After listening through the whole thing and doing a couple of minor edits here and there, this episode has been uploaded to the server and is ready for listeners. Despite a distinct lack of topics this time out we still managed to talk for a grand total of 2 hours and not-quite 12 minutes. We discuss The Last Airbender, which ***Dave recently saw, and the steadily declining film making abilities of M. Night Shyamalan, we ask Momma how I turned out the way that I did, we discuss some of our earliest memories and whether or not we’re remembering them directly or what we’ve been told about those events, there’s some talk about family and my mother’s religious outlook including why she thinks there isn’t an afterlife.

All in all for not having much to talk about we sure spent a lot of time talking about it. We had a great time and we hope you enjoy listening to the end result. The total file size, surprisingly enough, was still smaller than the first episode coming in at around 50.9MB in size. You can either listen to it right here in this post using the Flash player below or you can download it by clicking here.

As always I welcome your feedback in the comments.

[Update 7/4/2010: A commenter dropped by and told us these assholes are still trying to run this same scam under a new name. Do not apply for jobs with VOV Property Management either. See the comment thread for details.]

I’ve been out of work just over two months now and, as you would expect, I’ve been spending a good portion of my time trying to find a new job. One of the resources I’ve been using to try and find something local is Craigslist. It was there that I came across this ad on June 24th:

Looks legit enough, if somewhat brief.

So I sent an email with a short cover letter and my resume. Yesterday I got the following email:

Hi Les,

Thank you for your interest and your recent resume submission. My name is Armanda and I am the Human Resource Manager that is in charge of the hiring process for our company TTJ Property Management. I’ve look over your application and due to the high amount of replies that we’ve gotten regarding our recent classifieds posting, I wanted to contact you as soon as possible and see if you would be interested in setting up an interview with us.

Before I continue let me tell you some background information about TTJ Property Management: We are an established Rental Company that was founded back in 1984 and we’ve grown immensely since then. Unlike other rental companies, we hope to foster a fun yet efficient environment for our employees since we have the firm belief that if we provide our employees with a welcoming work atmosphere we will see an increased return in productivity. Candidates should consider themselves self-starters and be able to work efficiently with minimum supervision. Other skills like great interaction with employees of all levels of the firm, strong communication skills, organization skills etc. are also valued very highly.

Our company aims to build a strong bond with its employees and therefore we offer benefits packages for you and your family plus we thrive to pay our employees a higher hourly wage than any of our competitors. We will be discussing compensation and benefits a little bit more in detail during our interview when we are in a more private environment instead of public emails.

Now due to our policies I will not be able to schedule an interview with you until you have filled out one of our online applications which can be found on our company website. Please visit http://ttjmanagement.com/application/ and fill out our short application so we can move on with the interview process. Each applicant is required to have a personal application code in order to fill the application.

Your code is: [Code Deleted]

Since we have received such a high number of replies to our job posting I will only be able to hold your application on my desk for 1-2 days more so please do not wait too long to fill out our online application! I will contact you as soon as I receive your online application!

Now if you have any questions please feel free to contact me!
Hoping to see you here for an interview soon,

Armanda
Human Resource Manager
TTJ Property Management

It all looks legitimate enough and I was oblivious that anything might be amiss until I tried to click on the link in the email. My browser sat twiddling its thumbs and then finally announced that it could not resolve the domain name.  That seemed a bit strange so I tried a Google search which came up with a big fat nothing. Well, not entirely true. It found results for companies with similar names, but if you put TTJ Property Management in quotes to force it as a literal result you get the dreaded “No results found for “TTJ Property Management”.”

I thought that was odd for a company that’s been around since the year before I graduated high school. Even if they never had a web presence themselves surely someone in the past 26 years would’ve said something about them on the Internet. No company is so perfect that someone somewhere doesn’t bitch about them at some point. For that matter any of a number of online Yellow Pages and business directories would have an entry about them someplace. That is, if they actually existed.

My curiosity piqued by this interesting turn of events I did what all life-long computer geeks do when confronted with such an anomaly: I did a WhoIs on the domain name. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered that the domain belonged to someone in Moscow, Russia and had been registered for the first time the day before I got the email above:

Noooooo. This doesn't appear suspicious at all.

Now the klaxons in my head were going off at full volume, but I thought I should reply just to see what kind of response I might get. So I sent the following reply back to “Armanda” to see what she would say:

Armanda,

I seem to be having some trouble accessing the website you have listed in your email. The domain name doesn’t appear to be resolving properly and I’m not sure if it’s an issue with my ISP or not. I tried pinging the address and got no response so I did a WhoIs and it appears the domain is registered to someone in Russia and was just created yesterday.

