You have to see Jake Shimabukuro play to believe your ears. This artist can play things on a ukulele that most guitarist would like to be able to play with 6 strings, and Jake is playing it on 4. You have to see Jake play “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”.

As you know I work in the technology . It’s imperative that I keep up with the latest news on the technology front. If there is a new web browser, I download it and start testing our web site and home banking. Enter digg.com, digg is a social  bookmarking and rating site that is center around technology. One of the nice things about the site is that you can see all of the links/articles you “dugg” as well as being able to see the what your friends are “digging” too. I really like it, check it out.You want to see want to see what I dugg? My username is “o2bjang” Just add me to your friends list.

As you may or may not know, I am very allergic to grass, specifically cut grass. Because of this I am denied the basic male excuse for going to home depot, which is, I need to get something to finish mowing the lawn. General my Beautiful Wife mows the lawn. I try to help get everything ready for her, and then flee the area. There are times with I do get to mow the lawn, however it looks like I’m about to perform surgery with a darth vader mask on. (Which by the way I still think is over at my Folk’s house). I have latex surgical gloves on, and a respirator that makes my breathing sound like darth vader, and is amazingly warm to wear.  Not the most ideal lawn mowing apparel.

That is where the RCLM2006S comes in. A completely remote control lawn mower. I bet if I put a wireless camera on it I could mow the lawn from the living room.

Phishing is a reel pain. (pun intended)  So the phishing I am referring to in the Internet scam kind. I know that my family reads my blog, so this is for you guys. I don’t want you getting ripped off by the evil people out there on the Internet. In 2004, 970,000 people were victims of phishing scams.

So lets talk about what a phishing attack is, and how it starts. Its starts simple enough, you get an email that says it is from your bank or credit union. It usually says something to the effect that they’ve either done some system maintenance or had a system upgrade and need you to log in to the home banking site to verify either your information or your account. Of course for your convenience they’ve added the link to home banking in the email for you, so all you have to do is click the link to login.

See the Evils Phishing Bad Guys or EPBGs for short are very crafty. They will completely copy the look and feel of the website they are trying to imitate. Oh and don’t think because your bank or credit union is small that the EPBGs won’t try to phish it. It’s become a matter of when not if for all banks and credit unions.

So how do you tell the real email from the fake ones? Here is where the details matter. For the most part the EPBGs are launching these attacks from overseas, mostly Eastern Europe and Asia, so improper grammar and spelling are give aways that the email is probably a fake. Take it from me, our marketing people go through at least 5 revisions before an email is sent out.  Another thing to look at is the link in the email, does it look like the right address or is something a little off? If it doesn’t look right, it probably isn’t right. Third call the FI (Financial Institution) that send the email, don’t be afraid to ask them, “Hey did you send me this?”  If they don’t know about it, then they didn’t send it.

Okay now you’ve figured out that the email you got was a phishing scam, don’t delete it just yet, report the email to the company that the email claims to be from. They need to know as soon as possible, to protect themselves and their customers, as well as get the scam site shut down.

I’m not trying to scare you guys, I just want to keep you informed.

“Hello my name is Russ and I am a Dot.com survivor. I worked for four dot.com. Only one of them is still around. The last dot.com I worked for I survived five rounds of layoffs. By the time it was my turn to get laid off I was even relieved. I even asked my boss if he was okay, because he was more broken up about it then I was.That was in May of 2001.” I heard this monologue in my head as I was reading the article “10 Years That Changed the World” in this months issue of wired. I imagined that I was in a room full of ex-dot.comers as we take turns telling our dot.com survivor stories.

As I continue to read the article, which has a chronological order to it, I read from year to year and I think about where I was working in each of those years. It was the dot.com years so of course you never worked at the same place for more than a year.  A fact that almost played against me when I first interviewed at my current job almost four years ago now.  Of course I used monster.com to find these jobs. Monster being the first dot.com to spend all of their advertising budget on a super bowl add which worked for them. The very next year their were 17 dot.coms doing the same thing, it didn’t work as well for them. Can you remember any of them? Me Neither. 

In 1999 I worked at two dot.coms, the first one moved up north to the silicon valley a month after I started, they moved, I didn’t. The second was a dot.com that had a personalized license plate for a URL.  It was a contract job of course, and we all started with brand new G3 macintosh machines, and 21 inch CRT monitors. We were spoiled right from the get go. When they redesigned the new office space to have a fountain soda machine in the kitchen I should of known things were in trouble. Through giving computer geeks an endless supply of caffeine is a good way to get tons of work out of them, and they did. The deal breaker for me was, we had a huge project to do for the “Folks in New York”, so I worked from 5am and work till 9 pm for a couple months. The Execs saw what they wanted to see and our pleased boss took us out lunch to celebrate. Then he proceeded to congratulate his very attractive secretary whom hand only been there a week for the success. Two weeks later I was working somewhere else. What can I say, all I had to do was post my resume on monster.com and my voicemail would fill up with offers from hunger recruiters (head hunters) who didn’t know what HTML was but they knew they could get a finders fee for bring in someone that did.

2000, another year, two more dot.coms. The first was little startup that had great ideas, and offered me more money than the previous job. So of course that sounded great. However it ended on a Friday three months after I started when the “Big Boss” called us in the the conference room and gave a great speech about being a team and reorganizing for the betterment of the company (his wallet) , after that I was called into my bosses office, and laid off. “Don’t call us, we’ll call you”. A month later I finally got my last paycheck from them.

The second dot.com was one that you may have actually heard of , but I’m not going to tell you. This one had music though, and it was a blast, a lot of fun and a lot of work. I’d work till 4am sometimes, in a well designed working space blasting my music as loud as I wanted sitting in my Herman miller chair, and drinking all the free soda/caffeine that was offered. I got to meet quite a few famous people, and didn’t even have to leave the office. This place was the epitome of the rock and roll internet company. Honestly, if I told you that I accidently bumped in to a rock star in the hall, I really did.  I was working here when the dot.com bubble burst. I saw the large offce space shrink. We moved from working in to stories of a completely overpriced building on the Miracle Mile, to everyone fitting on just one floor again. I saw my friends and co-workers get laid off, and waited for my turn. My turn came May in 2001. I called my Beautiful wife, told her the news and bought her some flowers on the way home.

So that is it, those are my dot.com days. I worked in some of the nicest buildings, with the nicest office furniture money could buy. Others had the refigerator in the server room, and would open the frig door every once in a while if the servers got to hot.

I may not work for a dot.com any more, but I am still in web development, Sr. Web Developer in fact. I heard that most the dot.comers became Real Estate Agents. That makes sense, they just traded one comdity for another.

 

Well, I've changed the design for the photoblog again. I like this one better. The "harbor" theme just didn't go, but I really like the simplicity and playfulness of this one.

On the train this morning it's very quiet, with fewer people riding than usual. You'll hear one or two people talking about the "Attack on London" which of course leads to discussions about 9/11, but for the most part people are sitting quietly. The hum of the air conditioning, track noise and engine is interupted by the conductor, who beside making the normal station announcements, is also making a new one every ten minutes or so. "Please keep all personal belongings with you at all times. If you see anything that looks suspious please inform the conductor or a sheriffs officer immediately."  This announcement was put in to circulation after the Madrid attack in march, but had seemingly fallen out of popularity and use. After the announcement is made, people are gathering their things closer to them. I carry a laptop bag and a backpack every day I have them right next to me, as to make sure there is no doubt that their mine. I kind of expect to get stopped and checked just because of their size, and I'll be happy to do so when asked.

It's visible that security is higher. Instead of the normal metrolink marshalls checking for tickets, there are sheriffs offices doing sweeps of the cars after every stop. It's evident that they aren't worried about train ticket infractions. If you punched your ten trip or not seems kind of trivial today. At Union Station the security is even more evident. There are two sheriffs, or police offices at the end of each platform. Since the Madrid attack, there were always two to four on the platforms, but now each platform has it's own pair of officers. Its made even more poingant by the fact that some of them are wearing their tactical uniforms. There is also a K9 Unit, but that isn't exactly new. It's been showing up from time to time for a while now, so I wasn't surprised to see it. On the ride in to work yesterday I saw several police cars driving along the tracks inspecting them.

Talking with my Brother J this morning on the train ride in, he heard one of the "belongings" announcements over the phone and asked what that was about. So I told him about the announcment and the increased security. He said that he had seen that the homeland security warning for public transportation had changed to orange. He said knowing that made me feel better about me taking the train. I know my Beautiful Wife feels the same way. I asked her yesterday if she was nervous about me taking the train. She said "No, I think it will be okay". I think seeing the news this morning that shows all the added security made her feel better too.

It's interesting to look at the faces of my fellow passengers. They are reading and looking around, but you can see that the Attack is somethinng that we are all thinking about. I've talked with a couple people, and it's interesting to see the differences in attitudes. Some people are nervous, but the increased security seems to calm their fears. While other people felt it was there duty to be on the train today. One gentleman I talked with even said "Don't give them an inch, if you die on the train, you die on the train."  He felt that his keeping his normal routine was a personal affront to the people who launched the attacks on London. All I know is I need to get to work on time, and I still rather take the train than drive in L.A. traffic.