mcgees.org

Some weeks ago I received an unsolicited phone call asking me to participate in a 15 minute telephone computer-related survey.  If I participated, I was told, they would send me $50.  I agreed, and took the survey, which ended up taking 20 minutes.  I asked, “So you will send a check?”  They said yes, and I hung up.

Shortly after hanging up, I felt very foolish.  I realized they had not even asked for my address.  I felt very gullible and was sure I had been had.

Much to my surprise, the check showed up today, from Innovative Processing, Inc., a company that (according to their website) offers “Quality personalized fulfillment including Sweepstakes Management, Contests, Internet Promotions, Premium and Refund Programs” (kind of a neat market niche, I think.)  So if you get a call like this, there is at least the possibility that it is legitimate.

Been the victim of a scam?  Give these ne’er-do-wells $20 and they will tell you how to get “Rip-Off Revenge”.  “Using the Rip-Off Revenge Guide,” one satisfied “customer” writes, “in two days I got a newer car worth over $9000 more.”  This would be funny if it were not so sad.

Another cool link discovered through Random TinyURL: Rhetorical Systems’ TTS demo.  Really, try it.  [wav]

In other news, Edward Teller is dead, 60 years too late.  (Too harsh?  Hardly.)

I have yet another Random Link link to share with you: AltaVista Random Image Link, which actually seems to link to a page containing an image in their image database.  I found this, believe it or not, because someone used it to hit my site.  This is perhaps the least interesting of the random link URLs I have found.

Granite Canyon, the free DNS provider I have been using for a couple of years, has been having some serious problems lately.  My sites were out for a couple of days because their servers were down.  I believe they are still down, but it’s no longer relevant as I have changed my DNS provider to (the still free) XName.  They seem to be more solid.  Let me know if you have trouble accessing my sites.  Also, if you sent me mail in the past couple of days, you may need to resend it.

Purchase Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash or The Diamond Age from Fictionwise by credit card, and get a 100% Micropay rebate, good for anything they sell.  Offer good through September 8th.

127 mph over the speed limit?  Who knew radar guns went up that high?

It is, right now, only US$36 more to fly from Los Angeles to London than it is to fly from Los Angeles to Boston.  Sure, that makes sense.