PayPal Scam

As you know, we are heading back home from Australia soon and selling our stuff. We advertise it in multiple places, but mainly on Gumtree. It’s been mainly pleasant experience so far, and I’ve got a couple of good leads from this site.

What I would like to share with you is one PayPal scam that we almost fell victims of today. It all started in the morning when I got this mail from someone who supposedly wanted to buy our bedroom set. He asked for the lowest possible price and then came back with an interesting message where offered slightly more than I asked and told that he just moved to UK. He wanted to pay immediately and instruct his shipping agent to pick up the furniture. He offered to pay full price via PayPal and (politely) asked if I had more pictures since he’s unable to inspect the stuff himself.

That alone was suspicious enough, but at that moment we didn’t see how was it possible to scam us. I expressed how surprised I am to hear that he ships this furniture overseas, but told him my PayPal email address to transfer the payment to as agreed.

After this I get an email with the request to remove the ad and to provide my home address for pick up. At this point I started to feel something isn’t right…

I do a quick search and find that most online auctions and ad sites warn you about this scenario — someone offers you a great deal (that’s why they pay you more than you ask), they pay you straight away to your PayPal account, then you ship your stuff to an unverified location (or better yet, they pick it up locally and drive away in an unknown direction).

Now the fun part comes when PayPal figures that either the credit card was stollen, or they used the cheque that can’t be debited to your account and you lose your money. If you were lucky enough and withdrawn the cash from your PayPal account disconnecting your real account and CC from it, the worst that happens is that your PayPal balance goes negative and you are unable to use PayPal until you repay.

In my case, since I already sent them my PayPal email, I had to quickly disconnect it from my account. It would have been extremely unpleasant to find them sending me the payment. So I made everything possible not to receive it in the first place.

So how did I know it was the scam. I didn’t. At least not for sure, but there are some signs that made me suspicious:

1. They offered more than I asked. Looks like a lure. Have you ever seen anyone offering you more than you ask? I mean, Ever?

2. They agreed to any my conditions without any discussions. I wanted to keep furniture until the very date of departure. However…

3. They wanted to pay fast and take the ad off the site. In fact, they wanted to pay me NOW. In every letter I could see at least a couple “immediately”.

4. Is there any furniture in UK? What’s the point in purchasing it here and spend $2k on shipment? That’s stupid if nothing else. I’m not selling rarities after all.

My final response was the polite decline of the deal on the grounds that PayPal payments don’t look secure in this context and that I was advised not to accept them. Never heard from them before.

I hope this helps someone and saves from a lot of trouble. Trade safely!

What’s Up

You might have been wondering what’s going on with that settler Aleks and his wife Kate. Well, a lot.

A week ago our friends showed us the oceanic surf beach where we spent a lovely Saturday. My boogie board and I didn’t get out of water for at least 4 hours. Later, two and a half friends joined us and we all enjoyed a lovely conversation with a mellon, grapes and fresh pine-apple (that I cut right there on the beach). Wonderful day. If you wonder, the beach was Gunnamatta (Photos, Forecast).

Last month I was busy looking for a team to join locally, but haven’t found anything suitable yet. Some offices are inconveniently far and some looking for people with different skills (mainly Java which I don’t want to touch as a little kid who ate candy before dinner; my dinner is spoiled by Ruby). So I decided to take a break and keep my independent contractor chair warm for a little longer. These days however, I focus more on contributing to OSS and working with different projects just for the benefit of all Earthlings. During the last week I contributed a patch to Cucumber, worked days a nights on adapting Cucumber Rails generators to Rails 3, added a nice feature to pass custom tags into assets URL and path to Thoughtbot’s Paperclip, created and deployed Family Hut application for photo-sharing and discussions inside the family (yes, I know about Picasa, Flickr and alike which come all with their downsides; mainly in the form of pricing pages). As you can see, it was a very fun week and my life hasn’t stopped here at all. Quite to the contrary, I’m building up steam.

Also, I was thinking of starting another blog for purely coding topics on a different engine. Current best candidate is Enki but I haven’t reviewed it thoroughly enough. My main concerns with Wordpress are that (a) I still can’t make it show the source code beautifully, (b) I get a lot of spam, (c) I’m tired of PHP and (d) tired of WYSIWYG / plain HTML editor (where’s Textile or Markdown?).

That’s all, folks. If you have any comments / questions, welcome. I’ll let you know if I deploy another blog.

Why River of News is bad for me

If you aren’t familiar with the “river of news” concept, it’s quite a simple thing. Imagine that you are subscribed to several feeds. Now some feed readers let you read them all in the mix by choosing the folder they all sit in or in some other way. It’s convenient in a way that you don’t need to switch between individual feeds, but it’s also flawed.

When reading the “river” I never pay attention to what feed a particular article comes from. Why would I, right? Wrong. Over time I start to realize that I skip over many articles either because the titles don’t grab my attention, they don’t have pictures or uninteresting in any other way. Which of the feeds I don’t need any more on my list? There’s no other way to tell than get back into the history of read articles and try to find out. I have more than 30 Cocoa blogs on my list, so what do I need to clean up?

The answer to me is to get familiar with each individual blog content and the author. River of news doesn’t help me with this and makes it even worse. Daily, I can see the unread counter rolling up, but subconsciously I know it’s going to be looking for needles again. Bad attitude, spoiled reading.

