Day: <span>October 1, 2002</span>

Al Hawkins just sent me this B-day iCard:

My brother told me over the weekend about the hilarious Scam Joke Page:

“My friend and I have received quite a few ‘business proposals’ from the 419 scam artists. We have decided to write them back and lead them on a bit. Of course, we don’t use our real names. Instead, we like to go by the name ‘David Lee Roth‘.”

The folks behind the Scam Joke Page have made it their mission to disrupt the scammers who are behind the now notorious spam messages attempting to sucker people out of their money under the auspice of helping a former dignitary get their money out of Nigeria.

The site contains archives of email conversations, voicemail messages and “legal” documents between the scammers and “Mr. Roth”. Often the anit-scammers will lead these scumbags on for days or weeks, even going so far as to arrange fake meetings in Africa, and then make riotous excuses for why they didn’t show up.

Recommended reading, and the voicemails are particularly amusing.

(Warning: It’s addictive stuff.)

It’s officially been my brithday for about an hour. I’m 33 years old. I’m pretty sure that this means absolutely nothing except that it’s been a year to the day since my last birthday, and that it’s been 33 years to the day since I was born.

I’ve been reading in small bits, a three-year-old book called The End of Time. Julian B. Barbour is trying to convince me that time, at least the way we percieve it, actually does not exist. I love this stuff, and always have. Physics, Cosmology, and Theories of Everything have always fascinated me, and if I weren’t working on computers (which have also always fascinated me), I think it’s quite likely that I’d be a cosmologist or theoretical physicist.

But I don’t think that this has anything to do with my birthday either.

What I do know is that I’m going to take the evening off and treat myself to a really nice dinner out, and maybe a movie.

I also know that during my time in existence on this planet, there was never a moment when men had not already set foot on the Moon. This, I think is important, at least to me.

For my brother, there has never been a time when human beings had never sent a craft to the surface of Mars.

For my niece, there has never been a time when the Worldwide Web was not ubiquitous.

For her daughter, I’m pretty certain that nearly anything is possible.

(And though I know I’m already a few days overdue, I’m not going to do a Frontier screenshot today. You’ll have to wait for Oct 2, 2002.)