Update: Kari, Grant, and Tory have just posted apologies on Twitter.
Further Update: Jamie and Adam have posted apologies as well.

Yet Another Update: Adam has confirmed that no, Mythbusters has not been suspended/cancelled.

Fortunately, I use Plume for Android and it doesn’t remove deleted tweets! Here are the removed pictures:

Tory and his Cannon

"Cannon Envy"

"Heavy Artillery"

Edit: Sorry for the slowness – my little VPS is struggling to handle the load after being linked on Wired, Techdirt, and Fark (can’t find the link at the moment). Did some conf tweaking and the site should be more responsive now.

After checking with friends (who laughed at the prospect of owning a Mac), and spamming the global distribution list at work (no bites there), I restored to posting ads on Craigslist and Kijiji (the latter of which brought in zero perspective buyers). The Craigslist ad, though, prompted a number of replies.

The problem, however, was out of all of the replies I received, only four of them were people who were genuinely interested. I won’t post those replies, but instead, the ones that were almost certainly scams.

So a little background information – when I posted the ad, under all of the specs I very clearly wrote “Cash only – must agree to meet me in person, in a public place that we both agree on”. The ensures that not only do I not have to worry about shipping the thing, but it assures me that I won’t get any fraudulent cheques, money orders, etc…. Unfortunately, the people who tend to perpetrate these scams tend to ignore these warns, as outlined below:

This first example was actually “Sarah”‘s second email to me – the first one was a generic “Do you still have the item for sale?” inquiry.

Hello,

Thanks for getting back to me on time,i will like to buy this item and

Am quite comfortable with the condition of the item since i wont be

making any repairs on it,and i will be very more than happy if you can

help me get this item shipped, and am willing to offer $770 to include

the shipping fees through the USPS Express mail service,and i will be

paying you through my PayPal account so send me your PayPal email

address so i can make instant payment get back to me

…….ASAP….Thanks and GOD bless

Note the “GOD bless” at the bottom – I would imagine they were thinking “If I put that in, they’ll think I’m a god-fearing Christian and they’ll be sure to make the deal!”.

1. So what was wrong with this offer? Several things:
2. They ignored my Cash Only – Local Only warning. Never a good sign when they don’t even say “Hey, could you make an exception?”
3. The sentence structure/grammar are…well…horrible and far too formal. Definitely someone trying to sound on the up-and-up a little too hard.
4. Offering to pay more than the listed price. I listed the laptop for less than that. All four of the legit, local enquiries first offered less (in one case, far less) than my asking price. By offering to pay more, the scammer is hoping that you’ll be greedy and jump on the offer.

So why wouldn’t I try, take the money, and send it anyway? Well, the problem is that most of these involve stolen Paypal accounts. The person will get the account, not use it, and wait for something like this to come along (a relatively high-value item). They’ll then use that account to pay for it take the item, which they’ll then sell themselves. Meanwhile, the rightful owner of the Paypal account discovers the new unauthorized charge and files a dispute with Paypal. The money gets pulled from my account, and now I’m short both the money and the laptop. Pretty sneaky.

Another “Sarah” (which seems to be a commonly used name for the scammers) contacted me, asking a few more questions (“Do you still have the box”, and “What condition is it in”), before inevitably asking for my Paypal details to send the Payment. I politely replied that as the ad stated, I would only deal in cash and locally because of the chance of a stolen account being used. To this, she replied (in full):

my account is not stolen

Really? Well in that case, sure! I mean, I wasn’t positive, but you’ve managed to convince me!…Not.

Another one (again, the second email after the first “Is it available, what condition, etc…”):

Hello, thanks for your reply. I’m glad you still have the item for sale. Your asking price sounds OK to me. Payment will be make via money order with the shipping fee included. Payment will be deliver to you within 3 to 5 working days. Then pick up will commence immediate by my shipping agent once you have clear the payment in your bank. I will add extra 50$ to your last asking price if you agree to sell this item and hold it for me till you receive my payment. Kindly fill the below data for payment to be mail out tomorrow morning.

FULL NAME :
PHYSICAL ADDRESS :
CITY, PROVINCE :
ZIP/POSTAL CODE :
PHONE/MOBILE NUMBER :
ITEM AGREED PRICE :

I hope to hearing from you soon with the payment information in order to complete the sales asap. Thanks.

Regards,
Edward Parker.

Nope. Sorry.

There were a bunch more, but all were basically the same. In each instance, my typical reply is this:

As you appear to be illiterate, I well try to phrase my payment requirements in a simpler manner – a haiku:

Cash. Only. I mean it.
Must. Meet. In. Person. Okay?
No Exceptions. Thanks.

