Olympics: Bell Globemedia/Rogers Media to broadcast 2010 and 2012 Olympic Games in Canada
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) today announced that the broadcast rights for Canada for the XXI Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, in 2010, and the Games of the XXX Olympiad in 2012* have been awarded to Bell Globemedia/Rogers Media at a total cost of US$ 153 million spread as follows:
- US$ 90 million for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games (compared to US$ 28 million in Turin 2006), representing an increase of 221%
- US$ 63 million for the 2012 Olympic Summer Games (compared to 45 million in Beijing 2008), representing an increase of 40%.
Legendary running coach Arthur Lydiard died this weekend at age 87. Q and A with Lydiard here. Obit via Boomberg here. NYTimes obit here. Lydiard had been travelling through the US on a final lecture tour. Among distance runners Lydiard is a hero. Two of his athletes won gold medals for New Zealand at the 1960 Olympics, and Peter Snell went on to dominate the middle distance running at the 1964 Games, taking home two gold medals, the only man since 1920 to win both the 800m and the 1500m. Lydiard coached Mexican, Japanese and Finnish runners to Gold medal performances, and his philosophy of training has influenced countless other runners. Finland thought that he was important enough to the success of their runner's to award him the White Cross (eq. of a knighthood), making him the only non-Finn to be given the award. Lydiard's approach was high-mileage, aerobic conditioning. Even his middle distance runners trained 100 miles/week. He felt that too many athletes were training for speed first and endurance second. One of his lectures, explaining some of the science behind his theories, is here.
Wow! Finally the fine folks at the Runners Den have a real website that properly reflects what a great resource they are for the running community. It looks great and the information is now up to date and organized in an easy to read format.
Carl Lewis mangles the National Anthem at a New Jersey Nets game (12/1/93)
Thanks to April Winchell for the file
93-year-old runner lights Olympic cauldron - Jun 15, 2004
Ninety-three-year-old Rosario Iglesias capped a rain-soaked relay through the streets of Mexico City on Tuesday, touching her torch to light an Olympic cauldron in the capital's main plaza.
Oddly Enough News Article | Reuters.com
Huw Lobb made history when he became the first man to win Britain's annual man vs. horse marathon.
The previous 24 runnings around the 35-km course raced over countryside and moorland round the small mid-Wales town of Llanwrtyd Wells had all been won by a horse.
All of the crazy stuff that I might normally clog this space with has now been assigned to my dude blog. Its basically just a dumping ground for all the fun things I find in my RSS aggregator.
Upon checking my email this morning I had only one message. Sad, sure. What's even sadder still is that the email was from service@paypal.com. I was sure it was some message reminding me of the myriad ways that Paypal could be of use to me. Upon a quick glance at the email my spidey sense started tingling! The format of the email looked fine enough but the content was disturbing and it took me a second reading to finally grok what the problem was. Read for yourself:
Dear PayPal Customer
This e-mail is the notification of recent innovations taken by PayPal to detect inactive customers and non-functioning mailboxes.
The inactive customers are subject to restriction and removal in the next 3 months.
Please confirm your email address and credit card information by logging in to your PayPal account using the form below:
Email Address:
Password:
Full Name:
Credit Card #:
Exp.Date(mm/yyyy):
ATM PIN (For Bank Verification) #:
Except for the rather obvious grab for personal information via an email everything else looked pretty kosher before some basic sleuthing. Looking at the html source for the e-mail provides the first clue:
meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 5.0"
I couldn't believe anyone at Paypal would be using FrontPage to generate html. Call me elitist but FrontPage is for mom and pop sites. Checking the source for previous legitimate emails from Paypal confimed this.
Further evidence was just a few lines into the source (links broken to protect the innocent and expose the guilty):
a href="http://www.audimas.net/"> img height="35" alt="PayPal" src="http://www.paypal.com/images/paypal_logo.gif" width="109" vspace="10" border="0" target="_blank">/a
As you can plainly see the image is linked off the paypal.com website but what is audimas.net?
A quick whois via geektools shows the following information for audimas.net:
Domain Name Owner:
Smith Haist Dental Lab
2660 Westlake Rd.
Palm Harbor, Florida 34684
US
Administrative Contact:
Smith Haist Dental Lab
Hardy, Amber [AH-272]
2660 Westlake Rd.
Palm Harbor, Florida 34684, US
Phone: (727)787-8487
Email: sewmai@bshare.net
Technical Contact:
Omnis Network
Network, Omnis [ON-1]
3655 Torrance Blvd Suite 230
Torrance, CA 90503, US
Phone: (310)316-2744
Fax: (310)316-4991
Email: nicreg@omnis.com
Billing Contact:
Smith Haist Dental Lab
Hardy, Amber [AH-272]
2660 Westlake Rd.
Palm Harbor, Florida 34684, US
Phone: (727)787-8487
Email: sewmai@bshare.net
Record Information:
Domain Record Created: April 22, 2004 00:00
Domain Record Updated: April 22, 2004 07:45
Domain Record Expires: April 22, 2005 00:00
DNS Information:
Name Server: ns1.omnis.com
Name Server: ns2.omnis.com
Clearly this all the evidence needed to confirm that this is indeed a phishing scam but what now?
This is the first phish that has ever crossed my inbox so I decided to brush up on phishing via google which led me to antiphishing.net. Lots of great information here which led to another discovery regarding the devious ways that these phishers cover their tracks:
A dangerous new type of phishing attack has been detected that replaces the "Address" bar at the top of a Web browser with a working fake, using JavaScript. This technique allows the phisher to display a completely fraudulent Web address URL, while taking the consumer to the phisher's spoofed site.
