New Spamming Technology

It seems that over the past few weeks I have had the pleasure of experiencing a new type of spam - text messages sent to my Google Voice number. Fortunately, because the service is free, this doesn't cost me any money or much time (at least yet). What is troubling is how they happen to have gotten my number (unless they are just generating numbers). It is also troubling to think that this could start happening on a more widespread basis and that web-based services could start text spamming actual phones in such a way that would be almost untraceable (though I know to what end they would be working with such an approach).

While looking through my spam texts I happened to come across a mysterious message that I received a few months ago.



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I have no idea where this came from or what the caller was getting at. Hopefully they eventually found the person they were looking for.

Call From Santa

It seems that Neil got a call from Santa today. Talk about being lucky.



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I wonder if you too (or a loved one) might also get such a call.

A Few Quick Notes 355

-Today (Thursday) was another pretty nice day, though definitely on the crisp side of things. The unfortunate weather news for the region is that we have our first frost warning of the season. I am hoping that this warning is really more for more inland areas than where I live, but I guess I might have to wait and see to learn whether this is really the case or not.

-I just baked a batch of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies so that I will have something to snack on in the coming days. Tomorrow morning it seems likely that I will have to back a batch of bread so that I will have breakfast food for the coming days.

-I don't know what it is about me, but I can't seem to scale main dishes particularly accurately. For instance, the stir-fry that I made for dinner tonight was huge, I couldn't even fit it all in our largest serving bowl. As I was chopping vegetables, which is where the problem likely lies, I felt that I was only preparing reasonable portions of each vegetable. Two cups of celery seemed totally reasonable. I guess that the fact that in total I added over 10 cups of vegetables was probably most of the problem lay. I presume another part of the 'problem,' if we want to call it that, is that I really don't mind leftovers, so I probably allow myself a little more lee-way than I might if I absolutely despised leftovers.

-For the past few weeks we have been experiencing some strange traffic patterns on the blog. All of a sudden we have seemingly doubled our daily readership (from about 5 to about 10). Though I don't really know why this has happened, I do think that some of it can be attributed to the traffic that has been coming our way from the Google Voice Blog because I have linked to a few of their posts recently. Presumably the 30 or 40 people they have sent our way wouldn't mean much to most blogs, in our case it has been quite dramatic (though I am not sure that this really means anything in the long run).

-Earlier today I made my way to the grocery store. I imagine that I surprised the cashier with my purchases.



Carrots are hard to pass up when they are less than $4.00 for 10 pounds, so hard to pass up that I had to buy two bags.

A Few Quick Notes 354

-Today, like the past few days, seems to be turning out quite nicely. Though it has cooled off a bit this evening, I would still go so far as to say it is pretty nice, though it definitely feels as though we are approaching, if not in the midst of, fall.

-Today I had to head to school to attend an orientation session for the new students in the Political Science Department. Though many of the new students were likely attending to learn about the department and what would be required of them in the coming year, I was primarily attending to meet the new students and get a sense of who I might be attending class alongside in the coming weeks. I didn't end up sticking around much past the introductions as I really didn't need to hear about what is involved in preparing an MA thesis, which was much of what was to be discussed during the rest of the session.

Later in the afternoon I made my way across campus for my first class of the semester, which technically occurred the day before the semester was officially to begin. The most notable outcome of the class was that I have assigned a paper/commentary for next week. Fortunately, I have been able to collect all of the readings, and have already, though only just, tried to start read them.

-A few weeks or days ago Neil and I were talking about the SMS text service provided by Google Voice and the strangeness of the fact that it was not possible to forward text messages to one's email account. It seems that other thought that this was a strange omission as well, as earlier today I noticed that the Google Voice Blog announced that they have now introduced a few new features relating to text messages, one of which is the ability to have them forwarded to email addresses.

-I wish all first year students were like this.

A Few Quick Notes 350

-Today (Friday) was an absolutely beautiful day. The skies were clear, the temperature not oppressively hot, and there was even a nice breeze. This is exactly the kind of summer weather that I really like.

-Today I had to head into Dal to run to take care of some paperwork. Afterwards I made my way over to Quinpool to take care of a sale purchase I wanted to make. Last but not least on my list of errands, I made my way to a friend's apartment to pick up an aloe plant that she was giving me. My friend and I eventually decided to go get a coffee and ended up spending quite a while talking and having a good time.

Just after 4:00 we realized that it was after 4:00 and that we both had things to do and needed to get going. She made her way back to her place and I to mine.

Not to long after I returned home I noticed that the stove's clock was flashing. A little while later I was going through my RSS feeds and I learned that the South End had experienced a power outage for the better part of the afternoon. So it turns out that, inadvertently, I was able to use time that would have otherwise been unproductive to socialize. Slacking win.

