Pain in the ear

I woke up Wednesday morning with a shooting pain in my ear. After a couple of days with a cold, evidently I slept in the same position all night and the drainage made its way into a pool around my tender cochlea. Which responded by turning beet red and ringing.

So a visit to the doctor yielded 10 days of the largest pill I've ever seen (see right). I have to swallow this thing twice a day (the quarter is just for perspective -- I do not have to swallow the quarter).

The good news is that it kicked in pretty quickly and my ear is feeling much better, though it does feel like I have a suction cup over my ear canal. The bad news is that this anti-biotic pretty much wrecks my bowels. I know.. TMI? Feel my pain.

Phishing anyone?

Phishing: that age-old practice of attempting to get personal information out of someone by falsifying a data collection page. Normally, I can spot a phishing attempt at the email. But today I got a particularly well-done attempt. Check out this landing page.

Notice the URL, cleverly including the Chase official URL. Everything about the page looks official, except of course for the ridiculous notion that Chase would email you and ask you to go enter all of this information that they either already have, or have no business collecting in the first place.

So the moral is, be careful. Phishers are getting better and better. I always like to fill in these forms with dummy information like First name: Yorra, Last name: Djerch.

Bill Gates: the last day at Microsoft

Quite possibly the most creative thing I've ever seen out of Redmond. Very funny.

Weatherman wins this time...

After a week of bad predictions, I decided to take my chances on the scooter again today with a 40% chance of rain prediction.  Well, the weatherman got it right for a change, and I ended up soaked on the way home from lunch.  Soaked.  Absolutely... soaked.  And face numb from the sting of tiny raindrops.

I guess I can consider it initiation.  I knew it was bound to happen eventually if I was going to commit to really commuting daily on the scooter.  Oh well.. at least it was just rain and not hail!

Project Make McCain Exciting: Gray Ambition