Schinckel.net

I received another strange Spam message this morning - the subject alone got my attention:

I am Dislexic of Borg. Resistance is Futile. Prepare to have your ass laminated

Dyslexic: spelled wrong. But that’s one of the ironies of the word itself. Then, there was an image that didn’t exist, followed by a poorly transcripted excerpt from Anna Karenin:

“self-interest did not induce us to work for the emancipation of the serfs, but we did work for it.” “No!” Konstantin Levin broke in with still greater heat; “the emancipation of the serfs was a different matter. **There **self-interest did come in. One longed to throw off that yoke that crushed us, all decent people among us. But to be a town **councilor **and discuss how many dustmen are needed, and how chimneys shall be constructed in the town in which I don’t live–to serve on a jury and try a peasant who’s stolen a flitch of bacon, and listen for six hours at a stretch to all sorts of jabber from the counsel for the defense and the prosecution, and the president cross-examining my old half-witted Alioshka, ‘Do you admit, prisoner in the dock, the fact of the removal of the bacon?’ ‘Eh?’” Konstantin Levin had warmed to his subject, and began mimicking the president and the half-witted Alioshka: it seemed to him that it was all to the point. But Sergey Ivanovitch shrugged his shoulders.

I say poorly transcripted, as there are at least two spelling errors here, bolded above - and I’m not sure that flitch is a real word either. There is an attachment, which appears to be an image/gif, but I can’t view it. I’m not sure if it’s a virus attached to appear like an image - if it is it’s a very small executable - or some sort of advertising Spam. But there are no links in there, and I can’t figure out what they are selling, other than perhaps poor copies of famous Russian novels. There are a couple of headers worth noting: From: "allisyn breanne" <flimflammed@cdg.org> X-Mailer: The Bat! (v3.0.0.9) Professional I wouldn’t put much strength in the first one being legit, but the second one might be the name of a Spammer client. However, the only reference I can find to it in a very quick Google search is a list of serial numbers for it. That’s ironic, a cracked serial number for a spamming email client…

Well, that’s one for the record books. The fastest three-goal streak in World Cup Final history, and the first time the Socceroos have scored in the WCF. And I missed it. Bloody WoW! But, it’s downtime tonight, so I’ll be able to watch whatever games are on. Not quite the same without some sort of emotional involvement, though, is it? I do think it’s a little early for the celebrations that have erupted on the various Aussie football (but not as you know it) sites. From AAP:

Australia has arrived at the World Cup ball, not as one of the ugly sisters but as a stunning Cinderella set to wow them on the dance floor. And a startled world has sat up to take notice.

What I heard was that Japan’s defense was a bit crap. Perhaps I’m being too harsh, but it’s early to be breaking out the really good champagne. Unless, you just want to make sure you actually get the good stuff used. I’ll be saying “tops” if we manage to get past the Group games. But, in the meantime, I’ll jump onto the bandwagon. Why not?

The World Cup is upon us again, and whilst I am not the world biggest soccer fan, I love jumping on bandwagons. Two years ago I got right into the European Cup, and drew Portugal in the sweep at work. They made it to the final, where the guy who drew Greece (a Greek, incidentally, but that’s a given at my school) wanted to split the winnings 50-50 regardless of who won. I chose not to, and Greece won, meaning I missed out on about $60 or so. Oh well. This year, I’m fairly sure I won’t get that opportunity. See, I drew Trinidad & Tobago in the sweep. They are playing Sweden first, and are also in a pool with the UK, and Paraguay.

Always Attempt Alliteration. Anyway, I regularly check my Spam filter, as occasionally I come across a message or two that shouldn’t have been classed as Spam (commonly called Ham, which I think is really cute). Often, I will look at sender names to sort this out. Today, I got a nasty surprise. One of the girls I have coached, and now play Touch Football with is Laeticia Douglas. Today, I got a Spam with the sender name Letitia Douglas. Totally freaked me out. Well, not really, but made me notice enough to blog about it. The contents of this message were more than a little difficult to understand:

the hoydenish not bugging some childlike in infinitesimal ! miller some bantu it ordinance in cope in anonymous but belying may apportion the buckboard in spore or antiphonal ! chlorinate ! buses it’s drool may beryl see scum be wrench or taketh it currant but substantive or aureomycin on lexical on economic , presume in holmium may rio ! dryad a aware a arson it ani may decimal it balsa some mumble may verdant see stirling on screech but mont it shipley , cepheus the inharmonious ! osteopathic it panhandle Naw email hier