I have to admit that for a company that’s been around since 1984, the above facts strike me as rather odd. Seeing as I am unable to fill out the online application as you requested is it possible I could contact you by phone to set up a time for an interview? I’d also like to verify the address I’d be going to when the time comes.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,
Les Jenkins

So far I’ve yet to receive a reply, but the webpage address is resolving properly as of today. If you go there today you’ll see this:

Again, looks legit enough on first glance.

Looks OK, right? There’s plenty of pages to poke around on and if you take the time to do so you’ll soon be struck by how there’s so much text that isn’t really telling you anything. Sure, it all reads like what you’d expect on a property management site except that there’s no staff information, something which is pretty common on business sites offering services, and no information on where this company is located. If you click on the Contact Us tab you’re presented with a simple web form with no indication as to who the message will go to and absolutely no other information on how to contact anyone at the company.

It was about this time that it occurred to me to check the header on the email I received from “Armanda Elliot” and got the next clue that this was a scam. The email address the message was sent from was fezuqaxyxyfyq646818@hotmail.com. Now why would a legitimate Human Resources manager for a company so well established use an obviously randomized email address through a Hotmail account? Checking the originating IP address shows that it came from Amsterdam, NL. Website in Russia and emails from the Netherlands?

By this point I was pretty well convinced that this was possibly an attempt at ID theft, but before I started blogging about it I thought I should be thorough. So I went ahead and clicked on the link for the application “Armanda” had sent along and it took me to this page:

Starts off about how you'd expect.

You’ll note that I put a red box around the section that claims this is a secure page. I did this because it’s a flat out lie. The URL for that page was a standard http address and not the https of a secure page. Also most browsers will change the address bar to indicate when you’re on a secure page and Firefox gave no indication that the page was secure. I also took the time to ping the domain name and got an IP address of 217.23.10.25 which, when you look it up, is registered to the RIPE Network Coordination Centre in, you guessed it, Amsterdam. The same place the email originated from.

The next several pages were very surreal as they were filled with all manner of questions that seemed more like one of those find-out-your-personality-profile quizzes that are all over the internet than anything a company would put up. Some of the questions were OK such as “You see a fellow employee stealing from the company. What would you do?” followed by three answers — do nothing, tell a supervisor, confront employee — that I’ve seen asked before, but others seemed totally irrelevant to a job such as whether I consider myself a liberal, moderate, or a conservative. Right in the middle of the second page was where the next big red flag popped up as squeezed between the surreal questions was this:

Why would they need to know my credit history?

I can’t recall an employer ever asking me for my credit report before. What’s interesting is that if you click on the check box to get your “free” credit report the form launches an entirely new browser window which cycles through two or three URLs in rapid succession before landing at ID Complete.com which, ironically enough, has the following for its webpage title: Identity Theft Protection & Identity Theft Prevention by ID Complete. The URL goes to a specific sub-page and includes some codes that are probably affiliate indicators. Here’s what that site looks like:

This also looks fairly legit.

We’ll talk about these guys in a minute, but first let’s finish up with the TTJ Property Management folks. The last page of the questionnaire asks you to attach your resume and upload it to the site, which is odd because they already have my resume from the initial email I sent them so why would they ask for it a second time? More surprising, though, was the fact that they weren’t doing something obvious like asking for my Social Security number, which is what I had expected to have happen. I didn’t upload my resume again so I’m not sure what the screen after that would’ve been like, but I was feeling pretty confident at this point that I had investigated the site itself far enough.

Now as for the ID Complete.com folks, well, I’m not sure about them. Doing a Google search on IDComplete.com reveals they are all over the place with over 2,000 mentions mainly because it appears that they have an affiliate program which pays for traffic to their site. Having gone through the first dozen or so pages of search results I’ve been unable to find anything in the way of complaints and trying various search queries specifically looking for complaints doesn’t turn anything up either. Which is suspicious in itself as it suggests they’ve done everything they can to bury anything negative about them out on the net. That said, as near as I can tell, they are legit. Or at least as legit as any other company that attempts to sell you ID theft prevention and credit reports. You can bet your sweet ass that the “free” credit report involves signing up for their ID theft prevention service which will probably be very difficult to cancel once you’ve signed up.