So that’s about it. I ended up getting a little less than I asked for it, and now I’m the proud owner of an Asus Eee Pad Transformer. Hopefully it’ll be a long time before I decide to sell anything online again.

It's pretty sad when none of the other Federal leaders will play cricket with you

Ask anyone who knows me, and they’ll confirm that I’m absolutely nuts about Portal 2. As such, here’s a quick wallpaper with one of my favourite quotes from the game (Cave Johnson’s “Don’t Make Lemonade” speech).

(Updated – fixed a typo)

(Portal 2 is copyright Valve software. Quote and ‘Portal’ image used without permission. I call it Fair Use. If anyone disagrees, I would like you to note that I don’t make any money from this, and am too poor to be worth suing.)

• cloud puns
• go home and take a shower, sit on the floor, wallpaper
• how to put moblin on iphone
• insomnia efi boot
• how to pull up the command prompt in windows 7
• tea bag double double — Which I hope is in reference to this post, and not to the activity of “tea bagging”, political or otherwise
• froyo wipe – This references the Android 2.2 OS (codename Froyo), but the idea of a “Froyo Wipe” is very, very disturbing.
• crappy hardware
• www.google.com ibm g p o  – Yes, they searched for ‘www.google.com’
• “i got an agent right away”
• how to polish shit – I know the post that triggered this one, but I’m still surprised someone actually found this blog with that search
• microsoft shit
• where did “the god damn batman” come from — Read this.
• robocopying hosted vm’s - Wait, what?
• mess of cables
• what is the terminal emulator in rooted android – If you need to ask, you probably shouldn’t be using it…

The project itself was a type of community portal focused on local businesses, and had been in operation for a few months. Things were going swimmingly and the site was starting to take off with nearly a thousand local businesses registered. This got the attention of two local SEO (Search Engine Optimization) firms who desperately needed work (or at least, that’s how they ended up coming across). The salesman from the first firm was offensive to the point where the project manager simply refused to repeat the conversation they had and will only reference them by referring to them with a nickname. The second one, though, I got to hear the story of.

Mid-afternoon, the project manager gets a phone call from (as we’ll call her) Diane. Diane gets straight to the point. “I don’t want to offend you,” she starts, already oozing marketing slime through the phone, “but I don’t like your site. It’s going straight to search engine hell.”

Here’s a Pro Tip for those of you in the marketing/sales industry: If you have to start off by saying “I don’t mean to offend”, you’re going to, and the potential customer won’t appreciate it.

“See, when I search for <name of our region>, you’re nowhere near the first page on Google. With my help, you can be for local and global searches! I don’t know who made the site, but they screwed up, and we want the contract!”

Another Pro Tip: Research, research, research! The name of the developer is plastered all over the site, and was featured prominently during a news spot on the local news a few days prior, so if they had bothered to even look at the site they would have know who to call out. Secondly, had they bothered to look a little further in to the purpose of the site, they would have seen that global positioning of the site on search engines wouldn’t be a priority anyways, as the primary means of driving people to the site is via local advertising or by searching for keywords/the name of the business and the region, which already results in first-page rankings for the businesses in the directory.

The rest of the conversation went downhill from there. She attacked branding, overall design, and basically made an ass of herself. When the project manager finally got her off the phone and came to ask me if there was any merit to the criticisms. I did a quick review of the site, did some sample searches, and showed that the site lived up to all of the expectations and that the designers followed proper SEO techniques when building the site.

The SEO lady eventually sent a few followup emails which, thanks to her ‘marketing techniques’ were moved immediately to the trash.

So, for those of you who are tempted to start out a sales call by pointing out each-and-every flaw in the potential customers product: Stop. Don’t “don’t mean to offend”. And research. Then, if you are nice enough and craft your pitch well enough, you just may be able to skip the “???” step and jump right to “Profit!”.

I last night’s game, my character (a Lawful Good Paladin played to the tune of a Whitecloak from Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series) nearly died in combat. As such, I rolled a 1d20 with a result of 2. As such, I rolled the percentile and came with with a 5. From the Trauma Table (which I can’t reproduce here due to copyright restrictions), a 5 resulted in an Alignment Reversal. My Lawful Good Paladin became (after a short side trip) a Chaotic Evil Blackguard.

The Trauma Table doesn’t come in to play that often, but the result can be small (my friend Mike’s character can’t stand to be around music) or game changing.

I get what they’re trying to say – the PC is boxy and old-fashioned while the Mac is shiny and new. The unintentional humour is that while the Portal turret does it’s job adequately in its game, it’s easily defeated. The PC (or Team Fortress 2 turret) on the other hand starts out small and meek, but can be easily upgraded in to a massive powerhouse. That said, which would you rather have? Effective but locked down, or less-than-pretty but easily customizable?

Of course, I could just be reading too much in to things again.