Photog

When I was in high school, I wanted to be a sports photographer. I called the local daily newspaper and asked them if I could take pictures of high school sports for them. They gave me a tryout on a girls' soccer game and I guess I did okay because I was soon taking pictures for them every once in a while.

I hung around that paper a lot, and eventually got a job working in their darkroom. I'd drag my ass in there at 4 am to develop film and make prints for the paper. Occasionally I'd pick up an assignment and get a photo credit in the paper. I quit college because all the photography classes were artsy-fartsy and I wanted to be a "photojournalist." When I quit I went back working for my hometown newspaper, as much as I could.

The paper had a new chief photographer and he really took a shine to me and let me do a ton more work for him. He'd call me and ask me to go shoot some event, and I was a regular for Friday night football games in the fall. I was tight with the assistant sports editor that did all the work and made all the assignments.

Things went wrong when the chief photographer had a seizure in the darkroom. Turns out he had left the Navy because of epilepsy and couldn't work anymore for liability reasons. I applied for the chief photog job but wasn't seriously considered because I didn't have a college degree. They hired someone near my age with almost no experience, but he did have that piece of paper I lacked.

This basically inspired me to return to college and get that piece of paper, and even though I didn't get my degree in communications I went right back to work for a newspaper when I graduated. But this time I was more than just a photographer, I was also a sportswriter so I was responsible for a lot more than just taking pictures.

I miss those days when I would go to a sports event and just take pictures. I got the opportunity to go to Redskins games, Bullets (before they were the Wizards) games and I went to nearly every home game of the local minor league baseball team.

Now that everything is digital the job is much easier. I've been thinking of contacting some local papers to see if they need some help shooting the Friday Night football games for some of the local high schools. I don't have the pro-level equipment in digital that I have for film cameras, but some of it crosses over and I think I could produce some pretty fine pictures.

I have some email addresses for local sports guys at the newspapers. I just haven't pulled the trigger. Yet. I'm not sure what I'm waiting for.

Visual Quote

To visually quote my friend and Sawx fan billy bonkers:

Poker Comic #157

Poker Comic presented by Free Poker Money. Some places offer $25 Free Money. Some offer $50 or $75 Free Money. Here you get $100, with No Deposit Required and No Credit Card Required. (New Players Only, Must be 21 or older.)

Click HERE to view the Comics Archive

Go Karma Go

Online players, especially at lower limits, just plain suck as human beings.

We join the hand, already in progress...

Dealer: Dealing River: [7s]
River pairs the unsuited board...sharkk called a re-raise on the turn.
Dealer: shharkk bets $2.35 and is all-in
Not much left compared to the size of the pot, shharkk bluffs with the rest of his stack.
Dealer: monkeykel, it's your turn. You have 15 seconds to act
Douchebag "monkeykel" lets the timer count all the way down to 1 second, then:
Dealer: Player monkeykel has requested TIME
BAM! Monkeykel calls time and lets the timer count almost all the way down then:
Dealer: monkeykel calls $2.35
Dealer: shharkk has a pair of Sevens
Dealer: monkeykel has four of a kind, Sevens
Dealer: Game #11745252795: monkeykel wins pot ($16.65) with four of a kind, Sevens
Shows quads, the absolute nuts.


I hope payback is a BITCH.

Overheard at Work

"I'll head over there with you, just let me go to the bathroom first."

"Whatever you do, don't tap your feet!"

"Huh?"

"Nevermind."

Na Na Na Na...

Hey Hey Hey

Goodbye.

Draft Complete

Attended my first ever Fantasy Football draft last night. It was long, one moron took forever with EACH AND EVERY pick, and all those guys are nuckin' futz. They sure can dish out the trash talk but can't take it. I think I hurt some feelings. Boo friggety hoo. It's not rocket science. To those guys who took longer to make their selections than ACTUAL NFL teams take to make picks in the college draft...GET A LIFE! When I had to wait 10 minutes for the moron to take the next highest ranked player on everyone's fricking list, I wanted to strangle him.

I won't be reporting the daily happenings on my FFL team, don't worry. I'll just tell you all about it when something stupid happens. Unfortunately for you, based on last night's draft, stupidity will surely abound with this organizational retardation known as Fantasy Football Leagues.

Ugh, I feel like ass. My day has been a phlegmy nightmare. Maybe it's allergies, or all the ozone in the air from the heat and the construction. Maybe if I barf I'll feel better.

Poker Comic #156

Poker Comic presented by Free Poker Money. Some places offer $25 Free Money. Some offer $50 or $75 Free Money. Here you get $100, with No Deposit Required and No Credit Card Required. (New Players Only, Must be 21 or older.)

