From: Rita Smith
Please am interested to buy your item and i do believe that your item is in
Good Condition, please do get back to me with your firm price asap,
Thanks.

I figured at this point it just MIGHT be legit, since I didn’t post the condition. Though the price was pretty clearly specified. I responded with the following.

Hi Rita,
Per my listing I want to get $200 for it. Its in great condition as well.
Shelby DeNike

I then got the following email back from Rita. This was a CLEAR sign that it was a scam attempt. You would think that the scammers would think it through a little better instead of just dropping some bs line about how they need the money sent via PayPal and then mailed to some far off place such as Africa. Not to mention how they increase the purchasing price so much, even for a small item such as a phone.

Hello Shelby,
I got your mail.
Actually i am from Salt Lake city in Utah but want to purchase for my daughter that is currently in West Africa working with American Embassy,her birthday is coming up so i want to buy a surprise gift for her.Please if you do have a PayPal account,provide it to me so that I will Make the payment to you. It’s secure and protects two parties in a transaction.
I will be paying you the total of $280 for both the cost price and the shipping.
Please i need the information fast so that your payment will reach you before the
day runs out to enable you ship the Packages fast.
Thanks for anticipation.
Rita….

At this point since I knew that it was a scammer I decided to play a long, In the end I was hoping I could reverse the scam and make some money off the scammer.

Hi Rita,
I am very excited about this sale! $280 sounds perfect for shipping and
the phone as I assume that will cover the shipping charges. I dont have a
PayPal account but I can send you my address so you can send me a check
for it. Let me know!
Shelby DeNike

With the added excitement I had I think it caught the scammer and got them a bit excited as they sent me more information about getting PayPal account and what not. Also they tried to make it sound like they were sooo busy that this would be the easy way to get the funds. Though if you notice its about at this point where she went from a Mother who I can only imagine would be in her late 40’s or early 50’s since she has a daughter in Africa doing god only knows what over there to using “cos” instead of because …

Hello Shelby,
I will advice you open an account with PayPal cos It’s secure and protects two parties in a transaction.Just go to www.PayPal.com and sign up an account so that i will send the money to you.To sign up an account is free.Let me know once the account is set up so that i will proceed with the payment cos am very busy at the office right now.
Thanks for understanding.
Rita…

Still playing along with her at this point, acting mildly stupid about it. Figured if I act like I am semi new to the internet this would go further.

Hi Rita,
Thanks for getting back to me on this so quickly. Actually it seems I
already had an account on PayPal from a long time ago. My account is
shelby@7pounds.net. Once I get the money transferred to my account I can
send out the phone. What address do I need to send it to? You or do you
want me to directly mail it to your daughter? Thanks!
Shelby DeNike

Her simple response, not even including her name… she must have been really busy as stated earlier

Let me know once the account is set up so that i will proceed with the payment.

At this point I sent her my email address hoping that I would see some funds dropped into my PayPal account with another notice about how they rest of the money will be on its way or something along those lines … But instead magically I got an email from PayPal saying all the funds were deposited … funny as I was logged into my PayPal and no such funds were sent. Upon looking at the email headers of the PayPal message you can see it was sent from a Yahoo account pretending to be from PayPal

Paypal.com Fake Email

Subject: Rita Smith has sent you an Auction Payment using PayPal.{Transaction ID:8UG760668M701084Y}
From: service@PayPal.com
Date: Wed, February 24, 2010 10:36 am
To: isshelby@7pounds.net
Priority: Normal
Mailer: YahooMailClassic/9.2.12 YahooMailWebService/0.8.100.260964

At this point I decided the gig was up and decided to just spoil my fun with the following email back to Rita.

Hi Rita,
Well that was the worst scam attempt I have seen. You should really read
up on proper English dialog so you don’t make such simple mistakes. You
sent a fake PayPal notice to me coming from ymail.com, that’s the first
thing that really will make so people know its a scam, not to mention you
spelled my email address wrong on the notice, that being said an incorrect
spelling would NOT deliver the mail to me. So you need to make sure you
are not so sloppy next time. If you notice I said “my account is
shelby@7pounds.net” you sent the email to isshelby@7pounds.net, and even
the fake pay pal notice stated that it was sent to isshelby@7pounds.net,
since that’s not my address it would have NOT been delivered to me. Better
luck next time!
Shelby DeNike

I have not heard back, but if you want to get ahold of Rita yourself here email address is ritasmith55@live.com. I also attached and screen grab of the fake PayPal email that was sent to me. Looks somewhat legit.

