Martin Gumucio

We are at the norberg festival and these are our neighbours. Great times all around.

Here are some more pics:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/18/phone-scam-india-call-centres

“Sir, I call you back because your wife told me she is not allowed to use the computer without her husbands permission”

I just got a call from a man with an indian accent following exactly the same call template as you can read about in the link above. My computer was at risk, it had a virus, but he could help!

Puzzled by this friendly stranger i let the call go on, explaning that I was myself working as a sysadmin, this did not deter his resolution in helping me in the slightest. It should be noted that this was the third of fourth time he called me, from a number in the USA. This might seem strange in itself, but I run a lot of internet sites so I have been getting a bit more love from US spammers in the past.

Here is what i was asked to do:

- click the start button
- right click on “my computer”
- click on manage
- click on event viewer
- click on Application logs

… and right there i stopped the call because i knew what was coming next. The pitch is that in the application logs there are quite a lot of Errors and Warnings. This is completely normal for a Windows computer, but look intimidating to the average user. If i had let the call continue I would have been offered a “fix” that would have involved me installing malware on the computer and handing over my credit card information.

So consider yourself warned! These are professional scammers and they sound very gentle and persuasive. I have notified the police and local media.. and my mom. And the quote at the top is genuine, i have the best wife ever.

I made some changes to how comments work. Comments haven’t been working very well due to the large amount of spammers that are working the wordpress system. 500 spam comments in the few months i have had the system open.

So to rectify this i installed the most ridiculous captcha system i could find and enabled comments to be visible right away. If you comment with your Facebook account you wont have to bother with the captcha.

So enjoy! And if you are reading this and working on a spam-script. Go to hell!

The kids discussing trains, their proper care and maintenance.

Not letting one bit of summer pass us by for nothing we are on a rather hectic schedule these days. Here you can see us at the Alunda model-train exhibition, a giant setup of model trains that lets you control the trains yourself. Aron discovered how to operate the first train we saw, and he didn’t stop until it was time to leave. “No thanks dad, i will have ice-cream later. The train hasn’t arrived yet!”

The expedition consisted of JC, Gabs, Rob and Val. The road to Alunda is in pretty bad shape as its under heavy remodeling, there are very few places that you can safely pass another car in front of you. That is of course never a problem for me or Gabs since we are both quite content to cruise at the max allowed speed, a habit we don’t share with the Swedish population as a whole..

Anyway we saw TWO pretty serious incidents on our drive there, first a dude fell asleep at the wheel not 10 meters in front of us, he even left the road but managed to regain control just in time to save himself. It really was a split-second away from a serious crash.
Not 10 minutes later a busted up white volvo without working headlights tried to pass gabs in the most terrifying way.

Apart from these adventures, the day on a whole was quite enjoyable, we recommend visiting Alunda and their passionate train model society any day.

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