Hashemian Blog
Huh? What?
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
The Insidious Credit Card
I make a concerted effort to pay off my credit card bills every month. It’s a challenge but I simply have a moral issue paying outrageous usuries to these fattened institutions while many of their customers have to scrape bottom to come up with minimum payments.
If hamburger joints can be dragged into court for bulging up patrons, why not do the same to credit card companies who entice people to borrow money and then enslave them with exorbitant fees if they are late for one or two payments? At least fast-food companies don’t send people postal burgers.
Fact is (and everyone knows it) that people like me who pay their bills in full and on time are not one of their favorite segments. They try hard to trip us up by various schemes including shortening billing cycles because nothing makes them happier than a customer missing a payment. The rate rockets into the stratosphere and they’ve got the pour soul in their claws for eternity. So if you view credit cards as a necessary evil but despise the credit card companies for their evil ways, make this a sad day for them. Pay off that bill that’s been sitting on your kitchen table and celebrate a small victory.
<>
// posted by rh
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
The All-Season SPAM Harvest
For the past two years I have had a closely guarded yahoo account that I've used for personal business. I gave it an esoteric name to thwart spammers from guessing the account. Imagine my surprise when a couple of weeks ago I opened my inbox and was greeted by a torrent of spam. Had yahoo sold my account? Had I been careless with the account and used it on a crooked site?
Whatever the case, it had suddenly been added to various spam lists and it was getting lots of attention from the evil spammers. The genie was out of the bottle and it was time to move on to another account. But a couple of days later, I found the culprit, and of all the suspects it was me who had leaked it out. While crafting a new page on a site I was working on, I had used that account to test the page's functionality. When the page went into production, the email somehow crossed-over to the production version and suddenly it was plastered all over the site. Within one day of posting the new page, it was harvested and paying tremendous dividends to the spammers.
Now everyone (myself included) knows that harvesting emails from Web pages is one of the most utilized techniques by spammers. But the speed at which the email was found and targeted even surprised me.
Moral of the story: if you like spam, don't bother submitting your email to various sites. Post it on a Web page for a day, and watch with amazement how the spammers swarm around it like vultures on a carcass. (With apologies for debasing vultures.)
<>
// posted by rh
Friday, May 07, 2004
Trusting the Trustworthy
It’s been over two years since Microsoft announced plans to make their products secure. Since then continuous stream of new and increasingly vicious viruses and worms have crawled their way into our computers and the trend doesn’t appear to be stopping (or even diminishing) any time soon.
Okay, so we knew all that talk about security was a lot of hot air and convoluted products such as Windows and Office can never truly be trustworthy. And we keep downloading new definitions for our gallant software defenders of viruses, spywares, and worms, in the hopes to shield ourselves from these mischiefs before they get a piece of us. It’s an incessant act of arm-wrestling with the clever hackers. Sometimes we win and other times we end up with a big “L” on our foreheads.
Having to juggle so many high-tech tools to protect myself from these miscreants has really started to tire me. So one day when I was checking the running tasks on my PC in the never-ending quest to find aliens, I realized that most of the tasks already look like aliens. Have you checked them out recently? (if you have Windows 2000 or XP press Ctrl-Shift-Esc and click on Processes). I mean what the hell are lsass or wisptis? Or for that matter crss or smss?
So how about it Microsoft? How about giving us a simple tool to understand what’s going on in our PC’s and what all these running tasks are? And while you are at it make the extra effort and give us a list of the bad (or at least mysterious) actors and verify that the good are authentic, not evil imposters.
<>
// posted by rh
Sunday, May 02, 2004
My Wal-Mart Story
I've been to a Wal-Mart a total of only three times. Each time I have come away with a feeling that I wasted my time and should have gone elsewhere to get what I needed.
My last trip was to purchase gym shoes for my children. After wading through isles of "cheap" merchandise, we arrived at the shoe racks. Fighting our way through the crowds, we finally reached the gym-shoe racks where we proceeded to look at the available selections. The kids found a few favorites and began to try them on, but after a half hour of searching and fitting in vain I had enough. I didn't care even if the shoes were free.
In a moment of epiphany it occurred to me that if I wanted to buy gym shoes, Wal-Mart wasn't going to fit the bill. I needed to go to a sportswear store and try my luck there. And so we packed the kids in the car and headed straight to a Footlocker in the nearby mall. There we were waited on by one of the staff members who made sure that the shoes we bought were of the size and the style we wanted. The kids got what they wanted and I came away with a pleasant experience, and yes, I probably paid twice the amount I might have spent in Wal-Mart. And to me it was worth every penny.
Now who am I to knock Wal-Mart? Obviously the retail store is making all the right moves, judging by its overwhelming growth it has experienced through the years.
Maybe the next time I need paper towels, I would visit a Wal-Mart. But when the time comes for the kids to get their next pairs of gym shoes (and that won't take long), Wal-Mart will be off my list.
<>
// posted by rh
|
Links
Technorati Profile
TMCnet.com
ARCHIVES
09/01/2003 - 10/01/200303/01/2004 - 04/01/200404/01/2004 - 05/01/200405/01/2004 - 06/01/200406/01/2004 - 07/01/200407/01/2004 - 08/01/200408/01/2004 - 09/01/200409/01/2004 - 10/01/200410/01/2004 - 11/01/200411/01/2004 - 12/01/200412/01/2004 - 01/01/200501/01/2005 - 02/01/200502/01/2005 - 03/01/200503/01/2005 - 04/01/200504/01/2005 - 05/01/200505/01/2005 - 06/01/200506/01/2005 - 07/01/200507/01/2005 - 08/01/200508/01/2005 - 09/01/200509/01/2005 - 10/01/200510/01/2005 - 11/01/200511/01/2005 - 12/01/200512/01/2005 - 01/01/200601/01/2006 - 02/01/200602/01/2006 - 03/01/200603/01/2006 - 04/01/200604/01/2006 - 05/01/200605/01/2006 - 06/01/200606/01/2006 - 07/01/200607/01/2006 - 08/01/200608/01/2006 - 09/01/200609/01/2006 - 10/01/200610/01/2006 - 11/01/200611/01/2006 - 12/01/2006
|