Click HERE to view the Comics Archive

Sailing

Went out sailing with my friend on Percy Priest Lake, and remembered to take my camera:

eBay Scammers

constantin.ibrian@gmail.com
al3xsl1@gmail.com
michael_thomas1968@yahoo.com
gtdddsa2@gmail.com
costinnia19@gmail.com
djesits33@gmail.com
nicolae_arapu@hotmail.com
narcissrf@gmail.com
srfnarcis83@hotmail.com
ionclaudiu.dragusin@gmail.com
bestseller07@gmail.com
janet.forson@gmail.com
vreaupasarica@hotmail.com
florcat34@gmail.com
bestseller07@gmail.com
iulianamiclescu@gmail.com
osafiiars@hotmail.com
koinprokoinpro@gmail.com
itemsforsale92@gmail.com
cineemicsibealaptic@hotmail.com
michaeljohnson1953@gmail.com
dealmasterrr@gmail.com
patrick39ross@myway.com

Scammer Name: Florin Argentin Pandelica

A while ago I published a story of my exchange with an eBay scammer. At the end of the story I posted the email addresses I had been receiving the scam offers from.

Since then a lot of people have been hitting my blog by searching for these email addresses, and a few of them have emailed me to say they had received scam offers too.

I thought it would be nice to post those email addresses again, along with some more than I've received in a more straightforward post that will tell people that if they receive an email offer from one of these addresses IT IS A SCAM. Just delete it.

I will update this post with email addresses of scammers as I receive the scam offers. Sometimes bloggers can use their powers for good.

I Succumbed

I succumbed to the FFL pressures of my coworkers and have joined their Fantasy Football League.

The draft is next Thursday and my first job is to come up with a team name. I selected the intellectual masterpiece "Balls Too."

It comes from the Kevin Smith movie Clerks 2, when Randall Graves is asked by Dante's girlfriend Emma if it's nice having a job with so much downtime that he can hang out at the restaurant's playground. His response is:

Randal Graves: Downtime's important. If I had to deal with the fucking mouthbreathers all day I'd dip my head in the deep-fryer.
[Dante and Emma stare at him, waiting for him to leave]
Randal Graves: Balls too.

Poker Comic #155

Poker Comic presented by Free Poker Money. Some places offer $25 Free Money. Some offer $50 or $75 Free Money. Here you get $100, with No Deposit Required and No Credit Card Required. (New Players Only, Must be 21 or older.)

Click HERE to view the Comics Archive

Ding Fucking Dong

Ding Fucking Dong The Goddamn Witch is Fucking Dead!



Now get the fuck out.

If You Play the MaTH...

If you play the MaTH tonight and see CoxLover, make sure you call him a douchebag when he criticizes everyone's play.

Cute Puppy!

Here's a picture I took in January of our new puppy when she was still pretty small. I was looking at stuff on my hard drive and saw it. She snuck into my rec room and found a deck of cards...

Back from Ohio

The trip to Ohio was fairly uneventful, except for the speeding ticket I got in Kentucky on the way back. Now I know why the abbreviation for that state is KY...I got fucked. The speed on the six-lane interstate (six lanes on my side of the median, six on the other) apparently dropped to 55 for no obvious reason for about a mile. The reason became obvious when the cop pulled me over. The ticket giving process is VERY streamlined in KY as he didn't even ask me to sign anything. Just handed me a piece of paper that said I owe the state of KY $200 or so. That must be a very profitable piece of asphalt.

I'm not sure if I'll have to return to Ohio next week. I know if I do I will be staying at a decent hotel. The accommodations were acceptable but the internet was pathetically slow. Apparently the definition of "high-speed internet" is very subjective. I wouldn't call "approaching dial-up" as "high speed." Things are still screwed up in the plant and they need as many warm bodies as possible, but there is also pressure coming in from people here that I stay and do work that needs to be addressed here.

Poker Comic #154

Poker Comic presented by Free Poker Money. Some places offer $25 Free Money. Some offer $50 or $75 Free Money. Here you get $100, with No Deposit Required and No Credit Card Required. (New Players Only, Must be 21 or older.)

Click HERE to view the Comics Archive

Rudy Guliani’s 17-year-old daughter Caroline Supports Obama

Rudy's daughter picks Obama over him for President.

This is actually not very shocking if you were in New York when Guliani was running against Hillary Clinton for the Senate seat (which she won.) Rudy dropped from the race when it was discovered that he was having a not-so covert affair. His wife and kids were outraged that he dragged them through all that.

Good thing for Rudy that 911 happened and erased all the sordid details of his past.

To quote Guliani, "911, 911, 911, 911, 911, 811 oops, I mean NINE-ELEVEN!!!!"

