/dev/zero

Someone needs to do more research before they try to pull their next phone scam.

1. The “INS” (presumably he was referring to the Immigration and Naturalization Service of the Department of Justice) hasn’t existed in over 4 years. The enforcement portion of the former INS was transferred to the new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) branch of the Department of Homeland Security.
2. Government agencies do not call people at one o’clock in the morning to ask about reports of illegal aliens. The “We just received this information and we’re a 24-hour agency” response when questioned about why they are calling me at that hour doesn’t cut it.
3. Government agents identify themselves by more than just the name of their agency. This caller never offered his own name.
4. Government agents will give the full name of their agency, not the initials (”Hi, this is Agent Jones of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” not “This is the INS calling.”
5. Government agents will confirm more than just your first name when they call you. All he confirmed was that I was “Andrew”. He never asked for or offered my last name.
6. Law enforcement agencies don’t call to give you a heads up that they suspect illegal activities in your home, giving you a chance to get rid of the evidence.
7. When asked questions like “Who are you really?” and “Why are you calling at 1AM?” and so on, government agents have immediate answers, they don’t stumble for an answer as if they weren’t expecting anyone to actually question them.

At 01:00 this morning my cell phone went off with an “unknown” number. Pretending to have just woken from a sound sleep (I was actually reading the latest Harry Potter, but the caller didn’t need to know that), I answered the phone. The call will get it’s own post, but I’ll just say that it was an annoying, immature prank. After putting my book down for the night and turning out the light, I snuggled up to Kestrel and tried to fall asleep, but my mind wandered back to the call. I decided to get up and blog about it (since sleep wasn’t happening), so I slipped out of bed and into my office. When I fired up Thunderbird I saw that someone had registered as a user on this (WP) blog and posted 6 comments to various posts.
To say that they were rude is an understatement. Unfortunately one of them proved (much to my chagrin) that Amadan was right about needing to be a little more circumspect about what I post about work on my blog. I have since marked that post as private.
The person who made the comments was not the most clever however. Either he really doesn’t care that I know who it is, or he’s very stupid.

Let’s hope she servers her time with less fuss than her “Simple Life” partner Paris Hilton.
But I’m not counting on it.

Nicole Richie sentenced to 90 hours in jail - CNN.com
Nicole Richie

@jetdillo What, no pictures?

@CaliLewis Try movietickets.com in the future. They cover a lot of theaters that Fandango doesn’t and is just as easy to use.

Of all the people you have to tell “Don’t drink before coming to work”… astronauts???

NASA takes swift action after report of astronaut drinking - CNN.com

Bartonomus, I couldn’t agree with you more.
Luckily for me no one has spoiled it for me yet, but I don’t read a lot of web sites where that sort of thing goes on. Of my friends on Live Journal, they wouldn’t be my friends if they were the type to do that, and are all making threats against anyone who spoils the book for them, to.
The closest I’ve run into is Shinga posting her latest edition of Headtrip

Somehow, someone managed to alter my post about finding an Indian cooking vlog on Youtube into a spam.
Looks like I’m going to have to track down an exploit in WordPress. I suspect one of my plugins. For the time being I’ve disabled one the one my gut tells me caused this.

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