Got some more phishing spam this week at work.  This time it was supposedly from ACCOUNT CENTER and had the subject UPGRAD YOUR ACCOUNT.

Nice use of British English there.

Here’s what it said:

Dear Email Account Owner,

Wow! A personalised email, then!

This message is from educational messaging center to all our email account owners. We are currently upgrading our data base and e-mail account center.

We are deleting all our  email accounts to create more space for new accounts.

Wait, wait, wait!

First of all, I love the name of the administrational unit: “educational messaging center”, and with American spelling of centre too … and not a capital letter in sight.

Their reasoning for asking you to send them your username and password (which is the next bit) is terrific: “we are deleting all our email accounts to create more space for new accounts.”

That doesn’t even make business sense!  It’s like a bank saying: “we are clearing out all the money in the bank in order to create more space for new money.”

It finishes off by saying:

Thank you for using st-andrews.ac.ukk!
Warning Code: VX2G99AAJ

I looked up that warning code, it stands for: “This e-mail was sent by phishing, scamming scum”.  Good to know.

NOTE: This message is authorize by the st-andrews.ac.uk email account protector unit.Notification message will be send back to you after verifying your account before account could be reset. All right reserve.

Wow! I wish we had an “email account protector unit”, that sounds like a cool place to work. I imagine that they dress up in armour and have a big round table with a hole cut out of the centre in which they place the e-mail server.

Do not reply

SERIOUSLY, if you ever get an e-mail anything like this: DO NOT REPLY.

Instead, if you have any doubt about its authenticity then just forward the e-mail to me, along with your username and password, date of birth, address and …

Only joking, I don’t want to see your spam, I get enough of it myself!

So there I was, answering support calls in our helpdesk call management system when I copied a URL into the address bar of Mozilla Firefox 3.0, hit return and …

Well, I was a little surprised to read the following title bar text:

And this error message on the page.

Sorry, this application is not supported on this version of your browser. Your version of Internet Explorer needs to be upgraded to 5.5 or above.  Please contact your System Administrator.

Darn! I knew I should still be using Internet Explorer 5.5.

For those of you that didn’t see this at the other place: Microsoft Update KB951748 and ZoneAlarm woes

In short: ZoneAlarm + Security update for Windows (KB95174 = no internet connection.

Update

For those folks who don’t bother clicking through to my other blog post: the advice from ZoneAlarm is to uninstall the KB951748 hotfix until there is a more robust solution from either Microsoft or ZoneAlarm.

Setting your Internet Security level to Medium isn’t advised for long-term use — it opens your PC up to more risks than it’s worth.

Or just uninstall ZoneAlarm and use the Windows XP built-in firewall.

This is inspired by a Tweet from @jennybee that read:

Feel a bit lost with no tennis to watch at lunch time.

So Wimbledon is over for another year. But there are other major sporting events going on just now, such as the Tour de France.

In many ways Wimbledon is like the Tour. Except that instead of hitting a ball back and forth across a tennis court, they instead cycle around the court as quickly as they can. And instead of calling it a ‘court’ they call it France.

So with that brief introduction to the international sport of cycling over, head over to ITV4 for some Tour action.

On the recommendation of @solobasssteve I’ve been checking out TweetDeck, a Twitter client, but to be honest I find it far too wide.

After all, screen estate is a precious thing when you’ve only got two 17″ (1280 x 1024) monitors at home!

I think I’ll be staying with Twhirl, and just hope that Twitter stays up long enough for me to be able to use it effectively. And that they completely fix and restore their various APIs.

I’m really appreciating Portable Firefox for testing code in older versions of the browser.

But one thing that I really wish is that the process name (or whatever it is) in Portable Firefox was different to the installed version so that I could run both Firefox 2 and 3 simultaneously, like you can with the standalone installations of Internet Explorer.

Clearing out Notes in Outlook, I discovered this one.  I’d been watching I’d Do Anything on BBC1 where host Graham Norton was explaining about the public vote.

… but remember it’s what you think that’s ultimately important!

he said.

“Gosh!” said I, “That’s very postmodern!”

So there I was, up bright and early on a Tuesday morning ready to get started preparing to think about thinking about preparing a sermon for Sunday when I realised that during the summer months the Revised Common Lectionary (the big book with the list of readings for each service) goes a bit gung-ho! in its list of suggestions.

So this coming Sunday we’re offered two streams:

Continuous

Genesis 24.34-38, 42-49, 58-67
Psalm 45.10-17 or Song of Songs 2.8-13
Romans 7.15-25a
Matthew 11.16-19, 25-30

Thematic

Zechariah 9.9-12
Psalm 145.8-14
Romans 7.15-25a
Matthew 11.16-19, 25-30

I’m fairly confident that it’s the continuous stream that Newport-on-Tay follows but play has been delayed until I get confirmation … Ho hum.

Common?

It also doesn’t help that the Scottish Episcopal Church lectionary lists 6 July as “Week of Proper 14″ while the Revised Common Lectionary believes that the Sunday between 3 and 9 July is the week of “Proper 9″.

Not so common after all, eh!

Update

Turns out it’s the thematic readings … time to get a readin’, a prayin’ and a writin’.

I’ve just watched a really interesting video called Jesus in China (9:09).

There are 5 videos in the series, click the Segments button to see them all.

I nearly went to work in China in 1995, but that’s a whole other story and my dinner is ready!

Great to see that the latest update to Firebug has fixed the issue that I reported about it breaking when you opened Firebug in a new window (see Firebug bug at the other place).

Next up, I hope that the alignment of menu items gets fixed in the next update to the Web Developer add-in … it’s just annoying!

Here’s an example (above).  You can clearly see that the icons aren’t equally aligned on the left.