Finally, to be on the safe side, I contacted the Better Business Bureau to see if perhaps they had any info on TTJ Property Management. Not surprisingly, they don’t and the representative I spoke with on the phone agreed that it sounded like a scam. He suggested I contact the Internet Crime Complaint Center and the FTC about it. The thing that is puzzling is that it appears they aren’t trying to steal your ID at all. Rather it’s a very involved affiliate marketing ruse. If that’s the case then what they’re doing may not even be illegal.

The phony job application above says they’ll need a copy of your credit report at the interview, but they never ask you to send it to them. It’s designed specifically to get you to go to ID Complete.com website and sign up whereupon the owners of the phony job site will earn an affiliate fee. Seems like a lot of work for a few pennies, right? Naturally that made me curious to see how much they could potentially earn from this ploy.

Doing a Google search for ID Complete Affiliate Program returns just two results both of which point to oDigger.com which is a site for finding affiliate programs to join. The first points to an offer from Cactus Media for joining an affiliate program promoting ID Complete.com that apparently offers payments of $36 per conversion! Now I’m not sure what a conversion is, but I’d guess that it means for every person who signs up with ID Complete. The second points to an offer from Cpaway that offers payments of $19 per lead. Not as impressive as Cactus Media’s offering, but still not bad.

Interestingly enough, the Cpaway listing has the following description:

Identity Protection and 3 Bureau Annual Credit Report. Converts on a 2nd page submit with order of 30 day free trial. (Please be aware that his offer may not be ran on Craigslist and publishers found promoting it through CL will have their fund forfeited)

A prohibition against promoting on Craigslist! Now what would be a clever way to get around that prohibition and guarantee that at least some of the chumps applicants actually sign up for the service? How about a phony job listing that leads to an application that does the push to ID Complete? It’s brilliant! There’s also probably nothing illegal about it. It’s just a shame that they posted the fake job ad on Craigslist before they registered the domain for their phony company website and then were dumb enough to respond to an applicant before the IP address had time to propagate from Russia leading one overly skeptical job seeker to do a little digging. That would be me.

There’s not much more I can do to put a stop to this ruse, but at least I can blog about it. Considering that Google doesn’t have any search results for TTJ Property Management that means that this little blog entry will be the first it will index, probably before it ever finds the original page. And that means that the next poor schlep who decides to Google the company name will read all about it here.

If you’re that poor schlep and you haven’t applied with TTJ Property Management yet then you probably already realize that you shouldn’t bother.  If you have applied then just ignore any emails you get from them as it’ll just point you to this phony website. More importantly, however, is knowing that this sort of scam is out there and to be properly skeptical when considering ads for jobs on sites like Craigslist. You can bet I’ll be looking at them a lot more closely from now on.

The advocates of woo-woo in the U.K. have had a bit of a setback:

In all the furore over cuts to the NHS, doctors have voted to stop one service all by themselves – and unlike what is expected to follow, this is something we should all celebrate. The British Medical Association (BMA) has voted to stop offering homeopathic treatment on the NHS.

It’s better still. They also say that homeopathic products should no longer be labelled “medicines” and should instead be marked “placebo” when sold in pharmacies. In entertainingly robust language, Dr Tom Dolphin of the BMA’s junior doctors committee described homeopathic remedies as “nonsense on stilts”.

It’s worth reading the full “nonsense on stilts” quote from the news article:

Dr Tom Dolphin, from the BMA’s junior doctors committee, said that he had previously described homeopathy as witchcraft but now wanted to apologise to witches for making the link.

“Homeopathy is not witchcraft, it is nonsense on stilts,” he said.

“It is pernicious nonsense that feeds into a rising wave of irrationality which threatens to overwhelm the hard-won gains of the Enlightenment and the scientific method.

“We risk, as a society, slipping back into a state of magical thinking when made-up science passes for rational discourse and wishing for something to be true passes for proof.”

According to the Society of Homeopaths, homeopathy has been available through the NHS since its creation in 1948. You’d think that 62 years would be more than enough time to establish that it actually does something, but so far there’s not much in the way of evidence to suggest that it does.

It does my heart good to see doctors in the U.K. standing up for evidence based medicine. Perhaps there’s hope for all of us yet.

So here’s a bit of good news in the morass of bad news coming out of the BP Oil Disaster in the Gulf. Turns out that BP did test Kevin Costner’s machine that separates oil from water and it appears to work:

BP says Kevin Costner’s water cleaning machine can ‘make a real difference’ | NewsWatch: Energy | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle.

BP’s COO of Exploration and Production, Doug Suttles, said that within the first few hours of testing the machine, the company decided to order 32 of them.