1. cp /etc/cpanel_exim_system_filter /etc/cpanel_exim_system_filter_custom
2. Then edit /etc/cpanel_exim_system_filter_custom and remove the eml| from the four non-commented lines that reference it. You can also do this for URL, and LNK
3. Then log into WHM, click on Exim Configuration Editor, and change the system filter at the bottom from /etc/cpanel_exim_system_filter to /etc/cpanel_exim_system_filter_custom
4. Save the changes

Now Cpanel will use /etc/cpanel_exim_system_filter_custom, which if properly edited to remove the ‘eml|’ references in the particular lines will allow EML attachments to go through in the future

access_log — cPanel access log for both cPanel and WHM
error_log — cPanel error log
license_log — cPanel license log
login_log — cPanel user login log
melange.log — cPanel chat server log
melange_msg.log — cPanel chat server message log
stats_log — cPanel web stats log

Also cPanel keeps other system logs in the /var/log/ directory.

bandwidth — cPanel total bandwidth logs for the entire server
chkservd.log — chkservd service log
clamav — clamav log directory
cpupdate.log — cPanel update log
exim_mainlog — Exim email transaction log
exim_paniclog — Exim error log
exim_rejectlog — Exim rejected email log
maillog — Transaction and login log for all mail services
pgsql — PostgreSQL log file

cPanel keeps the domain weblogs in the /usr/local/cpanel/domlogs directory for each domain name that is hosted on the server. This includes FTP transfer logs for each account.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

1. Theme – If at all possible you want to look over your theme. While there are a lot of great theme developers out there, there are also a fair share of 15yr old kids out there that put together a theme for a class project in their HTML programming class. Often times in themes (I have done it myself) during the development you might include certain Java scripts that you really don’t use but forgot to get rid of upon the release. If you remove the excess code it can often speed up the loading of your site as well as help cut back on the CPU usage generated on every page load.

2. Images – Being on the Internet dating back to Windows 3.1 I have had to deal with slow loading pages and how to combat against them. I think a lot of that art form was lost over the years with faster Internet connections to each house hold. While having a faster connection it may not seem to make much of a difference how large and image is that you have on your site, but when the server has to serve a 1mb image time and time again it can cause high load and strain on the Web Server itself. By optimizing the images before you place them on your site can help aid in less load on the server, as well as your site loading even faster since it is less that the visitor has to download. If you are on a Windows machine you can download a program called IrfanView, its free and does wonders for optimizing images for the web. Adobe Photoshop does it as well, but that is priced a bit higher than the free mark.

3. Plugins – While we all enjoy our plugins since there is a plugin to accomplish just about anything, each plugin can cause CPU/Memory usage. While you dont want to disable them all take a look and see what really needs to be running and what you can go with out. Another good thing to do with plugins is shop around, chances are that there have been quite a few plugins released that do exactly the same thing. Read the reviews in the WordPress forums and see what others are saying. When it comes to stat plugins, take a look into something that is hosted off site such as Google Analytics. Since its not hosted on your account the load will be placed on Googles servers, which they dont have a hosting company breathing down their neck when things get busy and Google Analytics is an awesome service and can help you monitor your SEO even. If you decide not to go with Google Analytics, you can always just base your stats off of the stats program that comes with your host such as AWStats, might as well just use what is already being ran on your server. While disabling some plugins will help lower the load, enabling some will also help. Probably one of the best ones that you can install and enable is WP-Super-Cache. Installing this caching system can often times in itself drop the load that your site is causing by up to 50%. it works by creating a static page and serving that to your visitors instead of generating a new page on every load.

4. More Tweaks – If you are still experiencing issues even after all that you can try some of the following as it can sometimes cut back the load especially if you write a lot of articles and do multiple revisions before you publish.

If you edit the wp-config.php you can add the following snippit of code

// Disable the post revisions
define(’WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false);

Applying this will make so that WordPress stops tracking post revisions. For most people this will be totally fine to have this disabled. Once you disable it you will want to run the following command in MySQL. If you are not familiar with MySQL you should have access the phpMyAdmin as most hosts give you access to this in some form or another.

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = “revision”;

Once you have run that it should show that it removed X entries, those were all the past revisions even for posts that you have already published.
You may have noticed that WordPress autosaves your posts while you are typing. Every time that it saves it is going to use the servers processor to run the needed queries against the database and save your post. While this is wonderful and all, you may choose to raise the interval to a higher number. The higher the number means its not going to save as often, and will not hit the CPU as often either. To make the adjustment open the wp-config.php file again and add the following line and adjust the number so something that you see fitting. It is in seconds.

define( ‘AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL’, 1200 );

Doing all of the provided steps should help you lower the load your WordPress blog is putting on the server and provide a faster loading site for your audience.

Open Disk Utility
Click on the Partition
Click on the Current Volume Scheme drop-down and select One Partition
Click on the options button and chose either the GUID Partition button or the Apple Partition Map button
Click OK, you can adjust the other options if you so desire
Click Apply, The partition screen should open
Click Partition

After that has completed it will unmount and remount. Upon remount Time Machine might ask you about using the drive for backups, I chose no. Hope this helps anyone that has format issues with their Seagate 1tb FreeAgent.

1. No longer living on a couch, found a place about a block and a half from Venice beach
2. Attended Wordcamp here in Los Angeles, met some great people and enjoy the presentations
3. Ordered a Arduino, I have some ideas and plans for it but overall I just figured it would be something fun to mess with

Its sad to say that is really about all that has happened in the last month besides the surfing and hanging out at the hot tub almost every evening.