I’m fairly sure it’s generated by a computer, although the level of literacy amongst some of the players on WoW makes me wonder at times. There was a link at the end, in the last two words, but the site timed out. The attached image shows it’s an ad for some type of loan. I’m pretty fine for loans at the moment…

I’ve been involved for the past 9 months or so in quite a lot of stuff to do with literacy. It began with a Language and Literacy course, funded with ESL (English as a Second Language) money, dealing with Functional Literacy. Surprisingly, I really enjoyed the course, and was involved in presenting the results of the unit of work I designed as a part of this program to other teachers of ESL. I was part of a team that did the course, and two other teachers and I did the presentation. At this session, a couple of mentions were made of Stephen Graham, an apparently well-known expert of literacy issues. He is in Adelaide at the moment, and today I attended a workshop run by him, dealing with literacy in the Middle and Senior Years. That is, High School. Steven used to be a Primary School Principal, but has worked for several years with a publishing company and University research team on literacy in Australia, and overseas. Apparently, Australian children are the second-most literate in the world, behind only Finland. We have around 93% literacy, compared to around 55% in the USA. However, there are still large improvements that can be made to our literacy programs. Basically, the crux of the problem is that children leaving primary schools have quite good skills at reading and interpreting narrative (story) texts, but not so much at the varying types of factual texts. And around 87% of secondary school texts are factual, rather than narrative. A lot of the problem needs to be dealt with in primary schools. And hopefully, we will start to see them teaching more factual texts, and how to interpret them. This will help to improve the baseline literacy levels of students as they enter secondary schools, enabling us to work them to a higher level by the time they graduate. Having said that, there is still a role for secondary teachers to play in improving literacy. Especially in terms of critical literacy, but even in general. Teaching literacy explicitly is something that every teacher can do, and in some cases, whilst it may seem that teaching how to read and interpret a text may impinge upon the time that said teacher can spend “teaching content,” in the long run it will improve the efficiency of the uptake of the information. That is, the information will be absorbed in a shorter time, resulting in better gains in knowledge. But more so, this effect will be cumulative. And it will (hopefully) transfer across learning areas and subjects, so the effect will build even more over time. Graham was adamant that 10 minutes out of 50 will result in a huge gain in literacy for all students.

It’s currently WoW downtime, hence the reason I’m blogging instead of playing, and I’m wondering if the 1.11 update will be required when the servers come back up. The patch has been downloading (or at least trying to download) for about a week now. If they are distributing it, it seems to make sense that it is ready to use. However, being a somewhat newbie to WoW, I don’t know whether they work this way, or give a couple of weeks for it to download. The things that make me think it’s not going to be installed: firstly, there is no mention of it being implemented this week on the website, or in the forums, or the message that comes up regarding downtime. Secondly, there is a mention of hardware upgrades, for several realms at least (including Hyjal, thank god) so it would make sense that they would mention an upgrade of software if it was happening. Finally, not having the hardware and software upgrades at the same time should mean any issues will be easier to track down should they raise their ugly heads in the next few days. There are a couple of reasons I’m really looking forward to the upgrade. The main is that the bug that prevents reconnecting with the same character after a system or application crash, or a modem disconnect will be fixed. The nasty “A character with that name already exists on the server” message should be a thing of the past. Especially important for my monster 15 hour weekend sessions, when my ISP limits my dialup account to 5 hour blocks. Secondly, Druids are getting Innervate as a spell, rather than a talent. Which should be a very good thing. The only reason I don’t want the upgrade yet is that I’m only at 21% downloaded, since I can’t use the Background Downloader and play at the same time. And when I’m home, I play.

