This weekend was exactly what I needed. After a long and difficult week at work, Friday's Hip concert and last night's house warming party were very relaxing.

The concert was excellent. The Jubilee is a cozy venue.

Saturday's house warming party was a blast. The cops came by to tell us to keep it down, but we knew we were ok when they came in and said it didn't sound too loud to them.

I finally got a couple of those spams about some Nigerian bureacrat needing help to launder money out of the country. I remember my dad getting one of these in the real mail at work years ago. I wonder if these scams actually work. Are people really that dumb, or are these mostly joke spams now?

Oops, it was supposed to be CONFIDENTIAL. Oh no!

Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2002 02:27:38 +0100
From: kevinnmadu@eircom.net
Reply-To: kevinnmadu@mail.com
To: kevinnmadu@eircom.net
Subject: CONFIDENTIAL

NIGERIAN NATIONAL  PETROLEUM  CORPORATION

>From The Desk of: DR. KEVIN NMADU

DIRECTOR PROJECT IMPLEMENTATION (NNPC)

CONFIDENTIAL


Dear Sir,

URGENT BUSINESS PROPOSAL

Through some discreet enquiries from our foreign mission, you and your
organization were revealed as being quite astute in private enterpreneurship,
one has no doubt in your ability to handle a financial business of considerable
amount which will form the bedrock of an extensive business partnership in due
course. In folding the proposal. I want to count on your status as a respected
executive of our company to believe that you will handle it with utmost secrey
and confidentiality it deserves.

The business involves the remittance of US$41.5M ( Fourty-One Million Five
Hundred Thousand U.S. Dollars only) to your bank account from the Central Bank
of Nigeria. The money accrued through delibrate over-invocing of old projects
executed for the Government by some foreign firms. I and few officials here
have worked out a scheme to benefit us along with any foreign partner who
obliges us the materials and channel to push out the fund, our idea being to
come over thereafter to share the fund with whoever assist us.

Please get in touch with me immediately through my email address and attention
the undersigned. This email address is my confidential email address.
For your participation in realising this transaction 20% will be for you 70%
for me and other officials and 10% for any expense we may incur ( both parties
) during processing for the transfer to your nominated bank account.

I am awaiting your response most urgently and be rest assured that this
transaction is 100% risk free, as there is no risk involved on both sides.

Thank you and God bless.

Yours sincerely,                                                                

DR. KEVIN NMADU.

I got another one a few weeks ago. This one needs some line breaks to increase readability.

Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2002 00:25:07 GMT+1
From: tayeowens taye 
To: tayeowens@caramail.com
Subject: PARTNER NEEDED(TAYE OWENS)

    [ The following text is in the "iso-8859-1" character set. ]
    [ Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set.  ]
    [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ]

CONFIDENTIAL 5 Yusuf Adejo Street, Victoria Island, Lagos.
IFax:13094231956 FROM: TAYE OWENS. ATTN: THE PRESIDENT/C.E.O. Dear
Sir/Madam, I would like to firstly send to you the best wishes of good
health and success in your pursuits particularly through my proposal as
contained in this letter. Before going into details of my proposal to
you, I must first implore you to treat with the utmost confidentiality,
as this is required for its success. My colleagues and I are senior
officials of the Federal Government of Nigeria^Òs Contracts Review Panel
(CRP) who are interested in diverting some funds that are presently
floating in the accounts of the Central Bank of Nigeria. In order to
commence this transaction, we solicit for your assistance to enable us
transfer into your nominated account the said floating funds. We are
determined to conclude the transfer before the end of this quarter of
2002. The source of the funds are as follows: During the last military
regime in Nigeria, government officials set up companies and awarded
themselves contracts that were grossly over-invoiced in various
ministries and parastatals. The present civilian government set up the
Contract Review Panel, which has the mandate to use the instruments of
payments made available to it by the decree setting up the panel, to
review these contracts and if necessary pay those who are being owed
outstanding amounts. My colleagues and I have identified quite a huge sum
of these funds which are presently floating in the Central Bank of
Nigeria ready for disbursement and would like to divert some of it for
our own purposes. However, by virtue of our positions as civil servants
and members of this panel, we cannot acquire these funds in our names or
in the names of companies that are based in Nigeria. I have therefore
been mandated, as a matter of trust by my colleagues in the panel, to
look for a reliable overseas partner into whose account we can transfer
the sum of U.S.$20,500,000.00 (Twenty million, five hundred thousand U.S.
dollars). That is why I am writing you this letter. We have agreed to
share the money to be transferred into your account,if you agree with our
proposition as follows; (i)25% to the account owner(you). (ii)65% for us
(the panel officials). (iii)10% to be used in settling all expenses (by
both you and us)incidental to the actualization of this project. We wish
to invest our share of the proceeds of this project in foreign stock
markets and other business till we are ready and able to have access to
them without raising any eyebrows here at home. Please note that this
transaction is 100% safe and risk- free. We intend to effect the transfer
within fourteen (14) banking days from the date of receipt of the
following information through the ifax number stated above:Your
Company^Òs name, address,telephone and fax numbers. The above information
will enable us write letters of claim and job description respectively.
This way, we will use your company^Òs name to apply for the payment and
backdate the award of the contract to your company. We are looking
forward to doing this transaction with you and we solicit for your utmost
confidentiality in this transaction. Please acknowledge the receipt of
this letter using the above ifax number;it is an America Internet Fax
number it was acquired for the purpose of confidentiality.You can also
reach me on my alternative email: acctmin@exclusivemail.co.za I will
bring you into a more detailed picture of this transaction when I hear
from you. Best regards, TAYE OWENS.