-At a point this afternoon, while walking between Quinpool and my friend's apartment, I noticed a number of flashing lights and emergency vehicles ahead of me. In many ways it looked like the scene of an accident, but it appeared to be missing the requisite crashed vehicles. As I drew closer to the emergency vehicles it became clear that it was an accident with two vehicles, but that one of the vehicles was a motorized scooter (as might be used by individuals with problems walking) that appeared to be on its way across a cross walk. Talk about a downer of a scene.

Not too long after I found the story about the power outage, CBC also had a story about this incident.

-For some reason I wasn't able to go to sleep until about 5:00 AM this morning. Not surprisingly, this left me quite exhausted today. After returning from my errands and then having dinner I ended up crashing for about an hour and fifteen minutes. It turned out that it was one of the most intense naps that I have had in weeks. I was really out. The best part, of course, was that I woke up feeling refreshed and ready to work.

-At about 1:15 AM this morning, after several hours of work, I decided to take a break to make some humus. Though it isn't as nice as my last batch, it is still pretty tasty. I am eating some of it as I prepare this post.

-I have alluded to today's productivity already, but I guess I might make a more conclusive statement for the sake of posterity. Though I got a bit of a late start, I eventually managed to put in a few hours of good work. My plan for tomorrow is to do some tidying of footnotes and my conclusion. I can't wait to get the party started.

-The seems to be an overwhelming, almost deafening, e-communications silence coming from Las Vegas these days. Since shortly after their arrival in Nevada I have heard nothing from either Rebecca or Neil. Even more troubling is that our user stats suggest that no one in Nevada has been checking the blog.

This evening I realized that Neil could even phone his reports in if he wanted (we could use Google Voice and then post the messages) if typing is too trying. I hope that he at least remembers how he as been passing his days so he can eventually post a rather nice, well-researched travelogue that would outline what he and Rebecca did while they were in the proximity of such opportunities for sin, and winning money.

A Few Quick Notes 346

-It seems that for the first time in a few days we have had a maximum temperature of less than 30. The other thing of note is that the thunderstorms that had been forecast for the past few days have not had the courtesy to show up. Now it seems that they are off of the forecast, at least for the time being.

-Yesterday Neil was kind enough to let me know that Google Voice is now offering free calls to Canada. This is great as both Neil and I have accounts. For those of you that don't yet have accounts with Google Voice, such accounts might be looking into, especially if you want free long distance and texting.

-In other Google related news, yesterday I read a blog post from Google about their ability to predict search trends. In the post they also mentioned Google Insights for Search, a product I had not previously heard of (though I had heard of Google Trends and Google Zeitgeist). Anyway, Google seems to be doing some neat things on the searching front, some of which may have some interesting implications.

-Over the past few days I have heard about a number of incidents involving people openly carrying guns at Obama-related events. While it seems clear that no laws are being broken, I do find the behaviour both dangerously aggressive and strange. While one may legally be able to do this, I really don't see how it helps the situation, even for the people with the guns. If this grows more popular it certainly could lead to a situation with disastrous consequences. (More original, Montifax only content).

-Yesterday Neil, Rebecca and I were talking about this year's crop of incoming university students. What was most striking about these students is that are the second cohort from the 1990s, something that was making us all feel relatively old. Today I came across the Mindset List, which outlines a number of things that have been true for duration of these students' lives, and that weren't true even a few years before. For instance, for those born in 1991 the Cold War and the Iron Curtain are historical facts rather than things that they were alive to experience. Anyway, I had fun browsing the list, though it also made me feel old.

A Few Quick Notes 288

-So far today has been great. The skies are clear and the temperatures are a few degrees above zero. Unfortunately I spent much of the day indoors and was unable to take advantage of the great weather.

-I did take a trip to the grocery store largely to take advantage of the weather, so I guess I can't claim that I didn't at least get a few minutes of good times and fun in the sun.

-Our Ultimate game was a bit of a boondoggle yesterday. Shortly after we arrived we learned that our captain had given us the wrong time and that weren't in fact scheduled to play until an hour and twelve minutes later.

As the two teams playing the game prior to ours were short players, so Neil and I, along with two other teammates, ended up playing as subs.

The consequence of our playing two games, instead of one, was that we were rather tired by the end of the second game, at least I was. This turns out to have been rather significant as our game was quite close until the last few minutes, by which point I was in no position to hustle as much as normal.

-Aside from playing extra Ultimate, the other consequence of the delay was that we were delayed in returning to the apartment. Normally this wouldn't be such a big deal, but as it turns out Neil and Rebecca had invited a couple over for games. So instead of all three of us being here to assist with the hosting duties, only Rebecca was here to handle the heavy burden that is playing a game with guests.

-Man, do I ever need to get back to work on my paper. It is supposed to be 7500 words and I definitely don't have that many yet.

-Google is now offering a new service called Google Voice, which is basically just a new version of GrandCentral. The big downside seems to be that they no longer offer free calls to Canada, the upside is that I should now have free texting capabilities.

Unfortunately, membership is presently only available to those with GrandCentral accounts, but you may way to keep an eye out for the opening of the floodgates because I get the feeling that this will be a pretty useful service (particularly if you are in the US).