Scrumptious Word Morsels

Think you can tell a fake email from a real email, eh? Think you’d neeeeeever give out a username and password to scammers in Laos, do you? Well, now you can find out how street smart you are on the Web. Take this 10-question phishing quiz from McAfee to see how well you fare.

I know you’re curious, so I’ll just tell you here: I scored 10/10 and earned a rating of “Safety Guru”. Hoo-ah!

Nice work! Your practically clairvoyant knowledge of the Web allows you to spot even the most realistic looking spoofed sites. We’re impressed!

But remember that even one misstep on a deceptive Web site can put your personal information at risk which could lead to identity theft or financial losses.

I just got an email from Verizon Wireless letting me know that my cell phone bill is now available for online viewing. The message also provides information about paying the bill online and signing my soul over to Verizon so that they can automatically siphon funds out of my checking account every month (no thanks).

In fact, Verizon makes it easy for me to pay my bill online. How easy? Well… “It’s easy to pay your Verizon Wireless bill. On the web, you can log on to the Internet at www.verizonwireless.com.” Excuse me? Did Verizon hire Ted Stevens as a technical writer or something? Come to think of it, it did take longer than usual to receive the Internet that Verizon sent me this month…

Well, my friends, I am currently living the American dream. In fact, right now I’m a highly mobile, RSS feed reading, social networking, web browsing twentysomething—and I don’t even feel all that cool. I’ve got my laptop. I’ve got my Starbucks drink (my second of the evening). I’ve got my cordless frickin’ laser mouse. Heck, I’ve even got Microsoft OS X Windows Vista.

But the real reason I’m using the Internet at Starbucks is because it’s free until April 30th. As long as you’re using Vista and IE7, you can get free Wi-Fi at any T-Mobile Hotspot location through the end of April. Having just installed Vista earlier this week, I’ve got more than two months of free access ahead of me, so it’ll be interesting to see how much I use it.

And for you clever computer types who think you can simply spoof your browser’s user-agent string to take advantage of the free mojo, it ain’t gonna work. T-Mobile makes you install an evil ActiveX control after you create your account, so check your Firefox and your Windows XP at the door, kiddies. Is there anything I won’t do for free Wi-Fi?

Update: Firefox and other services like SSH work fine, but you still need to be running Vista, and you still need to install the ActiveX control in IE7 before you can do anything else online.

We all know that spam is an inherent evil of using the internet, but apparently I’ve got some particularly bad mojo clogging up my mailbox. The mark of the email apocalypse is upon us!

While I was driving to work earlier this week, I saw a bumper sticker that read: “I brake for saucy wenches”. My initial reaction was, “Hey! I’d brake for wenches, too!”. My opinion hasn’t really changed much since then.

If you’re geeky enough to know what DNS is, you should check out OpenDNS. I just found out about it a few days ago, and I think there’s actually a perceptible difference in the amount of time it takes to connect to sites. The best part for me is that I now have reliable DNS from the various hotspots I use.

Firefox 2 came out on October 24, so go download it if you haven’t already. The automatic updater in version 1 apparently doesn’t work across major versions, so you’ll have to upgrade manually. It comes in Windows, OS X, and Linux flavors.

Threadless is finally getting some major recognition, including a really positive post by 37signals, plus a long article in the Chicago Tribune (registration required). Remember, you saucy wenches, I’ll always accept donations of Threadless shirts.

Did anyone else grow up on Hostess Mini Muffins and Brownie Bites? I’ll be honest–I think they have a 300% daily value of fat content and sugary goodness, but they’re soooo delicious and tiny.

As long as I’m on the subject of baked goods, I saw this yesterday on the back of a Sara Lee truck: “Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee”. That is completely lame. Instead of using a bunch of negatives, the clearer choice would be to say: “Everybody likes Sara Lee”. Doesn’t that make more sense?

What makes coffee good? That is the question posed on Starbucks’ home page. Ironically, the link is broken, suggesting that perhaps they don’t know what makes coffee good. Therefore, I’ve taken it upon myself to fill in the blank. What makes coffee good is that Starbucks can charge more than $4 a cup for it, and loyal customers are more than willing to slurp it up. The investors, however, are another story. What with the loss of four company laptops containing 60,000 Social Security numbers and all, it just hasn’t been a good week for SBUX.

Update: The link wasn’t working when I posted this last night, but it appears to be fixed now. I guess Starbucks does know what makes coffee good, after all.

It’s been almost two weeks since I made the switch to Mac after using Windows nearly exclusively for about ten years. I don’t have any regrets, and I’m really enjoying OS X, but there are a few hardware caveats related to the MacBook Pro itself.

First, I think mine has a defective tilde (~) key. The key isn’t completely broken, but I practically have to hit it with a hammer just to get it to register. It’s not a major issue, but it is kind of annoying since I probably use the tilde/backtick (`) more frequently than most (usually from the shell). I’m going to bring this thing to the Apple Store this weekend and see if I can’t coerce a replacement out of them.

Second, there’s the whine. Lots of people have commented about the high-pitched squeal that the MacBook Pro emits, and let me tell you—it’s definitely noticeable. It seems like it comes on strongest when there’s no CPU load, but I can’t verify that scientifically. In some earlier models, I guess the battery was the culprit, but I’ve replicated my whine with and without the battery attached. The easy solution: plug in my fully-isolated studio headphones and crank the music. Problem solved.

Lastly, there’s a cosmetic issue. When the lid is closed, the seam between the screen and the bottom half isn’t even all the way around. Basically, the left side of the screen curves up and the right side curves down. I know this is nitpicky, but for a company that prides itself on the appearance of its products, this is a major issue. I’m obviously going to bring this up at the Apple Store as well.

Granted, these three things don’t add up to a catastrophic failure on Apple’s part, but you naturally come to expect more out of a computer in this price range. Fortunately for Apple, they have a chance to redeem themselves when I visit the Apple Store in a couple days here. I’ll write about that experience after it happens.

For those of you who have been living under a technological rock for the past few days, Apple released their Boot Camp software around the middle of last week, and that’s what I want to talk about. Because of Boot Camp, and more fundamentally, because of Apple’s switch to Intel processors, the next computer I buy will be a Mac. However, I’m not quite ready to make the switch for two major reasons.

The first reason is price. The MacBook Pro I have my eye on will cost $2800 decked out, and that’s a little difficult to justify considering that my current laptop is barely six months old. Plus, I’ve already decided that I’m going to buy a 24″ monitor before I buy a new computer, so that settles it. Adding to the price factor is the issue of re-buying all my software in Mac versions. I’m talking about the Adobe Creative Suite, Macromedia Studio, Microsoft Office, etc. That adds up to a smooth grand right there, even with educational discounts. With Boot Camp, I could theoretically boot into Windows each time I needed to use Photoshop, Dreamweaver, or Excel, but that would get old fast.

Price issues aside, the second reason why I’m not ready to switch yet is because Photoshop (and all non-Universal programs) would run woefully slow. Like I said above, I could boot into Windows just to use Photoshop, but that’s impractical. Adobe’s programs haven’t been rewritten to run on Intel-based Macs yet, so Apple’s Rosetta software does the translating on the fly. As you could imagine, compatibility comes at the cost of performance. The Universal version of Creative Suite won’t be out for at least another year, so no switching until then.

The funny thing is that I probably won’t even end up using Boot Camp after I switch. It’s nice to know that it’ll be there if I need it, and that peace of mind is what pushed me over the edge.