Madison is getting some truly unseasonable weather this week, as we managed to get get freezing drizzle, below-zero temperatures and enough snow to call a snow emergency in the space of about three days. My commuter bike is a Surly Long Haul Trucker. It’s a great bike, but the stock tires are mediocre for touring, and nearly unusable on snow… so I rode my mountain bike to work a few days to get a little more traction. I’d been looking around for a set of studded tires for the Surly, but it’s rolling on 26′s, so I hadn’t seen any. (Mostly because I hadn’t looked too hard.) I happened to be at REI picking up some Christmas presents, when I spotted another customer wandering around with some 26 inch studded tires. They’d just come in, and a few minutes later I had a pair for myself. I put them on later that night, with only one catastrophic gunshot of a tube failure, but nobody called the police, and our hearing was fine a few hours later. Anyway, it wasn’t a day too soon, because this was the scene outside around noon today.
 Looking northwest. |
 Looking northeast. |
 Looking southeast. |
 Looking southwest. |
Forecast for tonight calls for 5 to 8 inches of snow, 20mph winds and a low around 4°F.
Then we get a break from the snow for a few days.
Anyone who rides a bike on the streets has had at least one encounter with an enraged driver, and a few of us have even suffered bodily harm as a result; but a recent story in the Capitol Times suggests that tensions can be high within our own ranks.
The story suggests that a gentleman cyclist was riding after dark when he was passed by two cyclists, one male, one female. The gentleman suggested to them that they obtain lights for their bicycles, to witch the male cyclist apparently took great offense. As a runner and cyclist, I’ve had a few near misses with invisible bikes after dark, so I can understand why the man took issue. I also know that pointing out someone’s failures doesn’t often elicit a positive response, so when the rider’s girlfriend remarked that he had so many lights, he might just hand one over, I was surprised to learn that he actually did. I guess that wasn’t enough, because the pair followed the man home, threw him to the ground by his head and kicked him in the ribs.
The Capitol Times reported today that the gentleman rider involved was none-other than 51-year old Cronometro owner Colin O’Brien. O’Brien is a fairly prominent figure in the local bike scene, and was recently quoted in the New York Times in an article about bike fitting.
The kid that beat him up was riding his Trek TT bike, and his girlfriend was riding her Orbea road bike. Both fairly high end bikes, witch O’Brien was able to identify. Because I’m not a journalist, and nobody reads my blog, (hi Mom!) I don’t feel bad speculating that these bikes were stolen. First of all, it’s a little late in the season to be training for a triathlon. Secondly, there’s snow on the ground, and I have a hard time believing that anyone who doesn’t have enough sense to have a blinky on their bike after dark is capable of riding a twitchy road bike for any distance in four inches of snow. In an effort to learn more, I google’d for “Dustin Dunlavy” and found that aside from raging on random cyclists, he also enjoys living in Madison’s worst suburb and running very slow 5k’s with his mom and dad. On second thought, maybe it was his bike.
Read more from Bike Snob NYC and The Goat.
Update: They got a picture of the guy on a local news site.
It looks like some folks out there are using a page on Facebook to launch a phishing attack on your
Sample email
Facebook credentials. A page on Facebook page seems to redirect you to a URL defined in the query string. Julie and I have both received emails like the one on the right of this page. They appear to come from Facebook, and contain a that looks something like this.
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.jeffballweg.com
The part after the “?u=” can be any url on the internet, so, in this case, if you click on the link above you’ll be presented with a Facebook page that warns you that you’ll be leaving Facebook and heading to my home page. Of course, my link will cause you no harm – but since you can be redirected anywhere, the actual attack that’s circulating will redirect you to a malicious website.
For the uninitiated, here’s how phishing works: I make a website called www.myTotallyFakeFacebookPage.com and I make it look exactly like the real Facebook. Then I get your email address somehow, either by getting it from someone else or straight spamming it out there. I send you an email that looks just like the emails that Facebook sends, but the link is something like http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.myTotallyFakeFacebookPage.com/passwordStealer.php OK, you’re at work thinking you’re about to see videos of goats falling over so you “Continue” on Facebook’s warning page and you’re forwarded to my site. My site then asks you for your Facebook credentials, which you enter because you appear to be on the real Facebook, and I’ve got your password. I then use your credentials to get your name and your friends email addresses and repeat the scheme.
Technically, Facebook hasn’t done anything wrong here, but whenever you make a page like this, there is bound to be someone that will come up with this kind of use for it.
Max Kelly, head of Facebook security wrote a post about Spam recently, but hasn’t mentioned phishing since his post on August 7th. Facebook seems to have created a list of some of the potentially harmful websites, and the warning page says that the link may be malicious. Still, you’d have to be paying attention to avoid trouble.
Looks like this is the same thing that was making the rounds in August 2007, as noted here by TechCrunch. It looks like its undergone a few tweaks, because it’s resurfaced recently.
If you’ve ever had the pleasure of joining my family for Thanksgiving, you know that we’re a family of noisy, rowdy people. Each year we host the aunts, uncles and all the kids from both sides of my parent’s families, and as a world-wise family hosting a distinctly American holiday, we toss in a half dozen teenage exchange students. Together we represented Denmark, Saudi Arabia, America, (real and otherwise) plus China and Japan. In all we had 25 (or 26) people for Thanksgiving dinner at the house, including something like 9 teenagers, five of them dudes. Mom cooked a gigantic 24 pound turkey, and there were so many different dishes I had to doublestack a few just to get them on the plate. Our diverse group provided the experience of a few dishes that I hadn’t ever tried (or heard of) before. Of course we had the cranberries, potatoes, turkey, ham – and grandma’s famous get-it-now-or-get-none cabbage salad, but we also had some Dolmas (?) which was rice wrapped in grape leaves in olive oil. It was all great, and anyone would say that it was far more than even a family of our size could possibly consume in a single day. Of course, your mistake would be that there were something like 6 teenage guys in the house, and by the time they left there wasn’t a tiny piece of turkey left, and I was regretting feeding a few bits to the dog.
Overall it was a great thanksgiving. We had a giant snowball fight, talked a little politics, played pool, drank wine, ate pumpkin pie and did a lot of what my dad calls “visiting.” Tomorrow I go to Melrose to see if Julie’s family saved me anything good, but for now I think I’ll let the tryptophan take hold.
