Funk Babblings

A few months ago I started going to the monthly meetings of the Columbus Ruby Brigade, basically a computer user group of Ruby programmers.

( Short version: three meetings, all useful and interesting )

So I've gotten something useful out of every meeting so far. That beats my experience at COLUG. I think I'll keep going.

The funknet.net server is undergoing work today (replacing the machine, actually), so I expected things to be somewhat impaired. What I didn't expect, however, was this combination:
1. Not being able to send mail.
2. Not being able to receive mail I send myself from my yahoo account.
3. Still getting spam. In fact for a while I was getting a lot more spam than usual.

Update: Things seems to be working again, except that I'm still getting more spam than usual. Probably has something to do with a bogofilter upgrade. (Er, some upgrade, huh?)

Update 2: The bogofilter FAQ tells me why I'm getting more spam after an upgrade.

Lately I've been really amazed at how little spam makes it to my inbox. (Knock on wood...) I use a Bayesian filter, bogofilter, plus some additional filtering to get rid of virus attachments and a particular spammer that's good at getting around Bayesian filters (though I think my filter is finally getting trained well enough on those).

I have gotten some fax spam recently though. No, the laws against that haven't eradicated it. At least there was an 800 number to get off the list; it felt good that it might be costing them a bit of money for me to make that call, even if calling them only verifies that I received their spam so they send more.

Anyway, today I got a new one in email. Well, sort of new. We've all seen the "419 scam" in which some Nigerian supposedly needs help to discreetly transfer a lot of money. This one was similar, but instead of Nigeria it purports to come from a U.S. Army officer in Iraq, claiming to be trying to help an Iraqi businessman move millions of dollars out of Iraq. If I had more time on my hands I might actually mess with this one like some people do.

Do people actually fall for this stuff?

Yesterday I realized just how much my awareness (paranoia?) of scams has invaded my psyche. ( Scam dream.... )