Wal-Mart Telephone Scam in Canada

Today I received a strange call from someone with a thick ethnic accent of English. The caller claimed that I had won a “$100 gift voucher for shopping at Wal-Mart”. When I asked why did I win it, he told me that I had filled out “a ballot” while shopping at a “Wal-Mart shopping centre” at Westmount Avenue (a street where I have never been).

Let’s start from the beginning of the call. The caller was a male and sounded East Indian with influences of some other accents too. At times I could hardly discern the words he was trying to say. I got the phone call a little after the noon hour and the number that my caller ID showed was 000-012-3456.

The thing that struck me instantly was that he was asking for my wife, not me. It just so happens that I am not married neither do I have a girlfriend or any other romantic alliance. When I told him that there was no Mrs. So-And-So, he right away changed his stance and said that he was asking for Mr. So-And-So not otherwise. Yes, he had my name right. Most callers from telemarketing companies and their likes ask for “Mr. or Mrs. So-And-So” instead of just Mrs. I gave him the benefit of doubt on account of his bad accent.

Then he told me that I had filled out “a ballot” while shopping at a “Wal-Mart shopping centre” and as a result I had won a “$100 dollar gift voucher”, which, he later elaborated, was for Wal-Mart, too. Just look at the caller’s choice of words in inverted commas. He insisted that I had filled the “ballot” in the “shopping centre when you were shopping”, not online. Here’s the catch. I never fill any forms or “ballots” when I am shopping because of time constraints and, moreover, I haven’t been to any Wal-Mart in last three months or so. I gave him that too because it was not impossible for any of my family members to fill “a ballot” in my name if it was in and for a well-reputed store like Wal-Mart.

The caller told me that I could pick-up my “$100 gift voucher” at 42 Westmount Avenue. Note that there is no Wal-Mart at this address or anywhere close in its vicinity and, get that, it’s a residential address. It is a house, which, from Google Street View, looks like is in a well-to-do neighbourhood. He also gave me a postal code, which, I later discovered, did not match the street address that he gave me. By the way, even the postal code was not situated anywhere near a Wal-Mart or the original street address, for that matter.

He also gave me a telephone number to contact him which started with my city code and went on like (xyz) 800-9225. Although, he had told me that I could pick up the said “voucher” at any time between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM on any weekday, after giving me his telephone number, he told me that he needed to know when I was coming to pick it up. Then he told me to call him before I go to pick it up.

Near the end of the conversation, he asked me if I had a girlfriend. When I told him that I did not, he asked me if I had a female friend because I needed to bring a female with me as the voucher was for couples only. On my further inquiries, he told me that I could even bring a female blood relative for that purpose. Truly, this part of conversation was most surprising and in a way creepy with unthinkable premonitions.

I asked him if his records indicated the date I filled the “ballot”, he told that I did it on February 12, 2010, a day when I or my family did not do any shopping whatsoever.

A few moments after the termination of the phone call, I called the number he gave me and here’s what I heard: “We’re sorry. Your call cannot be completed as dialled. Please check the number and dial again.”

Later I called Wal-Mart and, needless to say, they told me it was a telephone scam to steal my identity. When I told the female representative of Wal-Mart that the caller had got my correct name and street address, she told me it is very easy to get it from 411.ca Yes, I did find myself at 411.ca along with my full address.

For the sake of preliminary analysis, let’s go back again. At the beginning of the phone call, he asked for my wife by saying Mrs. with my name. It could be because it was during the working hours. Or maybe because many scammers from Asia and even Africa are under the impression that it is easier to dupe women compared to men.

I think I am going to call the police.

Why Israel is America's best buddy?

Countless sources in all kinds of media of information tell you and will tell you that Israel is the best friend America has. Has anyone ever stopped to think why Israel is so passionate about the pronouncement of its friendship to the entity many of us know as US of A?

If USA or so-called America ceases to be a superpower – the richest country with mightiest military and craftiest diplomatic prowess – Israel will find a new friend. And at that time of necessity the new superpower will have Israel as the best friend it will ever be able to possibly have.

Since the dawn of the formal inception of Israel as a result of organized terrorism and genocide of Arabs, USA has been the most powerful country with the lowest standards of diplomatic morality. With America being as powerful as it has been, which it continues to be so far, and its economy securely tethered to Zionist businesses and politicians addicted to hefty donations from same Zionists, Israel is making sure it stays impossible to wean it from American teat.

An Interesting Theorem: Proving 4 = 0

Theorem: The digit 4 is a constant number. But sometimes it is not so. It becomes equal to zero.

