Cell Phone Spam (or scam)!

September 11, 2010 M.G.

Question:

Other than telemarketers, have you ever been contacted by a phone scam (or received phone spam)?

Yesterday, when I checked my phone as I was leaving the fitness center, I found a missed phone call from a number and area code that was not in my contact list and that I didn’t recognize. I didn’t try to call back, preferring, instead, to wait until after I got home and could find out where the area code is .

It turned out that the call was from Phoenix, Arizona.

Now, I do know some people who are living in the Phoenix area, but they were people from work who either quit and moved there to work or retired and moved there to work. I wouldn’t expect to hear from any of them.

However, there was a contract coordinator on one of the contracts jobs I did who worked out of Phoenix, though all of the communication with the contract company when I’m not working comes from the home office in Florida. Still, it was worth looking into a little bit more, but not enough to try calling back, yet.

I decided to try to do a reverse phone number look-up. For a price, personal information is available for the name a phone is in for almost every land line as well as many cell phones. There are varying amounts and varying plans that can be subscribed to. However, I don’t often have the need to track down personal information and I wasn’t about to pay for information about a call that might have been a wrong number. When I searched on the term “reverse look-up,” all I found were various websites trying to get my money when I tried to do a reverse phone number look-up.

Then I decided to do a search on the phone number in Google.

Sometimes ya just get lucky.

Some of the comments on one of the pages:

A credit card telemarketing scam! They are trying to get you to tell them your credit card number so they can charge your credit cards.

They keep calling me to my cell phone and I never give them my number,I don’t know how they got my number, they are violating my privacy calling to my cell phone I hope we can do something to stop this.

I get frequent "missed call" notices on my cell phone from this number ( ). The caller is always too cowardly to leave a message. As another complaint filer noted, it appears to be a telemarketer. How are telemarketers getting our cell numbers?

The second time they called – same message, and this time I played along.
This is a complete and utter scam
How do I know? because I’ve never applied or carried a credit card – not even a store credit card! I prefer to operate on a cash basis. They have nothing to do with any existing credit card company nor are they calling on behalf of any company from what I gathered from them on the phone they are either a complete scam or an intermediary that will buy your debt from your existing company although he was very hazy and evasive on the phone. So the alarm going off in my head says scam – and under no circumstances should you give these people any information about yourself

They won’t be calling me from that number for a while.

Verizon Wireless lets customers block calls from up to 5 numbers for 90 days. It’s a temporary measure, but, hopefully, our numbers will have dropped off of their system by December 9.

Question:

Other than telemarketers, have you ever been contacted by a phone scam (or received phone spam)?

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Triple image

September 10, 2010 M.G.

I was on another boat going in the opposite direction on Jenny Lake, in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming on July 18, 2010, heading toward Hidden Falls and beyond.

The boat images are actually from three photos taken as one boat crossed the lake in the opposite direction as us. I had hoped for more separation when I manipulated the image, but the other boat was going slower than I thought.

The inspiration for this image was one that I had created in 2007 in A FUN digital image — 4 bugs in one:

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Grand clouds over the Tetons

September 8, 2010 M.G.

July 17, 2010

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In the floor

September 7, 2010 M.G.

When we visited Grand Teton National Park in 2007, a new visitor center at Moose had just opened. Some of the interesting exhibits included the in-floor video displays.

This video is from July 2010.

Video segments included water flow with bubbles, seen under ice, a flowing stream, wildflowers, wildlife and more.

It is a little strange to be walking through exhibits with a video playing under your feet.

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Returning to an old theme – Eyes of the Great Depression

September 6, 2010 M.G.

From the visual index page – click on image to visit.

On November 1, 2008, I began a series of posts called Eyes of the Great Depression. The most recent image, 042, was published on March 11, 2010.

All of the image are from photos taken in the 1930s by photographers working for the federal government, mostly the Farm Security Administration. The original photos are all public domain and electronic copies are available from the Library of Congress.

I’ve created a new visual index page and will soon be publishing new posts in the series.

I’ve also replaced images that had been missing as a result of changes that had been made a while back on Exit78.

Each post has, at the top, an image cropped to focus just on the eyes, mostly of just one subject, though, so far, there is one with two people and another with three.

The rest of the post includes an image that shows more of the subject – and may include other people – as well as as much background information as is available. Most pages have a link to the source page at the Library of Congress.

So far there are 43 images, numbered sequentially, except for an error which resulted in two images with the same number, so the next image will be 043.

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The Sentence

September 5, 2010 M.G.

The beige phone in The Turmeric Bar and Grill, was ringing by mistake – wrong number; the band was playing The Spider Song for an audience of 5; on a silent television, a point was scored in a soccer match when the goalie was out of position and; on another screen, The Sentence flickered on in silence as the rehabilitated man walked in the front door.

Background info:

Davina, at Shades of Crimson recently held a creative writing exercise in which 9 words were to be used in a story, poem, etc., keeping it to a maximum of 100 words. It had to have a title, an image, and a few words on what the process was like.

Even though I don’t often participate in writing contests or “exercises,” this exercise took place while we were on our trip and I was only aware of it peripherally.

On Shades of Crimson, Davina shared several pieces that were submitted. Today she shared her version, Stoic, along with another piece, The Opening Line, both done as practical exercises for a summer writing class.

The Opening Line uses a different set of 9 words – in bold in the piece I wrote, at the top of the page.

Davina says “Please feel free to try your hand at this new set of nine words. Maybe you can use them in one or two sentences. Or, write a poem, or whatever comes to you.”

So I did.

I wanted to use all 9 words in one long sentence. It took me two tries and, after the first, this morning, I decided not to pursue it any further.

Then I sat down at the computer again this evening and tried it once more.

One of the things that strikes me in this is how much help Google can be for creative writing:

On searching “turmeric,” I saw a link to a restaurant by that name, which led to the bar and grill.
I wanted to use some other definition for “sentence” than one having to do with grammar and found the name an episode in a 90s TV series.
I had already included a song called “Spider,” but then went back to Google , after success with the first two items, to see if I could find a song with the word “spider” in it.

The image is from the series episode and is linked a video from the episode. The closure of my text is tied to the plot of the video.

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