This sophisticated new attack type does not make use of the MS Internet Explorer bug published last November, but extends the same visual effect to multiple browser platforms. It does so by automatically detecting the consumer's browser, and applying a custom JavaScript that replaces the look and feel of the Web address bar with an appropriately designed working fake.
I wasn't able to determine if this happened to me but just for safe measure I cleared all cache, cookies etc. I may also install the EarthLink toolbar that can alert users to this type of attack.
At the moment I'm confident that my machine wasn't compromised in any way but this incident has lit a new fire under my ass to make sure that all my important personal information on my computer is locked even tighter than it already is. I'm sure this will be a gradual process but I'll keep readers of this site up to date on my efforts.
FEAR OF CLOWNS: Fast highly effective Fear of Clowns program at The Phobia Clinic.
FEAR OF CLOWNS: (Coulrophobia and Fear of Clowns)
1: fear of clowns: a persistent, abnormal, and unwarranted fear of clowns , despite the understanding by the phobic individual and reassurance by others that there is no danger. 2: fear of clowns: a strong fear of, dislike of, or aversion to clowns
NCBuy Weird News: `Caffeine Doughnut' Cuts Out Need For Coffee - 2003-12-29
It's an understatement to say the doughnuts are a little different at Voodoo Doughnut in Portland, Oregon.
As of Monday October 3 2003 I am officially unemployed. There have been a number of events in my life that have lead up to this including a recent extended stay in the hospital, the new (now former) job and a desire to do something different with my life. I'm not up to rehashing the whole experience here because I have other more pressing things to concern myselft with like reexamining my resume, researching career options and finding another employer. For those of you who don't know my good friend Marc also jumped ship the day after I did and he has already written down what our work conditions were like far better than I ever could. So here's to new beginnings and better times ahead. I know I have the support of my friends and family which makes dealing with this "life obstacle" much easier.
I've just burned through another week of my vacation allotment and I'm sitting at my desk at work wondering where the time went. Here's a quick inventory of a few places we visited:
Google Search: fat man eating donut
I should be proud....shouldn't I?
TheStar.com - Rush for cheap tickets crashes Mirvish phone lines
This has got to be the greatest deal for a night out on the town in Toronto I've ever seen. How can you beat $125 Canadian each for the whole package?
I've been trying to get through to book our cheap ass tix to Mamma Mia!, KAMA Classical Indian, The Fairmont Royal York and the Blue Jays game.
Now I know why its been busy all day.
A hotline offering discounted theatre and sports tickets, three-course dinners and hotel rooms shut down temporarily this morning after getting flooded with up to 4,000 calls a minute. Outside the Royal Alexandra Theatre, dozens of people waited in line for up to an hour to get the cut-rate deals.
Its going to suck hard it we get left out in the cold on this deal. Hard indeed.
Well...not exactly whores, more like friends of DRC. I'm still porting over some of the functionality of my blogger page into MT. This is all very basic cut and paste with no real eye on design.
Enjoy.
I've recently installed Movable Type and I thought I would do some fiddling around with it.
Be prepared for some clunky templates and off topic posts while I play with this new toy live on the web rather than in some obscure directory like other responsible blog masters would. Thats not for me! I was the type of kid who would go down the slide headfirst without checking for dog poop at the bottom. Weeeee!
Maybe soon. Just testing for now.
Its true. See for yourself!
Its not been a great month for our families. Just weeks ago Tricia lost her grandmother Vera Holmes to cancer. This week my nana Marie Walsh died after months in hospital. They were both very special to Tricia and myself along with our families and we'll miss them very much.
Happy Hanukka to all my Jewish friends celebrating the festival of lights! In keeping with the exercise/nutritional theme that permeates this blog here is a link to help you create the perfect potato pancake.
For more information on the history and customs of Hanukka have a look at this site.
Tomorrow is my birthday. I'll be 32 years old feeling more like 42 right at the moment. I don't know if its the change in season thats has me so glum but I'd like to fucking snap out of it in time to celebrate the big day. Normally I don't go out of my way to acknowledge my birthday. When I was young they were the cat's ass especially being an only child. I used to be teased a lot by my extended family for always getting what I wanted at Christmas, birthdays, Easter...and that seems to have affected how I celebrate birthdays now. I usually ask people to not bother actually buying me a gift. I'd prefer a nice dinner and maybe a drink or three afterwards. This year is a little different. I'm deferring all offers of gifts until I can purchase the four dvd Lord of the Rings that is released in November.
Another reason that I'm feeling a little queasy about Friday is that our company is probably going to be announcing whether or not the current pay freeze will be lifted any time soon along with some other "goodies" I'm sure. I'm beginning to wonder if I should have just taken the day off. I'll let you know the 411 later in the week.
I'm starting fresh. I was tired of the old format of this space. I was always worried that it was stale and that the design needed updating. I've eliminated all those worries in one fell swoop by trashing the entire site. Its time to return to the simpler things in life...groan. I don't have a new philosopy rather I didn't want to fuck around worrying about everything that wasn't going right in my life. I figure by worrying less or not at all about the design of this site and more about just writing what I want to write then everything should be right as rain. Right? I'll find time to add links to other sites rather than the same old shit. This isn't meant as an insult to anybody I linked before 'cause some of you will be returning but I need to push the boundaries that I seem to have set for myself. If this makes no sense to you don't worry your pretty little heads about it 'cause I'm still sorting it out for myself.