The most convincing 411 scam eva!

Federal Bureau of Investigation
FBI Seattle Division
1110 Third Avenue
Seattle, Washington 98101-2904

Payment Code: R5780906K
Reg No: 132521093
Date: February 20, 2009

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has discovered through our intelligence Monitoring Network that you are eligible to receive the sum of $7,500,00.00 USD regarding to an over-due Inheritance/Award payment which was fully endorsed to be paid in your favor.

Therefore, the FBI Seattle Division in conjunction with the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Has screened through our various Monitoring Networks and has been confirmed and notified that the transaction you have with the Financial Institution is Legal and you have the Lawful Right to claim your due fund. We advise you to go ahead with the transaction as we are monitoring all their services and networks. Be advised that any letter or claims notification received from anybody or company should be forwarded to us with immediate effect.

Meanwhile, you are advised to follow the procedure of the Financial Institution. They have their own legal procedure which we have examined and confirmed legal. Follow their instructions while you keep us updated for more details. You are advised to contact the necessary office for more details of transfer as we are monitoring every move now.

Please, be advised and be aware that your funds had been insured and the necessary charges would be taken care of by you, as confirmed by the Monitoring network. For your own good you are advised to confirm any transaction or lottery promo you have either involved yourself with in the past to enable us trace this scammers. Only the Financial Institution has been confirmed Legal any other are still under investigation, and so many others are scam, most especially from Nigeria and Africa.

Please contact the Head of Operations Dr. Ferren Rodriguez, Spring Bank Plc.

Dr. Ferren Rodriguez (Head of Operations)
International Remittance Department
Email: ferrenrodriguez@gmail.com

If you need to contact me at any stage please do not hesitate to call (206) 350-6981.

Sincerely,

Fox Mulder (Special Agent-in-Charge Badge Number: JTT047101111)

Strangely given the fact he'd tracked me down, the FBI had very little info about me. I had to tell him my date of birth, mother's maiden name and details of the bank account I wanted the money paid to. Then I had to sign this form and scan it in and email it to his g-mail account. Apparently the FBI mail servers are down at the moment :(.

I did ask about Scully, and how she was doing, but he's not replied yet. Can't wait to see the money! I can great some great new camera gear with that amount. I already sent him the "handling fee" via pay pal so it should be any day now! Yipee!

Photographers Rights

I read today that hundreds of photograhpers have staged a protest, outside Scotland Yard, against a new law under Section 76 of the Counter Terrorism Act which means they could be arrested simply for taking a picture of a member of the police, armed forces or intelligence services.

This is in fact news to me, and had I known earlier I may well have gone to London myself to join in. Whilst I understand the intention of the law, I find the way in which it could be interpreted and implemented hugely unsettling and deeply worrying. I feel it's just another step down the road to somewhere like Nineteen 84. A slow and inexorable impingement of liberties.

There are already a huge number of laws that as a photographer one might have to consider, which demonstrates that the statement "there is no law against taking a picture" to be a fallacy. A contact on flickr was recently trailed by uniformed police with video surveillance equipment simply for taking a photograph of a defence establishment building. I'm assuming this is because it contravenes the official secrets act 1911. Although I understand too well the tactic of police to intimidate the legitimate public when there is as yet no right to arrest.

So whilst I understand the spirit in which this law was passed, I don't necessarily think it's well defined or necessarily needs be implemented as law. Any law that puts a check on civil liberties should be extremely well considered otherwise it sets a dangerous and disturbing precedent.

Nikon Colours

I found this setting on my camera which I think is quite useful. I'm not entirely clear I understand what it all means, to me colour is colour. With something digital, reds, greens and blues are just a pattern of bits. So 0xFF0000 should look the same anywhere, bright red. I don't really see how you can interpret this differently. But seemingly you can.

This relates to my D80, so I don't know which other models have these features, or even if they have different names. But open the menu (press MENU on the back), and go to the Shooting Menu (the little green camera icon, second down). Select Optimize Image (first option.) Then select Custom.

For image sharpening I choose Auto. Apparently this is quite good at making it genuinely sharp without introducing artifacts. I'm not sure yet, but if it causes a problem I'll turn it off.

Tone compression is currently 0, but I might change that. I like contrast, and is the most common thing I change on a photo in lightroom. So I'll see how things go and change if if I feel I would benefit.

Color mode, which I understand is the most important, should be set to IIIa. I have lightroom setup to use the sRGB colorspace, because I read on flickr a lot of people moan about Adobe RGB. But this is where I get confused. Surely RGB is just RGB? And what is the different between I a(sRGB) and III a(sRGB). It really makes no sense to me, but I "read it on the internet" so it must be right. That and the fact I do seem to spend less time processing and quite often can just export direct from Lightroom without touching anything.

Saturation I have on +, or Enhanced. Because I end up doing this in lightroom at lot too anyway, because I like vivid colours.

Hue adjustment I have left at 0. I guess that would be useful if I was shooting under different coloured light (otehr than white) although because I always shoot RAW for the colour depth (yes 12 bit does make a big difference over 8 bit) I can do this in lightroom if it becomes a big problem.

Of course I would ideally never do anything in lightroom. I enjoy taking photos not sitting in front of a computer endlessly moving sliders. So the aim of these settings I hope is to cut down the number of things I do, and increase the number of things the camera can do for me.

Flickr Stats

I suppose I get about on average 60 hits a day on flickr. By far my most popular photographs are my Royal Marine set. They alone account for literally thousands of my page views and are probably the reason I can take such rubbish photos and still get so many daily visitors. Imagine how many would visit if I was any good?

