It would appear PGE is having some difficulty in maintaining a steady 120VAC current to Montara, and thus my links are down today (and hopefully my equipment isn’t completely fried.) Current is alternating between brownout low voltage and surge. It’s pretty weird.

So I expect to be back at some point, but am down for now…

If you’ve been on the ‘net for any time at all, I’m sure you’ve gotten notes from phishers. What’s a phisher you ask? A sender of an unsolicited mail intended to lure you to visit a site and disclose sensitive information about yourself under false pretenses and for the benefit of the criminals. As a public service, here’s one of about 200 similar mails I’ve gotten over the past few weeks:

Dear Member,

The security questions and answers for your PayPal account were changed on April 23, 2008.
If you did not authorize this change, please contact us immediately using the form on the following page:

https://www.xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxx-pay-pal-acc.com/

Thank you for using PayPal!

The PayPal Team Security Advisory: When you log in to your PayPal account,
be sure to open up a new web browser (e.g. Internet Explorer or Netscape)
and type in the PayPal URL to make sure you are on the real PayPal website.

For more information on protecting yourself from fraud, please review the Security Tips in our Security Center.

Please do not reply to this email. This mailbox is not monitored and you will not receive a response.
For assistance, log in to your PayPal account and click the Help link located in the top right corner of any PayPal page.
—————————————————————-
Copyright © 1999-2008 PayPal. All rights reserved.

The xxx’s I’ve added as I don’t want to give these scumbags any more linkage than they already get, but suffice to say the landing page is a complete rip of PayPal and if you didn’t look at the URL, you could easily be fooled by what they’ve put on their harvest page. So, please, please, please don’t click on the links that come along with these messages and by all means, do not respond to the criminals.

If you are concerned and want to check what’s happening with your account, open a separate browser window, use your bookmarks to visit the vendor in question, and inquire through their customer service process how they would contact you if there was a problem and validate that there isn’t one.

In the past I would have suggested forwarding the message on to abuse@[vendor name].com – but these have become as bad as the thing you’re reporting. So do that if you like, but it’s now arduous. Be careful out there! Be skeptical, and don’t click URLs from unsolicited emails.

After nearly 15 years of this behavior, you’d think we would have learned how to defeat it by now. Oh well, another business opportunity to build a better mouse trap…

Attribution: Unknown
This made me chuckle and I thought you might like it too. Thanks Scott for the tip…

Obama did not win, he lost by 10 points. This is exactly how it’s being reported, a “win” for Hillary. Congratulations Hillary, I hope it fills the hole in your soul. It’s not a win for the country, that’s for sure.

Meanwhile, I feel like a sucker for again, having some faith in the citizens of our country to be able to tell the difference between good/evil, right/wrong, better/worse, you get the picture. Shame on me, after the 2004 election it should be clear that the populace of this country is unable and unwilling to make decisions in our own best interest.

It’s said that a democracy gives a country the government and leaders it deserves. That’s where we’re headed folks, that’s where we’re headed…It’s very disappointing. The only redeeming factor is, and Obama was right to say this, any of the three candidates constitute an improvement over the current occupant of the Whitehouse.

In the spirit of Earth Day, here’s a little project virtually anyone can attempt, if you’ve got any solar resource at all. Most homes spend around 30% of their energy budget heating water. Get 100 meters of black hose, a few connectors, and a place to site your heater and you’re in business with a cost effective solar hot water heater.

Segment 1: First Attempt


With the humor out of the way, here’s the rest of the story…

Segment 2: Success!


Hats off to Green Power Science who put these entertaining, yet cheesy, videos together.