Knees… fixed

I’ve been playing streetball for more than 17 years now and, no question, hard surfaces started to take a toll on my knees. They began to creak last year during the city championship and, shortly afterwards, falling out of sockets. The pain is terrible. All this beauty rendered me basketball-useless for quite some time. Doctors suggested to calm down a bit and leave active sport; and I couldn’t believe all is that bad.

Early this week a physician I know suggested a simple set of exercises to strengthen knees. A really simple one that takes only 25 minutes. So I did two of these with a little break each evening when watching NBA Playoffs, and you know what? Pain goes away. I still can’t believe I suffered so long and all I really needed is to strengthen my knees a bit.

I know there will be a long recovery period during which the remaining pain echos will fade away and I’ll get back on courts at full speed, but hey… it’s a start, and instead of a wheelchair I’m now shooting jumpers for an hour almost everyday in my recreational training.

The set is really simple:

• Sit on the floor, back to the wall — make a letter “L”
• Put a rolled towel under your knees to keep them bent a bit
• Now slowly strain your knee muscles (but keep your knees motionless) and keep it that way for at least 30 seconds
• Relax muscles and rest for a few seconds
• Repeat the set of straining and rest 25 times

I chose the 45-15 scheme for myself that is easy to count and takes exactly 25 minutes (~1.5 quarters of a game; so I can do 2 sets during one game).

Many thanks to Dmitry Skuridin (Sevastopol, Ukraine) for getting me back on courts!

Blog theme change

For all of you who read my blog in their feed readers, the web theme has changed to something less standard, to something lighter and breathing. I have simply fallen in love with this theme at first sight. It’s clean, it has lots of space, elements are all bold and meaningful, it’s based on my favorite grid (3 column 950px, the main part takes 2 columns). Oh yeah, and I tend to like white color…

Low-fat twitter, blogs and no-list

Habitually, in a new year I expect big changes. People like changes, don’t they?

Today I started my own changes with removing 90% of people I follow on Twitter. I noticed that it has really no value to me to read “went off the grid” or “what a nice couple of toasts I had this morning”, but wastes precious time. Yes, I speculated on this before, so not really going to expand on this.

Removed the blogs I don’t read or don’t pay too much attention to, especially high-traffic ones. This one is quite obvious — why spend time reading something you don’t appreciate.

Made a list of things I don’t need: iPhone, iPod Touch, hardware synthesizers, new vinyl records, new books and movies, new tv series, a car (don’t have one and don’t need one), coffee. These are things over which I had an internal discussion every now and then. Now I don’t and it’s a good thing as it removed just another thing to worry.

This is just a tip of the iceberg of changes I’m planning…

NYC Apple Terror

Ok, it hardly can get any funnier than this:

These are two shots from NYC: Tornado Terror, which is stupid by the way. Come on people, these Apple logos emit light that goes through the paper stickers. If you want to pretend it’s not an Apple computer, be a bit more innovative, for Christ sake…

Twitter Annoyances

Some people on Twitter think that it’s a great publicity tool and they are right.

10 seconds ago I unsubscribed from someone who texted constantly. I mean ALL THE TIME. I could get 2 new messages an hour and if I’m lucky enough, there will be up to 5. He is an experimental electronic music producer and it used to be fun to monitor his progress until he realized that sending “Released new album [link]” ten times in a row in different forms is good for karma. After that I could no longer stand it.

Another edge case is excessive granularity. What people don’t realize is that even keeping all democracy and freedom of speech in mind, Twitter is probably not the place to post “making a cup of coffee”, “drinking coffee”, “ah that’s nice”, “finished coffee, cleaning the cup” type of messages. That’s stupid and only obsessive followers can stand it.

Finally, how on earth people can follow more than 10-20 twitters? Reading must be a day job for someone the one below:

I have (well, had) one buzzing person on my list and it was enough to distract me from whatever I do all day long and this user has 2K. That’s IN-SA-NE!

LinkedIn is where Google Ads live now

Haven’t been to there (LinkedIn) for a while, so decided to update the profile and invite a couple of new contacts to my network. Was unpleasantly surprised by the number of distracting functions around what used to be a very nice and polished professional social network. Google ads are literally everywhere and annoyed me to the degree where I had to install AdBlock Plus to get rid of all that beauty.

Next, as I understand Applications have to bring value, but apparently most of them are quite useless. The LinkedIn Applications concept seems to play the first fiddle — you see the mention of them twice on each square inch of the screen place. I tried to ignore them for a quite some time and then gave up only to find there’s no option to disable them altogether on the settings screens. Ouch.

Can’t say it’s all that awful, but hey, it’s got an ill trend of ad-monetizing and poluting the interface with secondary functions that probably most people won’t find as important. Not everyone spend whole day in LinkedIn working on their profile and making sure their Wordpress blog posts are displayed nicely. Normal people have some work to do, and if some tool stands in a way or simply annoys, it’s likely to be abandoned.

Let’s see where it gets with all that.

Upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.7 Beta 1

Upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.7 Beta 1 several minutes ago. So far so good. I like the look of new Dashboard and its overlook of important parts, however my aesthetic sense is hurt. The worst selection of fonts and sizes ever in the history of WP, the width of the sidebar is disproportionate, font face families are different, non-matching colors… In other words, just like a sample from a “what you have to avoid at all costs” article.

Hopefully, they will fix that soon. Otherwise, great job!