Wow, I'm Rich !!

I received the following email today. I can't believe that spam like this is at all successful. Me, I thought it was funny.... until I saw that the "charity" is for people with disabilities. Not cool...
PS I am posting this as a warning and hopefully someone can make life difficult for this spammer

From: ONLINE NOTIFICATION
Reply-To: qef.donations08@ymail.com
Subject: Dear Beneficiary. From: Queen Elizabeth's Foundation.
Date: Fri, 04 Jul 2008 01:41:03 +0100 (Thu, 17:41 PDT)




From: Queen Elizabeth's Foundation
Woodlands Road Leatherhead
Court Leatherheadd Surrey
KT22 0BN.
Tel: +44 703 196 5163, +44 70457 23894



Dear Beneficiary,



Congratulations once again on behalf of the Donations Board. We do
believe that your winnings will be put into good use for community,
educational and business development. On Behalf of the Screening
Committee of Donations Board, I wish to formally announce to you
that you have successfully passed the Email Screening and Verification
Matching Test conducted for all online winners in your Category.
Hence you are therefore cleared, your cheque has been issued and you
can now claim your donation.

This is to notify you that you have been chosen By the Board of trustees
of the above International charity organization branch in the England as
one of the final recipients of a Cash Grant/Donation for your own personal,
education and business development Association Of Queen Elizabeth's
Foundations. in conjunction with the Queen Elizabeth's Foundations is
giving out a yearly donation of 600,000.00GBP, Six Hundred Thousand Pound
Sterling as specific Donations/Grants to 50 lucky international recipients
worldwide in different categories for their educational pursuit, health care,
personal Business development and uplift of their environments.

These funds are freely given to you to use for your business educational
and personal development and at least 30% to be used by you to develop
a part of your environment, as this is a yearly program Please kindly note
that you are not the only beneficiary in your country this year, and your
country is not the only country that is benefiting from this donation, as
beneficiaries have been chosen from countries from all continents. The
idea of this donation is that within ten years from now, there will be
notable richness amongest many unusual people around the world. All
necessary documents that will facilitate the issueing of your ATM CARD
in your Name has been processed.

The documents have been securely sealed and packed for security
reasons which makes it impossible for anyone to view it until its been
delivered to you.

Note: that your prize is protected by a hardcover insurance policy, which
makes it impossible to deduct any amount from the money before it has
been remitted to you.
This is in accordance with section 13(1)(n) of the national gambling act
as adopted in 1993 and amended on 3rd July 1996 by the constitutional
assembly.This is to protect winners and to avoid misappropriation of
funds.

For your ATM CARD to be remitted to you, be advised to contact Mr.
Mr. George Marthins with the details below and request him to start the
processing of your ATM CARD, to enable you withdraw your grant funds
at any of the ATM cashpoint in your locality.


Bank Name---------------- Scotia Bank Plc
Contact Person------------- Mr. George Marthins
Tel----------- +44 703 190 7492
E-mail----------- wire.transfer@scotiabankplc.com


Make sure you contact Scotia Bank with the above contact details and also
send them your personal info as stated below;

YOUR COMPLETE LEGAL NAME:
HOME OR OFFICE ADDRESS:
PHONE AND FAX NUMBERS:
E-MAIL:



Best Regards,
Mrs. Joyce A. Hecktor
Tel: +44 703 196 5163,
+44 70457 23894

Woodlands Road Leatherhead
Court Leatherheadd Surrey
KT22 0BN..


*******************************************************
Queen Elizabeth's Foundation for Disabled People is a registered charity
No 251051. Registered as a company limited by guarantee in London No
892013. Registered at Leatherhead.‭‮

Flickr

Ok, so I will give Flickr a try.
I think I need to keep my regular web site, but maybe it will help me organize and market...

I moved...

The last couple of months have been pretty crazy. I started a new job with all that entails, and I also moved into a new apartment. Hopefully I will get things organized and get back on this blog sooner rather than later...

Saving Stuff...

I have been running my own server for a while now. I started largely as an experiment to see how cheaply I could make a running website. (It originally cost me zero dollars, including the computer, but a TON of time...) Later it evolved into a full blown home server.
At the present time, I am running two servers in my living room. One runs my photo site, and the other is a storage server. The second is the subject of this blog...
As photographers, even with judicious editing, we amass a lot of images. And while hard drive space gets cheaper and cheaper, hard drives still fail. I really did not want to lose years of work. Through my research on building my own website (a topic for another day...) I came across SME Server. A few things I like about this Linux distribution:

1. very simple and very fast
2. runs on cheap, old hardware. Both my servers are old discarded machines.
3. runs raid "out of the box"
   
4. easy to configure and run (more on this below)
5. works well with windows networks (XP at least, I had problems with Vista, which was one of the reasons I moved completely to Linux)
6. well maintained, many updates.

Let me start with the last point first. There are almost literally a million Linux distributions out there. Many of them are very specialized, many of them are a hobby of a small group of people. SME has a large group of people working on constantly improving it. The really cool thing about open source software is that any programmer anywhere can look at the program and improve it. The more eyes looking at a project, the faster it improves. Also, because so many eyes are looking at it, it is much harder to bugger it up by adding spyware, etc. The rule of large groups says most people are very reasonable, "it is the few that spoil it for the many". or to state it more directly, any sufficiently large group tends to act to its collective best interest.
While I consider myself fairly computer savvy, I am not a computer tech. I can follow instructions, but I don't want to spend all my time configuring or fixing my system. now that may seem a bit strange considering how I have my Ubuntu desktop setup, but while I like eye-candy, I do just want it to work!

On to point 5. did I say Vista sucks for networking? In fact Samba (the Linux version of MS Windows networking) is better at networking than the Windows it is supposed to be copying. Also Linux (and Unix that it was originally based on) were designed from inception to be network aware. Permissions, user groups, etc are much easier to manage on a Unix based system. SME servers shows up in windows XP as a shared network drive. Same for my Ubuntu. Apparently OSX is supported as well, but I have not tested this. FYI an SME installation is seen from Vista, but Vista is not able to log on without a lot of hoop jumping, and the final straw was that all these hoops had to be jumped through every time I accessed the drive. I could not find any way to get Vista to save my settings. Just frustrating.

And finally, a note on RAID. If you don't know what it is, it is basically an instant backup of everything you store. All files are stored on both of the two (or more, but that gets a bit more complicated to explain) installed hard drives. If one drive fails, you still have all your data backed up on the second drive. You can take out the bad drive, install a new one, and the system will rebuild itself. You can read more here

New Images up

OK, I got a few new images up...
check them out.

new stuff

OK, I have neglected this site again. I do plan on adding some more photos on my website soon, so please be patient...
as a teaser here is one I took today

Merry Christmas

'Tis the season for good cheer and good will to all...
I have been very busy at work lately, and I have not had a lot of time for photography or blogging...
I have been working on my photo software. As you may know, I use Ubuntu Linux as my main operating system. It has been a bit of a learning experience moving from years of Windows and Adobe products, but I am getting closer to a real workflow.
I wish everyone a happy holiday season and a photographic new year.