Gone Phishing

About a week ago I received an email message in my yahoo inbox purporting to come from Yahoo. They said they were manually verifying each existing account in order to delete all unused accounts thereby creating more space. I was kind of suspicious since they asked for my user name, password, birth date and country of origin. The message threatened that if I didn't provide this information by return email within two weeks my email account would be permanently deleted. I did nothing for a week, my spider senses all a-tingle with fraud and then today I received two more identical messages but from a different sender. I spent about half an hour searching the yahoo site looking for information on this "manual update" or about some kind of scam. And to give yahoo a lot of credit, they responded within hours to my emails to them about this "scam", and not by an automated message but by a real person with a real name. In case you need to be reminded, never send your password to anyone. Anyone who needs it already has it. What annoys me even more than just being a potential victim of such a scam is that they used the fear factor of losing my entire email account. So today when I went back and re-read another time or two the messages that were sent to me I found grammatical errors. Not glaringly obvious ones, ones that were easy to overlook at a first read. The graphics provided were damn good too. Now if only they used this power for good instead of evil, imagine the world we could be living in?

And so this isn't strictly a bah-humbug post, here's a photo of Riley taken when we were putting up our Christmas decorations in December. We bought a new string of lights that were simple white snowflakes that light up by battery power and are really quite nice, even not on a tree.

And the full moon is almost upon us. I couldn't believe my eyes today when I saw someone turn left (LEFT!!!) on red. We aren't even trusted with the privilege of turning right on red in my city but as I sat at a (red) light, a truck (not even a car - a commercial truck!) pulled up beside me, looked both ways and made his turn. And it was no pokey little intersection, it was at the exit ramp off one of the busiest highways that cross the city. The next corner I reached, someone else ran a stop sign which, in itself, is not unusual here since stop signs seem to have become optional in the last two years. Sometimes I feel like I take my life in my hands when I go outside.