BilikFamily.com

Work - It was a bit of a long day at work yesterday. Yesterday (and today for that matter) I had a phone/web conference call that went from 10AM until 2:30PM. We had a fifteen minute break in the middle which gave me just enough time to run out for a McLunch. Luckily my presence was primarily just a backup role. I was able to take my work computer, a laptop, into the call and work on other issues at the same time. Nevertheless, it was a looong call.

Home Depot - I left work a little before five to meet Michelle at St. Patricks and take Mighty Timbo off her hands while she taught CCD and the rest of the kids attended their classes. I decided that rather than go straight home and try to think of something to do, I'd take him on an errand. We drove over to Home Depot to check out their stock of compact florescent (CF) bulbs. I had tried last week to see what our local hardware store had but it was hardly anything. Home Depot, though, seems to be capitalizing on folks' recent desire to go after energy savings. Not only did they have CFs in their light bulb section. They also had major displays near the checkout aisles, trying to go for the 'impulse buy'.

The unit pricing on bulbs was what I'd expect (a few dollars per bulb) but their bulk pricing was excellent. I found a box of 12 60 watt replacements (that use 14 watts) with a warm spectrum for $20. To paraphrase Larry the Cable Guy, “that's a bargain, I don't care who you are!”

Installation - Timothy and I got home about 20 minutes ahead of the rest of the family. I put on one of his new Baby Einstein videos but he was too fascinated in watching me change bulbs. Five of the most commonly used overhead fixtures on the first floor now use CFs. Mission accomplished. In many cases what used to use 180 watts now uses 42. When Michelle came home she quickly assessed what I had done and said she thought these bulbs looked much better and more natural than our first dabbling with CFs. She saw the box and braced herself for the price. “20 bucks,” I said. “Really?! That's awesome!” She was expecting $60 or more. She now wants me to get to work on the basement lights.

Veggietales - Michelle and I got the three boys down to bed. The girls and I prepared to watch our newest DVD that came in from Amazon — Veggietale's Lord of the Bean. Whereas many Veggie videos involve one major story with one or two minor stories, this one has just the "Bean" story with a minor intermission for their traditional Silly Song. It's about half as long as a Disney movie. I had two favorite lines on the DVD. One is when the main character, Toto Baggypants, says, “I don't know beans.” But my favorite is at the end of the silly song. Someone pops off Larry's fake elf ears and says, “I knew it. You're not an elf! You're an elfish impersonator!!”

Phishing scam - This morning I got my best phishing scam yet. First, the email was all HTML with no plain text equivalent. Thankfully Mac's Mail won't load the images in an email until you tell it. Loading the images in an HTML email would confirm to the sender that you read the message. It was extremely official looking and in normal view there was absolutely no way you could tell it wasn't from the "official" sender. In this case they were spoofing the popular online payment system, PayPal. The message said,

We recently received a report of unauthorized credit card use associated with this account. As a precaution, we have limited access to your PayPal account in order to protect against future unauthorized transactions.
For your protection, we have limited access to your account until additional security measures can be completed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
To review your account and some or all of the information that PayPal used to make its decision to limit your account access, please visit the Resolution Center by following the link below...

The link below visually said PayPal. I decided to do a View->Message->Raw Source. Sure enough, they did everything possible to make you think you were going to go to PayPal by setting the hover popup, the status line, etc, but in reality you were going to pws.prserv.net where they would then continue to spoof you by asking you to login, grabbing your account name and password. Man! I wish there was a way I could educate people as to how sneaky these can be. If I were new to the internet, it would have been so easy to grab my account because the details that they went through were quite advanced.