“We tested it in some of the toughest environments we could find and actually what it’s done — it’s quite robust,” Suttle said. “This is real technology with real science behind it and it’s passed all of those tests.”

Suttles said BP has committed to building four deepwater systems. Two of the systems will be barges that have machines on them and two of the systems will be a new design using 280-foot offshore supply vessels.

In total, the systems BP is rigging up will have a processing capacity of 128,000 barrels a day.

“That’s a substantial amount of capacity and can make a real difference to our spill response efforts,” Suttles said.

There’s already a lot of damage done, but better late than never in getting something like this out there where they can prove themselves in a real-world worst-case situation. If they end up helping to any decent degree then they should be made a mandatory part of every oil company’s oil spill response plan.

Which shouldn’t be too difficult considering that they all had the exact same photocopy of the piss-poor BP response plan anyway.

The Catholic Church likes to promote itself as a beacon of morality in a fallen world. Shame the reality isn’t anything close to what they’d like you to believe:

‘Dan Rather Reports’ Exposes Coordinated Effort by the Catholic Church to Protect Assets From Abuse Victims

From the Vatican on down, the church has vowed to make peace with hundreds of victims of a decades-long epidemic of sex abuse by its priests. But “Dan Rather Reports” found evidence that the church has done just the opposite: Wealthy U.S. Dioceses from California to Delaware have claimed to be broke and have filed for bankruptcy to avoid paying damages; Bishops have exploited arcane corporate laws to shield church assets from liability; and, in San Diego, parish priests have been caught literally hiding money in safes, according to court records.

“If you or I did what the Diocese of San Diego did in that bankruptcy, we’d be charged with bankruptcy fraud, and we’d probably be in prison,” said attorney John Manly, who has represented dozens of priest abuse victims in lawsuits across the country.

“Dan Rather Reports” found evidence that some high in the church hierarchy have provided guidance.

“One of the comments that came from one of the bankruptcy attorneys is that, ‘These guys make Enron look like altar boys.’ Pardon the pun,” said Don McLean, who was abused as a 10-year-old altar boy, and sought damages from the San Diego diocese.

“Dan Rather Reports: Spiritually Bankrupt” premieres on HDNet, Tuesday, June 29 at 8:00 p.m. ET with an encore at 11:00 p.m. ET.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t understand how anyone can call themselves a Catholic without being filled with shame and self-loathing. If I were to ever meet the Pope I’d have no other choice, in good conscious, other than to slap the shit out of him as soon as he started to make some bullshit moral proclamation.

Probably best the likelihood of me ever meeting the Pope is even less than the chances that God actually exists.

Sorry I haven’t posted much lately, but I’ve been getting ready for what is probably the shortest job of my career. I was contacted by one of my former contract houses about a three-day assignment which started yesterday. I’m helping a company unbox, test, and set up IV pumps for a local hospital. Yesterday was the first day and it was about as tedious as you’d expect something like this to be, but the rules of unemployment say I cannot turn down an offered job no matter how ridiculously short it is. So I’m doing what I must and at least it’s mildly interesting in the getting to see the inner-workings of a hospital sort of way. I’ve been to this hospital before with Anne and I hadn’t realized that they make use of robots to cart stuff like linens and garbage bins around with. Probably because they stay contained to the lower level where no one outside of hospital staff ever sees them.

Anyway, it’s time that I left for work so I better get going. I’ll try to get back into the swing of posting more regularly soon.

Just a quick note to let you guys know we’re running on the latest release of WordPress. I haven’t had a chance to look over what’s new in this version, though I understand it now supports multiple blogs from just one installation of the script is one of the biggies. I already have all the blogs I’m hosting for friends and family set up as individual installs, though, so I doubt I’ll bother trying to merge them into one Huge Mega Install.

Anyway, it’s a new version and so there may be some issues with plugins or bugs here and there so let me know if you see anything funky.

Google has added a number of new features over the past few months that I’m just starting to play with. Two of them are integration of real-time tweets from Twitter into search results and the ability to sort search results by how recent they are. Sure, I had heard that Google was going to be doing these things, but it didn’t really strike home just how amazing that is until just a little while ago when I tweeted about Disney’s upcoming Wii-exclusive game Epic Mickey which looks like it’ll be an incredible game.

I’d love to play it, but it’s the only game on the Wii that I’m actually interested in and I’m not buying a Wii for just one game and I said as much in a tweet. I then followed up with a tweet mentioning how Warren Specter, the head designer on the game, has said that it originally started out being intended for the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC and that any port to those platforms would be up to Disney to decide.