∴ To prove: 4 = 0

Proof:

Statement	Proof
Let we have an equation as follows
4² – 4² = 0	Universal truth as 16 – 16 = 0
it can be written
( 4 + 4 ) ( 4 - 4 ) = 0	by the formula
	a² – b² = ( a + b ) ( a – b )
4 – 4 = 0	dividing both sides by 4 + 4
or 2² – 2² = 0	Given
( 2 + 2 ) ( 2 – 2 ) = 0	by the formula
	a² – b² = ( a + b ) (a – b )
2 + 2 = 0	dividing both sides by 2 – 2
4 = 0	Hence proved.

Those who'd like to challange above theorem's approach, ever remember solving limit problems at the beginning of calculus?

Female Coworkers: Pain in the…

If you have read some of my previous and rather nonsensical blog posts, you might have discovered that I am an old fashioned heterosexual male who doesn’t need to brag about how straight he is.

I have been thinking about a certain issue lately, which I am sure has confronted many men in workforce out there. I am talking about female coworkers. I am not talking about authoritative, intimidating female bosses who look like early incarnations of anti-Christ or the old likes of mothers and grandmothers who have spent their entire life on the same desk and chair under the same roof. I am talking about smoking hot nymphets who despite being quite professional, and reasonably reserve and friendly at the same time can’t help but raise your heartbeat every time they are in closer than usual vicinity in office space.

At the beginning of your career together, you notice their alluring beauty which you find more tantalizing because of possible logistic convenience. You try to concentrate on your work and try to be more professional; partly you want to convince yourself that nothing is wrong and partly because you are afraid that you will get caught even though you did not do anything wrong.

Formal and rather limited conversation with your attractive female coworker can also be problematic on your psychological level. Since you are already charmed by her mesmerisms, you will be naturally compelled to find out if you have somehow the same alluring effect on her. After each conversation with her, you will probably spend hours scrutinizing every word of her mouth, every gesture of her limbs and every twitch of her visible skin to decode her thoughts about yourself and, unfortunately, it is very much possible that she is more indifferent about you than an ocean about the rain. Yet you will inadvertently bring about some odd statistics of her conversations with other male coworkers, her body language around your possible competitions and the number of times she smiled, said 'hello' or said 'goodmorning' to you compared to the others to prove to yourself that on some level she does find you enticing.

One day all of a sudden you’ll notice some most harmlessly common thing about her – it could be her bad mood because of an unrelated matter, her laughter with another coworker compared to her smile with you or her apparent indifference towards you (which could be the result of the change in her nature of work which involves you much less than before) – that you might start to feel rejected by her. You might even begin to blame yourself for being wrong from the very beginning, and reprimand yourself with a chronic guilt and resultant feeling of embarrassment for getting your hopes high on a semi-conscious level.

This, my reader, is unwanted sexual tension which can be very unproductive for your work and career. I have no ultimate solution for this as I have yet to find a 100% effective coping mechanism for such a lunacy which many men experience around the attractive members of fair sex.

I, however, have come to a result that may seem odd to you and can be wrong in some cases but, in my opinion, is true in most situations where romantic men find themselves stranded between love of the fair sex and the lust of the flesh.

My result is, in one way, a solution to most problems caused by sexual tension. There are some smaller points that you should think about before you get to know my final solution:

• You should not avoid small talk.
• Talk to her and think of your mother. This will keep you at ease, and keep your conversation normal and candid but within formal bounds.
• Try to think of her as a brain and not the body, and a brain which might be superior to yours. This will bring you in a competitive mood which might help you focus on your work more.
• If you are like me and believe in superiority of human race above all other creatures, then think of her as a sexless member a no-nonsense species of living organisms. I love science and philosophy but they keep me distracted from my more animalistic instincts.
• This might offend some women and feminists, but think of her someone who needs your help and guidance and think of yourself somewhat of a mentor in a superior position. This sense of superiority might help you be more indifferent to her sex appeal and more focused on office work.
• Let her talk when she wants to talk at length and of course time permitting. You might find out that she just finds you friendly as a human being and likes you to listen to her. Nothing less, nothing more.

And here is my final but rather crude solution. If you can tell your hot coworker a really dirty and vulgar joke and laugh with her without any fear of a formal complaint or lawsuit against you, then rest assured that, at least for you, she is a really hot man in woman’s disguise which nature gave her.

Review: Stay away from Rock Mobile Disk

If you use "External Hard Drive" as keywords on eBay, you will find that an image that constantly appears in search results is following:


I bought two of those in 2007. One in May and second in June, 500GB each. I paid $140+ for each. The one that I bought in May, I used to store enormous amount of pictures which are inevitable in this day and age of digital cameras. I had to use ACDSee to regularly organize pictures on it.
In about May 2008, exactly after one year after its purchase, it completely gave up on me and I regularly began to hear the dreaded click of death whenever I tried to access it. I lost all of my pictures. I had no backup. In fact I was quite satisfied that now I had this mass storage which had sole purpose of storing images, I had nothing to worry about. Silly me.
It all happened when I used Windows Disk Defragmenter. So I figured maybe this was the culprit. I checked the second hard drive that I bought in June 2007. It had videos on it and I did not use it as often. It had huge number of bad sectors. I had not used Windows Disk Defragmenter on this one. It was slowly giving up on me. By experience, I estimated that it would completely give up in June 2008, if I accessed it a few more times. I bought a 1TB external hard drive from FutureShop and transfered all of my data on to the new one and never used Rock Mobile Disk again.
Now I noticed something else. External hard drive that I bought from FutureShop, hardly ever got even warm, whereas Rock Mobile Disk heated up so quickly and so much so that you could hardly touch it.
Then I decided to open the disk with click of death.
I removed all four tiny screws. Two at the top and two at the bottom; see picture (only top screws shown):

Then you can pull the covers sideways to remove them. Following is a picture of front of the disk with the cover removed:

Following is a picture of back of the disk with the cover removed:


See following two pictures and see how they fit the hard drive in the casing. They used pieces of cardboard:



Here's another picture. I have pulled out all the pieces of cardboard and put them beside the hard drive:


Here's how to pull the hard drive out of the casing:


Look at the following close-up of the hard drive, and the close-up after that. Try reading the label and pay attention to the condition of the lable:


In above two pictures, you can clearly see that the hard drive is manufactured by Western Digital. The seal has been deliberately damaged. I assume whoever is selling these hard drives has got a bulk of faulty hard drives which are doomed to fail after much shorter than normal use and he/she is selling them as external hard drives by enclosing them in cheap casings. The label of the hard drive clearly instructs not to cover any holes and the casing is essentially airtight with no possibility of ventilation for the hard drive whatsoever. An over heated hard drive is more easily prone to failure. Any quality external hard drive's casing should have a way of cooling for the hard drive. The hard drive that I bought from FutureShop is from a well known company and, as I said before, doesn't heat up like a Rock Mobile Disk.
If you do a Google search for Rock Mobile Disk, you'll never find the manufacturer's web site. The only web sites you'll find will be either auction web sites or the forums with heaps of complaints about this product. Here's another assumption for your thought: Rock Mobile Disk is a phony company which only manufactures or supplies cheap, low quality casings for the standard hard drives.
There is no question, these external hard drives sure look good on internet and cause a lot of bid wars which result in inflated prices. These external hard drives with added shipping & handling charges, cost more than a high quality product with same capacity bought from a well known retail store.
Here are some tips to keep yourself safe from rip-off known as Rock Mobile Disk:

• If you are bidding online on one of these, stop. Pull out your bid if you can or hope someone outbids you. Alert the bidding site about the possible fraud.
• Do a survey of your local computer retail stores and compare prices. I bet you'll find a better hard drive at much lower price.
• If you are currently using a so-called Rock Mobile Disk, make a copy of all the data in it and to prevent any possibility of data loss, stop using it. You have been a victim of internet rip-off like me. Don't lament. Help prevent such frauds.
• If you have won a bid on one of these disks and haven't paid yet, then don't pay. Negotiate with the bidding site and let them know about the situation involving possible fraud. I hope they'll understand.

If you have any further information, if you want more information added to this blog entry or if you have relevant links to share please feel free to leave a comment. You don't have to register to do so.
Be safe and prevent fraud!

Swat girl's public sexual exploitation

A video that has recently surfaced (kudos to Geo TV), has left Pakistan in shock. It shows a girl being beaten by a flog by a bearded man while others were holding her from arms, legs and sides of the chest, in the presence of dozens of onlookers, all men. This happened in Swat where Taliban are spreading like cancer.

I, myself, haven't been able to watch this video in its entirety. I have even seen beheadings of men on TV and internet without getting much disturbed but cannot bear to see this video. It's too much.

A point, that much of Pakistani media has largely ignored or has not dared to say given the unanimous support for censorship of sexual discussion on TV, is that at one point in the video, you can clearly see the girl being hit on her buttocks. Consequently, her posterior shook and moved as a perfectly natural reflex to sudden pain. The girl was fairly young, some media report her as 17-year-old, and this scene of her backside in that kind of environment was equivalent to a woman being publicly stripped to her undergarments in a western country.

This is obviously sexual exploitation if not rape. There is no denial that biologically a woman's posterior is a cause of sexual attraction for men and this girl's was hit publicly without any regard for her privacy and self-respect for a crime which was not proven by any law, Islamic or secular. (Most secular laws and procedures in the West are very similar to those in Islam.)

A human being's buttocks by any scale are a sexual part and violation of this part is sexual exploitation and abuse. These men should be arrested and tried under Pakistani laws for sexual abuse and believe me the punishment for sexual abuse in Pakistan is extremely harsh and even life threatening.

Joke from my jokes collection 26

Q. Why can’t Sardars make ice cubes?
A. They always forget the recipe.