Anyway, I was just browsing through my referrers the other day and it made me laugh. I've about twice as many refers from yahoo image search, which is perhaps not surprising given the owner of flickr. And given my stream, the top 4 hits are unsurprisingly "royal marines", "royal marines commando", "royal marine commando" and "kittens". Then a little down the list I get "crazy person", "basket of kittens" and "crazy maniac".

Why anyone would think I had any pictures of crazy people I don't know. I don't even know anyone crazy. Well other than myself. But I am intrigued by what a "basket of kittens" would be, and why so many people are interested in seeing one.

I'm also intrigued by the person looking for "cow that eats grass". More interesting I thought would be a "cow that doesn't eat grass". Perhaps one addicted to ice cream. Or even a cow that ate people! That would be crazy.

Down at 101 is "burger flipping" which is co-incidentally probably what I would end up doing if I tried to take photography seriously. If I did end up working in the food industry though I'd like to meet "kind cookies", I so hate the rude and selfish ones.

Just over half as popular is the google image search. This actually makes me wonder about the relative popularity of search engines actually. Do I get twice the hits from yahoo because twice as many people use yahoo to search for images? Is it purely because yahoo own flickr? Or do I take more yahoo-ee images. You know, the sort images that people who use Yahoo prefer and I'm being shunned by the more sophisticated google audience. Where do the most sophisticated people do searches for images. Other than flickr itself, I actually prefer live.com for image searches because I like the AJAX funkyness and you can't just keep scrolling down the page and don't have to click next. But I have no referrers from Live.

Again top of my google searches are "royal marines officer" and "40 commando". Over half the first 50 refers relate to the Royal Marines, or 40 Commando in some way. And ironically amongst the google results are a number of "site:flickr.com" searches. Do people really find it easier to search flickr via google?

There are less bizarre searches coming from google. The only one that really jumps out is "marines in sing", whatever that means. I thought ""joe townsend" +legs" was almost bad taste though.

I don't know how "guava+thai" found anything of mine. Nor some strange unicode search which I have no idea what it means, nor even what language it might be in. Probably Korean it looks like.

There were a couple from google.com that made me laugh (i.e. normal search, not image search.) Among them a grockle asking "what does ark at ee mean ?" And someone who wants to see images from "planet fish". I'd like that too! Then there was some odd ones like "site:www.flickr.com 2598186246" (a picture of brent knoll), "site:www.flickr.com 2580973670" (rusting tractors) and "site:www.flickr.com 2577596337" (purple flowers). I don't know if this is indicative of some craze where you can search for random images on flickr, or systematic of something else. I find it hard to believe someone would remember a number and go "Oh where was that really cool picture of brent knoll I saw the other day...hmmmm oh yeah I remember, it was image 2598186246 on flickr."

Sadly there was only one refer from google for someone searching for "Jamie Gordon". And that might well have been me. Or my mum!

Fixed Computer

As much as I wanted to just buy a new DELL from the DELL outlet, after buying an engagement ring buying anything scares teh crap out of me. So I did the obvious first and took my case off. Inside was about 3 inches of dust, 13 birds nests and a snake. So I got the vacuum cleaner out, vacuumed and tried to be careful not to suck off any jumpers, and reinstalled XP onto a new hard drive.

Goodbye Vista, welcome back XP. (Oooh, how fast my new PC is!)

Now to reinstall everything. Luckily I've kept my Lightroom backups up to date.

Broken Computer

My computer is broken. It's some hardware failure, Vista is so crap the blue screen literally is just a blue screen, doesn't tell me anything. I've only managed to get one minidump out of it and it told me nothing that it's a "hardware failure", but I can't pin it down any more than that as it was only a minidump.

I'm gonna strip it down as I've a feeling it's heat related, seeing as it's at its most stable when it's first turned on. Check the fans, make sure the memory is still seated etc. I may also check in another hard drive and re-install XP just so I have a clean system to diagnose with.

I just bought an engagement ring, I can't afford a new PC as well, not for about another 3 years anyway.

Miserable

The weather has been so bad this October, I was really hoping for a spectacular autumn, and all we have is rotting leaves on boggy ground. It's so depressing. And the other day I had to spend about 4 hours outside trying to coax one of our kittens back inside who escaped, then I got freezing, and then soaked and covered in mud when at one point I laid down in the mud which was once our garden trying to coax her through the hedge.

All I want to do is go to Westonbirt to take a picture of the trees. I guess I'll just wait and go on my birthday and do the Enchanted Walk again. And try to capture Autumn next year.

So far this month, I think in fact I have not even taken one photograph. But I have run 19.45 miles, and burnt in the region of 2,669 calories. I don't think I've lost very much weight, maybe a kilos or two at most, but to be honest the scales fluctuate so much I have no idea what I weigh. But running is easier now so it must be doing some good. Although with the evening being so very dark now it's hard to run my normal route which takes my up a lane and through trees with no street lights. It's completely pitch black. I'll have to take a torch with my next time so I don't have to walk just so I don't run into anything!

The other day I did buy some skin tight lycra tights because it is so damn cold. I'm no Linford Christie I guess, but they are still embarrasing to wear without shorts. I also bought almost the most expensive pair of socks in the world because I had a problem with my foot. They were £8 a pair. My last socks I got from JJB Sports and were like £2 for a pack of 5 or something. But they are cotton and the trouble with cotton is it absorbs sweat and swells. The problem I had was pins and needles in my left foot after about 3 miles. The internet told me this was either too tight shoes, or a problem with my ligaments which a hamstring stretch would help. So I am doing extra stretches before and after running, and I have these new socks. They're are pretty comfortable, and make a huge difference to running just wearing them. So far also I've not had the circulation problem also, but my long run isn't until tomorrow morning so will see then.

I don't care how cold it gets, I just hope November is brighter. What I wouldn't give to see some snow this December too.