Then I decided to do a Google search for “Epic Mickey PS3″ to see if perhaps there was any word about a possible port now that the PlayStaion Move is due out in the Fall which will bring Wii-like motion control to the PS3. To be sure I got recent news I hit the Latest button on the Google search and this is the page that popped up:

Click to embiggen!

Go ahead and click the pic to make it bigger. See those two circled bits? Those are the two tweets I made about the game just prior to doing the search. When Google said real-time inclusion they weren’t kidding around!

The speed of Google’s searches are already mind boggling when you think about the amount of computing power they must be using, I can only imagine how much more power they’re burning up to include tweets from Twitter mere minutes after they’ve happened. Maybe I’m just easily impressed, but this made me pause for a moment and say “Wow!”

As for Epic Mickey on the PS3, Disney hasn’t ruled it out and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it happen. At least I hope it does as the game looks incredible.

If you’ve ever traveled I-75 through Ohio in the past six years then you’ve probably passed by the Solid Rock Church which is famous for a 62-foot tall statue of Jesus that faces the freeway. This is what it looks like:

And the Lord saw the touchdown and it was good!

Or rather I should say, that is what it used to look like. Apparently God got sick of staring at such a tacky looking statue and decided to lay a little Biblical wrath upon it:

MONROE — Charred remnants remained this morning, June 15, of the large Jesus statue iconic to Interstate 75 that was destroyed following an apparent lightning strike during a thunderstorm late Monday night.

The Lawrence Bishop Music Theater at Solid Rock Church on Union Road endured smoke damage, according to officials. Damages to the King of Kings statue and the theater were estimated to be around $700,000, said Monroe Fire Chief Mark Neu.

No one was injured in the blaze.

I bet he never thought he'd prefer being nailed to a tree.

Now, if you’re like me, you’re probably wondering how the fuck a statue burns. It must be some honest-to-God kind of miracle, right? Well, not quite:

Since its completion in 2004, the statue, which appeared to come out of a pond in front of the nondenominational megachurch, was known by multiple nicknames, including “Touchdown Jesus” because the arms and hands were raised upward. It also was known as “Big Butter Jesus” after comedian Heywood Banks referred to it as such and created a song about the statue, which he performed on radio’s popular “The Bob and Tom Show.”

The statue was constructed of wood and styrofoam over a steel framework that was anchored in concrete and covered with a fiberglass mat and resin exterior, according to the church. It was slated to undergo renovations this summer.

Yeah, that shit will burn pretty easily even with a thin fiberglass coating over it. My mistake was thinking it was made out of traditional statue material like plaster or marble or cement. Shit that doesn’t burn. Apparently it cost $250,000 to build, which seems a tad ridiculous considering how cheaply it was made and how tacky it was, but I’m no art critic so what the hell do I know. The cost of the damages to the statue and the amphitheater behind it are estimated to be around $700,000.

OK, so a statue of a mythical figure made out of easily combustible materials gets struck by lightening and burns to the ground isn’t really all that interesting to me. Sure, there’s some humor to be found in an image of a God being destroyed by what would be called an act-of-God, but irony of this sort is pretty easy. What really interests me in this story is the response of some of the believers. Like these two guys:

Also gathered along Union Road were Franklin twins and storm chasers Levi and Seth Walsh, who said they were out in the thunderstorm when they heard about the fire through a Facebook update.

“It sent goosebumps through my whole body because I am a believer,” said Levi Walsh, 29. “Of all the things that could have been struck, I just think that that would be protected. … It’s something that’s not supposed to happen, Jesus burning,” he said. “I had to see it with my own eyes.”

“I can’t believe Jesus was struck,” said his brother, who noted the giant Hustler Hollywood sign for the adult store across the street was untouched. “It’s the last thing I expected to happen.”

You’d think that perhaps this would clue these two in that there is no God. Or, if there is, that he’s much different than what they imagine him to be. Apparently he really doesn’t like cheap statues of himself, but finds stores selling porn right across the street from his supposed house of worship to be quite tolerable. Not surprising when you consider that Jesus spent a fair amount of time hanging out with prostitutes.

But this won’t do anything to change their minds. They’ll sit around for awhile and wonder what the church could have done to have God torch the graven image of himself. Perhaps they’ll find something they can latch onto as a rationalization for it and then they’ll put it our of their minds altogether. No, it’ll take more than some simple irony to change their minds.

Story sent in by a whole lot of people all at once. You guys were all over this one.