Sudden Trip

My business trip to Mexico was postponed for a month, but today I found out I am desperately needed in Moraine, Ohio so I'm renting a car and driving up there tomorrow morning. Moraine is near Dayton, which isn't very far from Cincinnati, which I drove to last year for a birthday/poker gathering. It was a pretty easy drive then, I expect the same now.

I'm not sure about my availability, right now I'm working on a portable WoW solution. A junkie's gotta have his junk, right?

YMBADI

You MIGHT be a donkey if:

You devote entire posts to how MTTs are not as good as cash games and 95% of people who play them are losers.....then host an MTT once a month.

You post that tennis, the NFL and the NBA are "fixed".....just after telling us all about your MLB bets.

Play with your Food

I really hate scammers.

I recently bid on an item of interest on ebay. It was a normal lens for my digital camera. I have a normal lens but it is manual focus. I like to use it because it is so fast and that makes it easier to focus manually. The 18-55 zoom that came with the body is really nice at 18mm, but at 55 it is a horrible F5.6 and it looks like mud when you look through it. The problem with my normal lens is that you get no meter or anything when you use it, so you have to use it in full manual and guess at the exposure. An AF 50mm F1.4 is relatively inexpensive and would at least give me some through the lens metering. With a film camera no meter would be death. You'd have to use a handheld meter like it was the 20's. With digital at least you can guess, look at the LCD and adjust accordingly. But an AF lens would make life easier.

So I put a bid out on a lens via ebay. I like used lenses because I'm fairly rough on my camera equipment and if I'm going to beat it up anyway I like the discount of pre-beat up equipment.

I put in a fair bid and got sniped at the last minute, which is pretty much how ebay works these days. Snipers will pay anything for the satisfaction of screwing someone at the last minute.

The next day I got an email from the seller saying the buyer backed out and he would sell the the lens as a second chance for $100, and he would pay the shipping.

Wow what a deal! I bid $175 on a lens and get outbid by $2.50, now I can get it for $100 and the seller suddenly decides that he doesn't want $20 for shipping anymore? It's my lucky day!

I replied immediately and asked for his paypal address. He replies from yet another gmail address and says he is in Romania and his real name is saleh ali.

Okay, lets count the warning signs here.

Unsolicited email selling something...check
Sent to my email address not associated with my ebay account...check
Way underpriced item, deal waaaay too good to be true...check
using multiple email addresses with fake headers saying they are from ebay...check
operating out of a foreign country, even though the original seller was in Minneapolis...check
Won't accept normal safe forms of payment...check
Email name Kevin, real name saleh ali...check

I contacted the ACTUAL seller and verified that this guy was a scammer. Then I got "Kevin" in a gmail chat.

me: Does this work on a lot of people?
I contacted the seller, you're not him
there's about 50 suspicious things about you
Kevin: what do you mean
?
me: I guess you're not a scammer because you're smart
10:01 AM If you were smart you'd have a job or something
Kevin: yes i`m a job
me: Why do you use the name Kevin?
Kevin: because i the email at my friend
me: ah, of course
10:02 AM your friend's email is about to get shut down
He will be very mad at you
Kevin: sir
you want to make the deal with me yes or no
?
if you not i find another buyer
me: You're NOT the seller!
I talked with the seller
Kevin: go hard
me: and you're NOT HIM
Kevin: go away
and lett me
10:03 AM bye
and have a good day
me: I hope you go to hell for scamming people
Kevin: thanks
:*
me: I hope you die tomorrow so it is soon
in a painful way
slow firey death
10:04 AM or an animal slowly eating your flesh
Kevin: good bye
me: maggots feasting on your scammer body
Kevin: bye bey bey
10:05 AM me: you don't like it when people find out about you?
everyone knows about you
one day someone will track you down for this and kill you in your sleep
it must be tough to sleep knowing people are looking for you to kill you

Indeed, you are a job saleh.

If you're searching the internet for email addresses to see if someone is a scammer and you come across this page, here are some that this guy uses:
gtdddsa2@gmail.com
costinnia19@gmail.com
djesits33@gmail.com
nicolae_arapu@hotmail.com
narcissrf@gmail.com
srfnarcis83@hotmail.com
ionclaudiu.dragusin@gmail.com

Poker Comic #153

Poker Comic presented by Free Poker Money. Some places offer $25 Free Money. Some offer $50 or $75 Free Money. Here you get $100, with No Deposit Required and No Credit Card Required. (New Players Only, Must be 21 or older.) Now featuring free money at ULTIMATE BET. U.S. Players Welcome!

Click HERE to view the Comics Archive