Sigh…

Well, I’m back at work. Ick.

Had a great time in the sunshine. Missed most of the storms around here from what I hear.

My tips for the USVI:
(Some of these I did, others I wish I would have)
– If possible, make back ups of digital pictures or take a second memory card
– Take more t-shirts than you think you’ll need, and less shoes/socks
– Don’t worry about renting a car on St Thomas. The taxis can get you where you need to go for about the same price if not less. And you don’t have to worry about driving. St Johns is probably a different story.
– Buy your own, good quality snorkel gear to take with you
– Do a day sail. I highly recommend New Horizons
– Unless you really want someone else to do everything for you, pass on the Tropic Tours tours. They’re educational, but you’ll probably have a better time doing it on your own at your own pace.
– Visit St Johns
– Do another day sail.
– Make sure your sandles are comfortable to wear and walk in. You’ll be wearing those or barefoot most of the time.
– If you’re staying there and planning on shopping ‘downtown’ – make sure there’s a cruise ship in town. A lot of the stores don’t bother to open if there aren’t.
– Hit the beaches early in the morning when possible. Once the cruise ships come in, the beaches get crowded

That’s all I can think of for now… I hope to make it back there one of these days

Happy Tax Day

Back-firing political ads
Crack me up – I think Bush is convincing me to vote for Kerry…
“Kerry wanted to increase the gas tax because he thought it’d make people drive less”
Ok, well regardless of his reasons, I think that’s a great idea. Increase the gas tax – make people seriously think twice about buying that gas-guzzling SUV. You drive me, you use more gas, you help destroy the environment more than I do, you should pay more in taxes than I do. And how many commercials have I seen with “… he supported increasing 182 times!” They did the same thing with something about how he voted against military spending a billion times. That doesn’t really tell me anything – So maybe it was something he felt strongly about, and it got shot down 181 times, so he supported it until he got it done.

Some random thoughts about taxes and money – poor people actually need finacial advice, but they’re the ones that can’t afford it. Same with taxes – they get sucked into the ‘refund anticipation loan’ scam. And they get stuck in the payday loan cycle too. Maybe we need to have some basic accounting classes in high school.

About 5 weeks from now, I’ll be sitting on a beach with a fruity drink. 5 weeks – entirely too long to wait.

More religious spam!!

From the inbox (with relevant header information included)
———-

Received: from 89.164.195.48 by 218.65.79.131; Wed, 07 Apr 2004 12:40:01 -0300
Message-ID:
From: “Tiffany Emerson”
Reply-To: “Tiffany Emerson”

Dont be fooled all pain,suffering,sickness,greed,

meaness comes from saten.

Accept God today.

bedimming graves worthy casework blew nucleic owing rena potbelly barbaric calvert morphism fractionate chatham anaheim paramount sarcastic dough muggy panther copeland delightful bedside bayreuth aperture tagging sought barry chalet beginner sauerkraut fiendish getaway amuse jetliner antedate
———-

Ok, so this didn’t come from someone at “dsl-only.net” – that seems to be based in Portland, OR. The first traceable IP address is registered to China Telecom. So I’m getting spam full of typos (saten??) from China?! WTF-O?
It came in plain text, and with no read-receipt requested. So here’s my guess – it’s either trying to validate email addresses by removing ‘bounces’ from the list; there is a dim, misguided soul in China trying to save me from saten, and the eval version of the spam software puts ‘junk’ at the bottom hoping to make you pay for it; or it’s actually Al-Queda trying to overload Carnivore with keywords.

What do you think?