Archive

Three new old books, two notebooks, a FreeAgent

(… And a partridge in a pear tree. Heh.)

Not much updates from me, except:

  • Got three more great finds from Booksale: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, The Confusion (Vol. 2 of the Baroque Cycle) by Neal Stephenson, and Something Wicked this Way Comes by Ray Bradbury — all for under a hundred pesos.
  • I had the pleasure of trying out two sleek notebooks: an Acer Aspire Gemstone and a Gateway T-6311. Both were from balikbayan kamag-anaks who asked me to, er, stress-test their new toys. More on this when I’m done playing with them. Suddenly, I’m craving for a replacement to Mathilda (my Dell Inspiron) — not!
  • My bro gave me a Seagate FreeAgent Desktop external hard drive. Yay! It’s 500 GB in a cool black finish, with a footprint of an office stapler. It now rests next to the 19″ LCD monitor. All I need now are a cheap NAS solution and a UPS, and my home computing setup is complete.
  • Due to several NDAs I signed, I couldn’t blog much about what I do at work. Let’s just say it’s been a very interesting engagement. I’ll be in between team deployments (but with the same client) next quarter, so that gives me some breathing space to take on vendor and in-house training. My blogging will more or less be the same — I’m actually thinking of changing my tagline to “Posts of a weekend blogger”. :)

Surprise finds

Surprise finds from a second-hand book shop.

Got these yesterday from a second-hand book shop here in Cabanatuan City: (from top) Neil Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon; Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead; William Gibson’s Virtual Light; and Programming Perl, second edition, from O’Reilly. All for Php99 each.

Not bad at all.

It’s tax season

And what do you know? I recently received a refund from the IRS. Wow!

After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of $480.23. Please submit the tax refund request and allow us 3-6 days in order to process it.

A refund can be delayed for a variety of reasons. For example submitting invalid records or applying after the deadline.

To access the form for your tax refund, please click here.

Note: For security reasons, we will record your ip-address, the date and time. Deliberate wrong inputs are criminally pursued and indicated.

Regards,
Internal Revenue Service

Copyright 2008, Internal Revenue Service U.S.A. All rights reserved.

Err… Thanks, but I’m not even a US citizen. Unless our BIR offers refunds in dollars now?

The link points to an IP address registered in Latin America. It gets better: whois info shows the following:

OrgName:    Latin American and Caribbean IP address Regional Registry
OrgID:      LACNIC
Address:    Rambla Republica de Mexico 6125
City:       Montevideo
StateProv:
PostalCode: 11400
Country:    UY

Mexico is in Uruguay now?

The headers are also very interesting:

Received: by 10.114.150.9 with SMTP id x9cs106067wad;
        Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:44:15 -0800 (PST)
Received: by 10.82.181.7 with SMTP id d7mr20582205buf.4.1203666254308;
        Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:44:14 -0800 (PST)
Return-Path: <taxrefund@online.irs.gov>
Received: from ug-out-1314.google.com (ug-out-1314.google.com [66.249.92.172])
        by mx.google.com with ESMTP id z40si1631581ikz.4.2008.02.21.23.44.13;
        Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:44:14 -0800 (PST)
Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 66.249.92.172 is neither permitted nor denied by domain of taxrefund@online.irs.gov) client-ip=66.249.92.172;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 66.249.92.172 is neither permitted nor denied by domain of taxrefund@online.irs.gov) smtp.mail=taxrefund@online.irs.gov
Received: by ug-out-1314.google.com with SMTP id e2so1204598ugf.21
        for <myemailaddress@gmail.com>; Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:44:13 -0800 (PST)
Received: by 10.67.115.10 with SMTP id s10mr1971303ugm.89.1203666253276;
        Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:44:13 -0800 (PST)
Received: by 10.67.115.10 with SMTP id s10mr1971299ugm.89.1203666253174;
        Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:44:13 -0800 (PST)
Return-Path: <taxrefund@online.irs.gov>
Received: from mailkbh.delud.dk ([194.182.91.20])
        by mx.google.com with ESMTP id 32si287442ugd.37.2008.02.21.23.44.12;
        Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:44:13 -0800 (PST)
Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 194.182.91.20 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of taxrefund@online.irs.gov) client-ip=194.182.91.20;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 194.182.91.20 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of taxrefund@online.irs.gov) smtp.mail=taxrefund@online.irs.gov
Received: from mailaarh.delud.dk ([195.192.86.117]) by mailkbh.delud.dk with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.3959);
	 Fri, 22 Feb 2008 08:44:07 +0100
X-Spam-Status: NO, hits=0 required=5
X-Spam-Flag: NO
Received: from User ([71.132.110.97]) by mailaarh.delud.dk with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.3959); Fri, 22 Feb 2008 08:44:05 +0100
Keywords: disclaimer
Reply-To: <taxrefund@online.irs.gov>

This ran past GMail’s much-daunted spam filters, even when Return-Path was obviously forged. So much for SPF.

Here’s what’s funnier — at the bottom of the message is this boilerplate:

This message has been scanned by F-Secure Anti-Virus for Microsoft Exchange.
For more information, connect to http://www.f-secure.com/

Right. I’m proud that I used to work with a better anti-virus company. ;)

First!

First!
Originally uploaded by iandexter.

Julian Emmanuel’s first birthday is coming up.

I gave this flyer a grungy look because it fits Julian’s personality well. He’s got that gritty look in him, and just the right amount of mischief peeks through every time he smiles. We call him “sutil”, a Filipino term that’s similar to “naughty” but not quite there.

(Fonts from dafont.com. Grunge brushes from bittbox.com.)

Dilbert, widgetized

Via The Dilbert Blog