______________________________________________________________
Envoyez des messages musicaux sur le portable de vos amis ! Cliquez ici

Double standards annoy me, especially when people apply the bad one to me.

First, some background. I work for an Internet company and we have a lot of customers. We get a huge number of support requests, sales questions, etc. every day and we answer them all. Every time someone sends us a new email (as opposed to replying to an existing ticket), they get an immediate auto-reply with a ticket number they can use for future reference if they call, email, fax, etc. This does two things: it lets them know that we received their email and it makes it easy for them to follow up if they don't think their problems are being handled properly. It's extremely rare that anyone waits more than 8 hours for a reply from a real person, no matter what time they email us, and most get replies well within an hour. On top of that, a real person with real technical knowledge is there to answer the phone 24x7. We don't have a huge call centre or anything. We're exremely cost-conscious (part of the reason we're still in business, unlike some of our prominent competitors) and do things efficiently instead of just throwing money at problems (or ignoring them). I think this is a pretty good system and yet I still occasionally hear of people complaining about it.

Now, I'm often in situations where the roles are reversed and I'm the customer. I deal with one particular vendor maybe once or twice a month. Well, I use their automated system to get some stuff. I don't actually deal with a person. I ran into a problem a while back and emailed their support department about it. I really just wanted to know if we'd been billed for something and I included the order number and all the necessary information to make it easy for them to look things up. I didn't receive any answer at all for a week, so I called them. Their automated system told me that all their customer service reps were busy and to please wait for the next available rep. After about 10 minutes on hold, it forwarded me to a voicemail system and said that someone would call me back the next business day which is 9am-5pm Eastern Time, Monday-Friday. The next business day? People still have 9-5 business days? What is this, the 70s? I left my name, contact information, and all the information I sent in my email. That was a week ago and I still haven't heard back from either the call or the email.

This vendor is a big company. A big Internet company. They make a lot of money. Their product requires far less ongoing support than most of the stuff we sell. It should be pretty simple for them to answer anything within a few hours. Granted, this happened around the whole September 11 anniversary thing, but we keep up our support during all holidays and world events. I resorted to contacting their billing department and threatening not to pay them if I didn't get some answers. We'll see how it turns out, but I was pretty sure I'd have to dump them and find someone else. Then I checked out their competition and guess what, they look just as bad. Their web sites don't list prices, they push all kinds of value-added crap that I don't want, and they actually want fax communication for certain things instead of email. Ridiculous.

It didn't take me long to get so annoyed with the whole situation that I gave up for tonight and posted something to my web site.

Rock 'n' Roll High School was on Much More Music last weekend. For those who haven't seen this cinematic masterpiece, it's a classic teenage rebellion movie featuring the Ramones, much like those old Beatles movies except that the Ramones are far less attractive. It was also, embarassingly enough, my first real exposure to the Ramones. I had a couple of their tunes in my collection, notably "Judy is a Punk" which impressed a colleague's girlfriend, but no full albums. I also clearly remember their appearance on the Simpsons, where Smithers introduced them as several young men who he was sure would go far. After soaking up some Ramones culture over the past few days, I realized that they would have been in their mid forties when Smithers said that.

There's some good live music on the horizon, too. Next week is the Tragically Hip concert. The week after that is the Tool concert with the illustrious Warcode. I saw the Cowboy Junkies (whose cover of Sweet Jane beats the pants off Lou Reed's version, in my humble opinion) on television yesterday. I'd like to see them live again.

Since moving to the new place (warning: site intentionally doesn't work in anything but Internet Explorer), my walk to work has improved substanatially. It takes a few minutes longer, but now I walk by Grant MacEwan instead of Churchill Square. That is, I walk by cute college students on their way to class instead of creepy park dwellers asking for spare change. The only down side is that I now walk into the sun both on the way to work in the morning and on the way home in the evening. It's a small sacrifice. Having a supermarket next door is also a quantum leap in convenience. It reminds me of my days back at the house of fun with Mike and Nicki, except that the ceiling is nearly twice as high.

After much procrastination and even some helpful advice from Dave and Ben, I'm still not much closer to buying a car. All the test driving and haggling over price and insurance and gas and parking. It's just such a hassle and it's so much easier to just put it off for later and watch another episode of The Sopranos. I invite comments on car-buying strategies and recommendations.

Recently played:
Supreme Beings of Leisure: Divine Operating System
Beth Orton: Daybreaker
Elastica: Elastica

Web site notes:
It's been over 5 years since I started my web site. After putting up with the accumulated cruft for so long, I decided it was time for a change. The new antiflux.org services encourage a more long-term design instead of my usual ad hoc approach.