Within the multiverse that is WoW (there are different servers, called realms, which are totally isolated from one another) when a character reaches level 40 they are eligible for a mount. This is an expensive exercise, at around 90 gold for training and purchase, but is well worth it, as is allows for a faster ground speed. Since Ibukan is a Night Elf, she only has access (at least at this stage) to one type of mount, a Nightsaber. I chose for her the striped, rather than the spotted version. I will post a screenshot, just so everyone can see how cool she looks on it…

I saw an ad for Werthers Original, available in traditional Hard and new Chewy. Wouldn’t the chewy one not be original…?

I learned something last friday, and I learnt it from some juvenile delinquents. I’ve often wondered exactly what signals, so to speak, a train is coming. What is it that enables the boom gates to come down and the light to start flashing? Last friday, I found this out. Some students, a couple from Scotch College, and a couple I take to be from Underdale High School, got off the train at my station, and one of them proceeded to run back towards the nearest level crossing. He squatted down over the state railway line, which seems to be marginally lower gauge than the local system. I was getting relatively close to where this boy was, but I don’t think he’d seen me. He reached his arms out perpendicular to the tracks, and pressed something, I assume a coin, onto each of the tracks. The lights then began to flash, and the gate started to come down. By this time, I had approached to being about two metres away from the boy. He saw that I wasn’t one of his cronies, and jumped up. A car had pulled up at the tracks, and thinking a train was coming, had stopped. The driver had their window down, and the boy said to him that no train was coming. I continued to walk, but as I was about 10 metres past the crossing, I took my phone out, and turned around and very blatantly took a photograph of the group. I very shortly turned around the corner into the street I walk down on the way home, and I think the gang had begun to disperse, perhaps fearing I had called some sort of authorities, as I did hold my phone to my ear. • So, what is it that makes the signals know when a train is coming? I assume that there is some sort of Ohm-meter, that measures the resistance between the two rails of the track. Normally, this would be very large, as they are not connected. It should, in theory, be almost infinite. That is, it should be an open circuit. When a train approaches, it acts as a conductor between the two rails. Since the rails have a resistance of some sort, albeit quite small, it would be measurable over the distance a train needs to be away from the crossing to trigger it. This, and the fixed resistance of the actual train would be a threshold. When this threshold is breached, and whenever the resistance of the system is less than this value, the lights would flash, and the gate would come down. The whole time the train is going past, it would hold the resistance below this value. After it has gone past, and exceeded a certain distance, the resistance would then have gone above the threshold, and the system would revert to the open state.

Well, it’s been a bit over a month since I first got World of Warcraft, but almost exactly a month since I first finished downloading the updates and started playing. So, what’s to know? In one month, I clocked up around 7 days of play time. That is, over 170 hours. In a month that only had 30 days, that’s almost 25% of the past month I have spent in WoW. My main character, the Night Elf Druid, is now up to Level 39. I haven’t decided which specialty I will move towards: Feral looks the most fun, but Moonkin (Nature spec) form looks kinda nice too. The next big thing is the mount I can purchase at Level 40. I think the 150-odd gold I have saved up should cover it. Although upgrading spells is starting to become rather expensive too, at around 8 gold for the last batch. My big tip to new players is to have an Auction House character, living in one of the big cities, that just picks up stuff from the mail, and sells it straight on the AH. Mine is in Ironforge, but I think Darnassus would be even better - the mailbox there is just steps away from the auctioneers. Basically, everything that is surplus to requirements gets sent to this character, and sold for whatever I can sell it for. Because some deposits are quite large (>50s for some items), you’ll want to pick your prices carefully. You don’t want to sell for too little, but by the same token, you’ll lose money if you pay a large deposit three times, and don’t end up making this much on the final sale. The other trick is to get a couple of items you can manufacture that are reasonable earners. There is at least one item that is required for a quest that various trades can manufacture, and watching the AH means you can ensure that when that item isn’t available, you can charge a hell of a lot more than it’s worth. I’ve sold an item that costs me about 30s to make for upwards of 1g 50s. I also have another character that just stores my surplus items. For instance, learning First Aid is important, but you don’t want to have to waste all of that Silk Cloth until you are ready to use it, but neither do you want it taking up space in your pack. So send it to your Müle (as mine is called), and when you need it, send it back. If you Return an item, it appears immediately, but if you collect and re-send an item it takes about an hour.