28. June 2008 by Winn Schwartau.

I am a phisher and scammer.

I had put up a couple of my laptops for sale on my local Craigs List. Sold ‘em that PM.

I soon received a couple of “I want to buy” from a couple of guys in Nigeria. They offered more than I asked to include shipping to Sub-Saharan Africa. They wanted my PayPal account which is fine, cause it’s just an e-mail address.

Then I get these emails from  ‘PayPal’ to an address I do not use with PayPal itself, about “It’s paid” “Ship Now” and so I am having gobs of fun winding these ***holes up. They are threatening legal action from PayPal, and acting all tough. The cool part is that I am able to document it all. I’ll post it when I get through this game and you can distribute it to your users, and family nubes to help buy them a clue.

This is fun!

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28. June 2008 by Winn Schwartau.

The worse bank. Been extricating myself. Oy vey they suck.

Been doing a refi on my house after a remodel. Easy… except, the account with the Worst Bank in America with my loan:

1. Shows up as a first mortgage on the credit reports.

2. They cannot find in their records as having ever existed.

3. Was sold three years ago to another bank.

4. Does not pull up my LOC with my SSN

5. Cannot communicate with their different data bases across 17 states.

It actually took gobs of phone calls (useless) and a trip to the bank to pay off $16.79 to clear the old LOC. But, my wife went into the bank cause the drive through was useless… and four tellers spent 4 hours scouring their databases to find our current account.

It’s sad. I moved ALL of my business and personal on-line banking to BofA. Their security rocks (so far!) and their on-line facilities let me do just about anything I want, from anywhere in the world and with anyone in the world (sans a few bad places, of course.)

I do NOT own BofA stock. I am just terribly impressed with their services and real geeky customer service people who know how to help.

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28. June 2008 by Winn Schwartau.

My Identity, according to Mellon Bank was stolen. I own some Disney stock and they lost a box of backup archive tapes with all of my details (and a ton of other folks, too.)

They sent me this letter telling me to watch out for bad guys.

Best of all, they subscribed me to a credit monitoring service for free. I have always used one, to the tune of $10 per month, but now I can cancel that and use this one.

No matter: YOU, and everyone should do two things:

1. Monitor your credit with a service. It will tell you within minutes if something has changed.

2. Write to all three credit agencies once a year and get your free credit report. Federal law makes them do this. 30-50% contain errors.

3. Check your online $-everything weekly.

OK, three things.  Do them, though. Please.

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28. June 2008 by Winn Schwartau.

I just sold a bunch of my old Macs. 3 years is enough abuse for them to take at my hands.

Got 35% of the price I paid for them. Now that’s what I call a great ROI for a depreciating asset. Bought a new iMac 24″ from Apple. Got the last CPU version from their on-line refurb store at www.Apple.Com, scroll down in the Store on the lower left. It’s hidden. Saved hundreds upon hundreds of dollars. Bought it with 1GB RAM and instead of paying Apple’s high-$ for 4GB ordered it from another RAM place. Saved a few hundred more. Got it all for $1450.

Two days later, it’s here.

Plugged it in. Done. The 24″ iMac machine is simply the finest computer I have ever owned, due to impeccable hardware engineering and 10.5.x, Leopard OS X. I had to move back from the screen to watch a DVD. Startling quality. It immediately networked.

I have to come to realize that Apple ships its machines with the optimum settings to work right out of the box. No tweaking necessary. I mean NONE! All I did was add Firefix 3.0 (upgrade if you haven’t) and added my legal Mac Office. DONE!

The other awesome part is how my Macs can backup, exchange and sync info seamlessly over my wireless networks. Still thinking like a cumbersome Wintel guy, I was all prepared for hours of playing: total time to make it all work - out of the box? 12 minutes for everything.

Yeah, I know a Dell is $599. But then you get Windows or worse… Vista. Then you have umpteen hours of install and reboots and…. arrggghhhh… If you at all value your time, relegate your old Dell as a backup server with a big hard drive and make the switch.

Wow. Suddenly your PC is a tool, entertainment center and whatever you want it to be, and not like a stack of bricks hung around your neck.

Try it. You can always return it (30 day rule) if it sux. But it won’t.

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28. June 2008 by Winn Schwartau.

I bought the PsyStar “Mac Clone”. I tried. I really tried because I firmly believe that it would be a good thing for humanity to have OS X on more than 8% of desktops - especially since they are largely always on. The bad guys use the clueless masses to penetrate, obfuscate and cause endless mayhem.

After hours and hours of playing and talking with PsyStar, I have concluded that this product, while potentially very cool, is not ready. Period. Do not buy it. Yet, that is. They need to really upgrade, fix and make the entire experience far better than it is.

In short:

•     I bought the PsyStar without OS X cause I have my own licensed (legal) family packs.
• It arrived a few weeks late.
• The lack of documentation is pretty bad, especially for nube users. You have to know what you’re doing.
• Then it still doesn’t work.
• Unable to recognize or load OS X no matter what.

Their tech support people were pretty useless.

“You should have bought it with OS X installed.”

“It’s really really hard to install and make it work.”

Then why does PsyStar and its sales dept offer it naked? Big mistake.

So, recommendation:

• Do not buy a PsyStar - yet.
• Wait till V2.0 comes out. At least.

You get what you pay for. Nothing.

Posted in Mac Experiment | No Comments »