-8033053069

Best regards, YOU CAN REPLY TO dr_simon01@yahoo.com

Dr. Simon

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Email #2
STEVE CHAMBERS
BARRISTER (REV.) STEVE KALU (SAN)
LEGAL PRACTITIONER, SOLICITOR & ADVOCATE
PLOT 9, YOUNIS BASHORUN STREET,
OFF AJOSE ADEOGUN STREET, VICTORIA ISLAND ANNEX
P.M.B. 1254, LAGOS, NIGERIA.


Dear Spears,

I am Barr. (Rev.) Steve Kalu (SAN) Solicitor & Advocate, personal attorney to Engineer Robert Spears, a national of your country, who used to work with Osusu Construction Company Nig. ltd. here in Nigeria herein after, shall be referred to as my client.

My client with his entire family (The wife and Two Children) were involved in the bomb explosion in Lagos, Nigeria, on January 27th, 2002 which, claim many lives and property. Unfortunately, my client and the family lost their lives in that disaster that needed not to have happened. Since then I have made several enquiries to your embassy to locate any of my clients extended relatives, this has also proved unsuccessful. After these several unsuccessful attempts, I decided to track his last name over the Internet, to locate any member of his family hence I contacted you.

My purpose of contacting you is to assist in repatriating the fund (Estate) left behind by my client prior to his death before they get confiscated or declared unserviceable by the company where this huge deposit were lodged in, where the deceased had an account valued at about US$10.4 million. The company had issued me a notice to provide the next of kin or have the account confiscated within the next 14 official working days. Since I have been unsuccessful in locating the relatives for over one year, now I seek your consent as the next of kin of the deceased since you have the same last name/surname so that the proceeds of this account valued at US$10.4 million can be paid to you.

I will provide all the necessary official and legal documents that can be used to back up your claim. All I require is your honest co-operation to enable me as the legal attorney to the deceased in seeing that you receive your inheritance fund. I guarantee that this will be executed legitimately to protect you from any breach of the law.

You can find informations about the January 27th, 2002 Bomb Explosion on the website below.

http://www.disasterrelief.org/Disasters/020130Lagos3/

Please get back to me through my email address for further discussion.

Best regards,
Barr. (Rev.) Steve Kalu (SAN)

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Spam Tale

07.07.2004

I got spam from these people last week:

http://www.posrat.info/

I went to fill out all of their information (with fake info, of course), and then in the comments politely asked them to not send spam, to anybody, ever again or I would have to make it my life's goal to fill out their form multiple times every day, making sure to waste somebody's time as they went through and read everything while deciding whether or not it was legitimate.

I then looked at their source code, just to poke around, and saw their javascript to filter out some words from being submitted. While noticing that it was a very involved list, I saw that you could enter "fuckin'" into any of the fields and it would slip by. So to be nice, I pointed this out in my comments to them. Multiple times. Along with a suggestion that they may want to add it to their restrictive list. Even though they haven't yet.

It's so hard to be helpful to some people.

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Spam 4000

07.06.2004

Last month, Yahoo's mail service upped their storage space from 10 MB to 100 MB, mainly to compete with Google's G-Mail service (which offers 1GB of storage for free). I use my yahoo mail account as a catch-all, really using it more for my day-to-day mail than I do other mail accounts. I've had it longer than most of my other accounts, so it's more of a habit to use it than anything else.

Over the years, being my most used account, the amount of Spam I would get has been slightly growing ever so much. Whenever I would go a weekend without checking my mail, I would get about 100 spam emails, which Yahoo would graciously put in my "Bulk" folder so I wouldn't have to look at it unless I wanted. After the space upgrade, I decided I would would save the spam and see how much I was getting. 4 weeks ago I stopped deleting the spam. Today, the spam folder got spam #4000. (In the 3 minutes I've been typing, it's inched up to 4001).

I'm amazed there's that much spam floating around. What is it people are trying to talk me into? The latest topics are:

• Not enough time, Russ? (Well, lately I've had plenty of time)
• Tqygcsfy Ref1ll Your Rx 0rder (How dare you call me Tqygcsfy!)
• Enter To BE A WINNER Of The Sizzlin' Summer Sweeps (And miss my chance to be a LOSER Of The Sizzlin' Summer Sweeps?)
• Car Quotes - Compare & Save (BMWs are more than Yugos)
• Do you need to fix your computer? (Well, no.)
• Coffee's on! What are u waiting for? (I'm waiting to when I like the taste of coffee)
• Donate a car to improve taxes, reputation, and self-confidence! (I would have to gain the self-confidence to walk everywhere, since I've only got 1 car)

It's shocking, nowhere are there offers to increase my penis size, people telling me there are hot lesbians waiting for my call now, or how to get Viagra online. It's a new age of spam! More topics to ignore! But out of 4000 things I should ignore, shouldn't there be at least 1 that I secretly, really need?

Probably not.

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Happy Birthday Open Bio

07.02.2004

It was 2 years ago (yesterday, I think) that an exodus of about 25 laid-off ResGen/Invitrogen workers made their way down the street to the newly formed offices of Open Biosystems. I was part of that group, although I was the only one going as a "contractor", my job being to make a super cool shopping cart and website.

Open Bio was my first real shopping cart that I made from scratch. It was really more than a shopping cart, because it turned into the core for the workflow process that was being developed. I did a lot of things right, I did a couple of things wrong (I can't bring myself to say "a lot of things wrong"). The amazing part was that the website and cart went from nothing to working and accepting orders in 3 months. Normally something like that would have taken 9-12 months, but those were my early ass-kicking days when I would stick to the keyboard for 12 hours a day.

I stayed at Open Bio for about 9 months before coming to Spiritus. As I was leaving they were getting ready to re-skin the website, which I've got to admin looks a lot prettier. But I still get a kick out of looking at the Open Bio site and seeing that my old cart is still there, just chugging away. Even though I may not be there any longer, and although I was just a contractor and not an official "employee", I think I'll always feel like one of the gang from Open Bio.

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B5 Compressed

07.01.2004

The 5 seasons of Babylon 5 are comprised of 110 episodes, 22 per season. After commercials, each episode is roughly 45 minutes long. For the run of the series, that makes the whole thing last about 82 hours.

Over the past 7 weeks, since my little beach vacation, I've managed to watch all 110 episodes.

I've been wanting to watch the entire series for a while. I had never seen the 5th season, and I was completely wrapped up in the first 4 seasons when they originally aired starting in '94. Watching the episodes again, I'm amazed at how much went on. Wars, conspiracies, more wars, friendships built and destroyed. It had a little bit of everything.

Babylon 5 was envisioned as story that would take place over 5 years, with a definite beginning, middle, and end. Although most of that story was squeezed into the first 4 years (rumors of cancellation made the writer fit everything in), the entire series still holds up. My favorite part of the series are the little seeds planted that fortell what will happen. It may happen in the next episode, it may be 50 episodes away, but it's cool to see it finally come to fruition.

I doubt there will ever be another series to try and take on the scope of what Babylon 5 did, but it would be cool for somebody to try.

The Babylon 5 movies are coming out in August, expanding the Babylon 5 universe. I had missed most of these, too, so it's going to be fun getting one last glimpse into what seems to be my favorite series.

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