Best Spam Ever!

| Richard

An absolute corker this morning, with the subject “Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II”:

Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II
Queen of England
Buckingham Palace
London SW1A 1AA, England.
********************************

ATTN: Winner

Your Ticket number: 56475600545/012 with Serial number 5368/05 drew
the Lucky number: 86.

On behalf of the Queen of England, we are pleased to notify you
that your email has won in the Annual Christmas free Internet Lotto
Sweepstakes and as a result you have been granted the lump sum payout of
£500,000 GBP which is equivalent to $917,956.00 USD.

To file for your prize, please fill and submit the claims processing
form to:

*********************************
Mr. Perkins Oliver
Email: perkinsoliver@yahoo.co.uk
Telephone: +44 702 402 4689
Fax: +44 707 502 4610
**********************************
CLAIMS PROCESSING FORM:
1 Full Names:
2 Address:
3 Age:
4 Sex:
5 Marital Status:
6 Occupation:
7 Phone numbers:
8 Country:
9 Email:

We advice you to contact your claims officer as detailed above
immediately to avoid Claims deadline.

Congratulations,
Mrs. Sarah Wilfred for
Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II
Queen of England.

So Betty’s running a sweepstakes now, is she? Excellent. And handy to tell me where she’s Queen as well, just in case I’m not sure. And she’s making 50p per minute on accepting any incoming calls and faxes! Anyone would think this might be a scam 🙂

Those Forced ezboard Migrations…

| Richard

For a while now, the staff over in the yuku help forums [sic] have been claiming that there are no forced migrations of ezboards over to yuku and that they have to be requested by board owners.

If you recall, I mentioned this back in September.

Now you should bear in mind that:

  1. ezboard, Inc. has yet to reveal pricing for ad. removal from yuku boards; and
  2. yuku is still in beta, which is the excuse they always trot out when somebody complains that something isn’t working on yuku
  3. ezboard, Inc.’s Help Wiki still says “Do I have to switch to this next version of software? No, not unless you want to.” and “Do I have to move my board to yuku.com domain? No, you do not have move to yuku.com.”

Of course, being ezboard, it appears that the truth and the statements at item 3 above are mutually exclusive…

Or what about this?

“Will my ezboard forum be switched over without my consent?
No, boards will need to be switched by the admin. At this stage, they will not be switched over by our system if you do not initiate the switch.”

So nothing to worry about then.

Oh dear. “ezdollar”, presumably someone working for ezboard/yuku, writes:

“My understanding is that they are now migrating some small batches of boards without the owner’s request, but, a few days before migration, those boards should display an Important Announcement at the top of the board, stating that it will soon migrate.

“If the developers had been able to write an upgrade for the ezboard program, it would have been sent out to all servers and no ezOp would have had any choice whatsoever about whether to use the new version or not or when to make the switch to the new version. The upgrade would have happened virtually (if not literally) overnight. This is really no different than a major ezboard upgrade, except that, in effect, ezOps have been able to choose to go to the new version early, and the upgrade is being done gradually instead of overnight.

“Migrating your account to Yuku has nothing to do with board migration.

“Having Gold or not having Gold has nothing to do with migration.

“As I keep saying… if you have issues with Yuku, you have to take them up with Yuku staff by posting at Yuku Support or opening a Yuku Help ticket. We may feel your pain, here, but we simply can’t help you with most Yuku related issues here.”

So that confirms that they are indeed moving boards without the owners’ say-so. And it makes no difference if they’re Gold - with no ads. - or non-Gold. I bet gold communities won’t be very happy when they start showing ads. … which is due to happen soon, no doubt, as they have recently confirmed they are finally working on yuku versions of gold communities and ezsupporter which should be ready for testing “within a month or two at the latest“…

So there you have it: forced migrations despite what they tell you elsewhere. Forced migrations from release code (if buggy) to beta code (very buggy and incomplete). What a way to treat your long-suffering customers!

Oh and still no word on whether they plan to actually share revenues with board owners as ezboard, Inc. CEO, Robert Labatt, promised. And where is Mr. Labatt? Incredibly silent, even for him…

Armstrong & Miller

| Richard

One of the funniest shows on television at the moment is the Armstrong & Miller show on BBC1, showing again after a break of six or seven years and having moved from Channel 4.

