419 Recursion

My Gmail spam filter just caught this gem.

Just send us your contact information and our scammers really promise to send you money that you’d lost from those other, less virtuous scammers.

Blitzed by @FeedBlitz

Some of you may have seen a scary message when you clicked on a link to my blog post this morning. The service that handles distribution of my blog, FeedBlitz, had a bit of a meltdown this morning. They’ve explained the error in an email and on their blog. In part,

This morning, shortly before 8am US Eastern, one of our databases became overloaded and, to use a technical term, crapped out.
Our monitoring apps told us of the situation, we quickly jumped on the apparent problem, and we thought we were done … but there was more to the issue than at first appeared.
One of our downstream web servers that handled tracking became horribly overloaded as a consequence of its being unable to reach that specific database. That in turn caused a failsafe in FeedBlitz to kick in, which had the nasty and unintended consequence of putting up a scary malware message.

There was no risk to your computer or with anything on www.roasterboy.com. I’m sorry for this false alarm. FeedBlitz responded quickly and correctly, getting the servers back online and communicating pretty well.

https://twitter.com/RoasterBoy/status/362905010905956352

They did continue their regular Twitter posts, which did not relate to the crisis at hand and, for while, leading to the impression that it was business as usual. 

BoA getting it wrong in Holden

So, the Bank of America in Holden recently repainted the entrance to its parking lot. In the process, it got the arrows wrong in all the ways possible.

In this view, we’re facing Main Street.

  1. Left turns form Main Street into the BoA parking lot are prohibited. Nevertheless, there’s an arrow on the parking lot showing how to make that left turn.
  2. Coming out of the parking lot, only right turns are allowed. Therefore, there’s an arrow for a left turn.
  3. Both of those arrows are on the wrong side of the island.