I am honored at how close the voting was, but out of patriotism and a desire to let the nation move forward, I am conceding the race for People Magazine's Sexiest Man Alive. I would like to congratulate Bradley Cooper and his team on his hard-fought win. I know we went back and forth there in the polls for a while, but in the end, the sexier man won.

I will be joining my wife and our children at our ranch outside Everett, Washington, where I can do some soul searching and figure out how I can best use my sexiness to help the American people.

Thank you and God bless.

Just got this faked "Career Builder" e-mail (Career Builder's e-mails are sent through their servers, not through Earthlink) from "Charlotte Wallace".

Here's the text:

Thank you for your interest. After viewing your resume on careerbuilder.com, we have decided to contact you.

We have an excellent opportunity for you.

We are looking for:

Responsible and motivated individuals to assist in Company’s financial business. We value the exceptional people and provide our employees with an environment conductive for productive and long-term employment.

We offer:
- New concept. Commissions without sales.
- VERY competitive salary plus attractive bonuses plus commissions with each order
- No Fees
- You can start tomorrow
- Compensation: $85,000 - $95,000 per year
- Employee Type: Full-Time/Part-Time
- Vacation (2 weeks for Exempt employees)
- 4 paid Company Holidays / 2 paid floating holidays

Large and stable corporation

Requirements:

- MS Office (Word) - basic knowledge
- Internet access and e-mail
- A sufficient level of work ethics
- Ability to learn fast and perform tasks in a timely fashion
- U.S. resident or green card holder
- You are not required to quit your current job.

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

- Assist in company’s financial business.
- Perform financial tasks.
- Make reports.

We offer opportunities for internal advancement for the responsible employees. During the initial stage of work you will receive precise instructions and any possible help from the company’s Manager. Qualified candidates will be offered flexible schedules of work, competitive salary, bonuses and other benefits. Company covers all the reasonable expenses.

You will be able to plan your own working schedule (few hours weekly).

Please reply to this email if you are interested.

Hiring Department

The reply address is diagnosticparts@aol.com.

Read through my "job scams" tagged posts and you'll see this come-on over and over. Financial job, easy hours, work from home, perform financial tasks, good pay. Sounds too good to be true... because it is. The job usually entails receiving "customer payments" via forged checks or hacked PayPal accounts. You cash out the payment, take the cash to Western Union, and wire it off to your "employer" in another country. You're instructed to take a percentage of the payment for yourself as your commission.

Sounds great until the check fails to clear or the PayPal fraud is discovered, as always happens. Then the money for it is pulled out of your account. If you had enough to cover it, you're out the amount of the check. If you didn't, the bank that gave you the money wants it back and will involve the police.

No legitimate company needs a U.S. representative to cash checks for them and wire them the money via Western Union.

If someone you don't know offers you an amazing job cashing checks or receiving and forwarding packages (stolen goods paid for from hacked PayPal accounts or with credit card fraud), they're usually a criminal and they're trying to make you an unwitting accessory. They will leave you owing money you don't have, and maybe a few weeks closer to financial ruin because you weren't out job hunting because you thought you had a new job.

Be safe out there people, and if you are job hunting, good luck.

A little something inspirational I came up with last night. Thought I'd share it here. The statement is original as far as I know.

Current Release 0.5.0 Beta (download - .zip - 16k - CC 3.0 Attribution license)

What Is A Heatmap?

Thanks to siewlian for our underlying photo

A heatmap is a way of visually overlaying hostspots of incidence/concentration on a grid. The hotspots can represent a clickstream (I set up a little AJAX script to record every time I clicked on the photo above and then rendered the data of where I clicked as a heatmap), or it could be the incidence of robberies or concentrations of zombies on a map.

Long story short, I got curious about heatmaps last year, but all the solutions I'd found were not in PHP, used the ImageMagick library, had a complex API, produced a heatmap I thought sucked, or multiple elements from that list. Eventually, because it produced the kind of map I wanted and could work simply, I first ported "The Definitive Heatmap" from Ruby to PHP.

I still didn't like the fact that it used ImageMagick (because many people on shared servers might not have access to ImageMagick), plus it executed the ImageMagick commands to the shell, which is not as secure as I'd like. So I re-wrote the whole thing to use PHP's built in graphics library, GD. That came with its own set of pitfalls, most notably being that GD has no Multiply blend mode. I had to create a GD Multiply blend in PHP from scratch. For those of you who arrived here specifically because you were Googling for a PHP script to do a Multiply blend with GD, you'll find that code in the overlayDot() method of the class.

I added a few functional modifications, did about an hour of testing to make sure it worked, wrote up the README, and packed it up.

The download package contains the class file, a README with instructions on how to use it, and a graphics folder with a color strip and dot image needed to create the overlay images. You'll need a basic knowledge of PHP and arrays to install this and make it work with the sample code.

Enjoy the class and if you have any questions, comments, bug reports, feature requests, or just plain praise, please post your thoughts below.

Current Release 0.5.0 Beta (download - .zip - 16k - CC 3.0 Attribution license)

September 2011
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