The plain-speaking divorced Dad makes me laugh, but the highlight of the show has to be the two chav World War II pilots who are somewhat “shtreet” in the language they use:
Armstrong & Miller's Chav Pilots

Standard, isn’t it?

Fundy Mentalists

| Richard

So Sudanese protesters are calling for British teacher Gillian Gibbons to be shot after children in her class named a teddy bear Muhammad.

A tad extreme?

Tell you what, as the ‘offence’ was one of insulting religion, I think they should protest for the execution of Muhammad Ali and for that matter, anyone else called Muhammad.

And whilst they’re at it, it’s probably best for equality to call for the execution of anyone – mainly of Latin American origins, probably – called Jesus…

The Chattering Classes

| Richard

One of the few interesting things things days about yuku - apart from how quickly their ideas have been overtaken by others who’ve actually released message boards, profile pages and image hosting that actually works and is reliable - is one of the threads in their support [sic] forum about problems with the chatrooms that they claim to be one of their “improved features” over ezboard.

Go and have a look at the thread, which presently includes over 100 replies.

Sheesh! That’s been running for almost three months and it’s clear that the chatrooms are up and down more often than a whore’s drawers and that when what appears to be their only tech guy “Ransom” says it’s up, that’s not what the actual users experience.

Why on earth do the poor people over there stay when there are so many better alternatives out there?

A Personal Apology From HMR&C

| Richard

So Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs have confirmed that our details were amongst those they managed to lose.

Their Acting Chairman, Dave Hartnett, wrote us “a personal apology”. Well, OK, he didn’t actually sign it. And he didn’t even bother stamping a signature on it. {sigh}

So what did it actually say?

“The copy of the data is likely to still be on Government property. The police are now conducting a search. There is no evidence that it is in the possession of anyone else.”

Well considering it was supposed to have gone from an office in Newcastle to an office somewhere else, they should have been able to find them by now, surely, if they are likely to still be on Governemet property? And of course there’s no evidence that it isn’t in the possession of anyone else, is there?

So what data is it they’ve managed to shove on a CD and lose? Nothing important, I expect.

“This data includes your and your children’s names and dates of birth, your address, your National Insurance number and, where relevant, the details of the bank or building society account…”

So … most of the necessary details for identity fraud.

Ah well, we can take comfort from his assuances that:

“all efforts are being made to ensure that such a loss can never happen again.”

What? Like maybe sending two CDs’ worth of data by e-mail rather than putting it onto CDs and shoving it in the post? And as I pointed out in my earlier post on this subject, it’s not the first time these idiots have messed up.

Am I confident in their abilities? Am I fuck! Same bunch of civil servants with cast-iron, index-linked pensions and no responsibility…

Message Board Spammers

| Richard

I co-admin. a few message boards and one of our pet hates is wankers joining up just to post lists of ‘phones they probably don’t have in the first place in order to make a buck or two off the unwary. There may be some otherwise legitimate companies in amongst the spammers, but I doubt it.

So we tend to delete all the ‘useful’ information and just leave the e-mail addresses they helpfully include so that other spammers can offer them viagra, tickets for rugby matches and those missing millions from Nigeria. Here’s hoping anyway.

I thought I’d start posting their e-mail addresses on here (and hence on the sites carrying the syndicated RSS feeds) so that other can avail themselves of their bargain wares … or something.

Here’s the latest: iphones@europemail.com iphone@ommail.com iphonss@yahoo.com

NEC Bike Show 2007

| Richard

An earlier start than usual as I was heading off to the NEC at Birmingham for the bike show on Trade Day.

I picked up a friend just after 8.15am and was at the NEC at around 10.30am. Wandered around the other halls until 12.00pm when Hall 1 opened. This was where the big manufacturers were exhibiting as well as where TWO Magazine had their corner plot. TWO bought visordown.com earlier this year and they were running a competition involving their “Wonderwall”: a collage of photos of VD members as submitted by us. If you spotted your photo on the Wonderwall, you would be entered into a draw to win something, in this case a Shark Helmet.

As Hall 1 only opened at 12.00pm and the competition draw took place at 2.00pm (geddit?), there weren’t many entries today … two, as it turned out. And I won! Now all I need to do is ring Nevis Marketing and claim my prize.

Anyway, I took some photos: