ray's big blog

I'm a pretty light eBay user. Recently I bid on something that seems to have attracted a lot of fraud. Beware of any emails you get from Yahoo accounts after bidding on an item on eBay. I got mails from the following accounts:

• mss_sophie_44@yahoo.co.uk (mss sophie)
• wtwdint@yahoo.com (wtwdint wtwdint)
• muistisecolului@yahoo.com (K A)
• ebay_great_deals@yahoo.com (paul rafael sandu)
• radu_ivanel@yahoo.it (Radu Ivan)
• michel_sell2000@yahoo.com (ionut voican)

All the above emails had obvious signs of fraud:

• A very low selling price (except for mss sophie)
• Offer of free shipping
• Insistence on the use of Western Union

In addition, the email from mss sophie was a pathetic attempt at a spoofed email from eBay. Aside from being a bad fake, it also had the Yahoo free email account advertisement at the bottom, so amazingly this fraudster is using Yahoo to mail OUT the solicitations!

Anyway - be aware!

Well, I'm just about to give up. I bought a dead iPod on eBay hoping to fix it up. Apparently I got a bum logic board, or main board, or motherboard, or whatever the proper term is. At first I thought it was just a bad firewire port, but I soldered on a new one and the thing is still flaky. Just to screw with me, it hooked up to my computer the first time I tried it - but it has since reverted to it's old behavior of resetting whenever I touch the wheel and refusing to see my computer. Oh well, back to eBay to find a logic board!

So far I've done two things:

• I mixed up some water with extract of anise.
• I found some Torani Sugar-Free Raspberry syrup at the local coffee shop and put a tablespoon of that in with about a gallon of water.

Personally I kind of like the anise flavor. It's like licorice. My wife isn't so into it, so I know anise isn't for everyone. A tiny little bit goes a very long way. Before that batch was finished, I filled the container back up and mixed in some of the Torani. Just a tablespoon or so. Man, it really brought out the anise flavor! I mean, there was half as much anise in the water as before, but now the anise is much stronger. I'm going to finish this whole gallon before I try the Torani again. I want to taste the Torani without the anise flavor.

So since I started this blog, I've noticed a lot of traffic on my site. Weird, since I usually only get family members.

Most of them are asking for the "atom.xml" file, and then for some non-existent rss and typical blog files. These are clearly robots. Since we are not going out until midnight (for a showing of "Goonies", I shit you not), I started looking up who these people are. The Database of Web Robots helped me find out.

Anyway, I'm turning on the agent and referrer logs in Apache to better help me find out what is up.

So back when I started working full time in 1998, I somehow managed to put on over 40 pounds in about a year. It was amazing. I was a skinny kid, so it didn't really matter too much, except that now I was a 36 instead of a 32 so I had to buy all new clothes.

I decided to sign up at the gym, and that knocked 10-15 lbs. off all by itself. At the time I reasoned that if I swam 3 times a week, I could eat all I wanted.

Wrong. The weight stopped coming off. I must have been 205 lbs. for a year. I decided to give up the obvious junk. Switch to 100% whole wheat. Stop buying ice cream. My "Atkins light" approach then, over the course of the next two years, got me down to 200 lbs., which is pretty disappointing.

Then something odd happened. We stopped buying juice and started buying (sugarless) flavored seltzer water. In addition, I stopped drinking regular soda and switched to diet soda and unsweetened tea. In a few short months, I dropped to 190 lbs.! Fantastic! All that orange juice was chocked full of 100% pure premium fresh squeezed Florida evil!

One problem, though. I have acid reflux, and all that seltzer seems to be irritating my poor delicate esophagus. So, I figure if the flavored seltzer water was doing the trick, why not regular flavored water?

Well, for one thing, it seems to be trendy. Trendy=expensive. So how hard can it be to make your own? I googled a little, and I found some leads. flavors2go.com has exactly what I'm looking for. Problem is, I'm having trouble finding anyone that has something good to say about them. Another suggestion I found was to use small amounts of Torani syrup, which while sweetened, can be used in very small quantities. They also have a sugar-free version, which is what I think I'll try.

Why not? Every once in a while I find that I need some information that
is not available from any other source. After hours of Googling, I
usually end up finding some of the information on some mailing list or
blog. When I find those hard-to-get-elsewhere pieces of info, I'll throw
them up here.

But mainly I was looking at my cousin's blog, and I just started fooling
around with blogger.com. So here we are.