In My Room

The Bagle.F virus hit our school’s network today. In my school email account (and everyone elses, for that matter) was this hilariously spoofed message from our university president:

From: (university president)@mtsu.edu
Subject: [25] Hey, ya! =))
To: students@mtsu.edu

Nice friends, nice men, nice sex and feeling great. I don’t mind the
odd bout of cybersex as I love to use my imagination when I masterbate.

****** Message from InterScan E-Mail VirusWall NT ******

** WARNING! Attached file Jammie.scr contains:

WORM_BAGLE.F virus

It has been deleted.
***************** End of message ***************

It’s obviously fake, but in any case, I got a laugh from it. It’s an odd message to be receiving from your university president, especially after his sexual harrassment scandal. (Yeah, that was low. I suck.)

Now, what I can’t comprehend is how these viruses continue to spread. If you get an email message from someone you don’t know, with a weird nonsensical subject line, plus a file attachment, it should be obvious that IT’S A VIRUS!!! DO NOT OPEN IT! Some of us know this, of course, but there are enough people that are clueless or stupid enough to continue opening virus-laden attachments.

Considering that there have been so many high-profile email viruses lately, you’d think that people would finally get the message. But no. The net result of a few users’ stupidity is that a large number of home computers on high speed connections are being used as “open relays” to send spam. My ISP (Comcast) is a particularly egregrious offender. Some virus-infected PC’s on Comcast’s network send as much mail as the customer mail servers do.

According to one anti-spam software provider, 60% of the email sent across the Internet now is spam. Personally, I’ve been receiving more virus-ridden emails lately than spam (or valid messages for that matter).

I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client. It’s still in beta, but quite functional, and it has great adaptive junkmail controls. If you’re sick of spam, consider changing your email client.

I’ve been meaning to post something, but nothing interesting is going on. Well, of course there was the Oscars. I’m not really a film buff, but…

It was nice to see that LOTR finally got it’s due (with 7 Oscar wins!). Sofia Coppola won Best Screenplay for “Lost in Translation,” which I loved. A little disappointed that Keisha Castle-Hughes didn’t win Best Actress (but then again, we all know that she really didn’t have a chance in that category).

I have to spout effusively about the Nellie McKay album. My editor told me about this artist, and assigned the album to me for review. I’ve been listening to it for at least the last week straight, and have listened to it several times already today (There are two tracks in the radio.blog to your right).

Nellie is most often compared to jazz pianists such as Norah Jones, but she’s far more eclectic and zany. (The title of her debut album “Get Away from Me,” is an obvious pun on Jones’ “Come Away with Me”). Nellie adopts many musical styles including jazz siren, Abba-esque pop, and even a little bit of rap. On her decision to sign to Columbia Records, Nellie said “I asked them if they’d bail out my mom if she got busted for marijuana possession. And they said yes.”

So go read the damn website www.nelliemckay.net and buy the album already. Trust me on this.