Rick's b.log - entry 2025/05/30

Scam surprise

That was eleven months and a week ago.

I had planned to have an easy evening on Tuesday, doing... actually I don't know, I had nothing planned. What I certainly hadn't planned was looking for a bank statement and turning the place upside down as I found damn near every other bank statement...

Why? Because I got an email from the Prefecture of Val d'Oise (I think that's near Paris) and somebody there has taken an interest in my case. She wanted me to fill out a form with all that I know and send it with every piece of relevant information that I have available.
Well, I have the bill and the guy's mobile number and the phone number of the company (according to their website, that doesn't in any way match the name on the bill) and the uncollected letter that I sent demanding that the work I paid for be done, as well as the complete IBAN of the bank account that I was told to transfer the money to.

Yesterday I filled out the form and scanned it, then created a document in OvationPro to describe what happened, along with scans/photos. Which was immediately bounced back as having been rejected by the recipient because it was too big. Taking a look, my description PDF was a mere twenty megabytes. Ummm... So a bit of ChangeFSIing later, it was down to about 2MB. Much better.
Even better, since I was using DTP instead of something like Word or GDocs, once I had a picture frame set up, I could freely change the picture inside it. Which meant I could replace all of the large pictures by dropping in the smaller replacements and they would just be rescaled to fit. Can you imagine doing that with a standard word processor? You would need to delete the original image, then drop in the new one, then set the desired size (then undo and try again this time using the method that preserves the aspect ratio!), and finally hope like hell it hadn't triggered some sort of text reflow or whatever that broke stuff or messed up all of the following page breaks etc etc.

Anyway, I've sent what I have to the Prefecture to hopefully aid in their case.

My mom used to say that the wheels of justice grind extremely slowly, but extremely close. I still do not imagine that I'll ever see any money back from this, indeed the letter straight up said that this wasn't about that, and if I want to go to court then... but that's a whole pile of complications that I can do without.
However, I would derive satisfaction from knowing that the people responsible for this - because I very much doubt that I'm the only person that has been scammed - have been given the opportunity to become somebody's unwilling butt monkey.

What the hell?

The war, which Ukraine did NOT start, has been going on for over three years now. And not so long ago Trump was looking to bring about a ceasefire by basically capitulating to Russia.

Speaking of which, I absolutely love how the government is looking to kick off a diplomatic crisis by considering refusing visas to European diplomats from countries that censor the free speech of Americans (translation: EU countries that wish to stem the flow of blatant misinformation and bullshit doing the rounds of social media), and yet just look at what happens if you happen to be in an American university and wish to protest to support the rights of Palestinians. Just look at what happens if you are an American university and you happen to think that maybe, just maybe, diversity and inclusion are good things. Or how about the foreign visitors that much have been less than complimentary to the current Idiot-in-Command and then find themselves whisked away by ICE goons.

What little dipshits like Trump and Musk mean by "free speech" and "free speech absolutism" is nothing whatsoever to do with freedom of speech or any rights that citizens might think they have, it's simply they want to be able to spew whatever ill-informed crap passes for thought in their minds without repercussions, accuracy tagging, fact checking, or any of the normal sorts of balances where somebody with an iota of a clue might say "dude, that's not how tariffs work" or "dude, that's not how government works", or maybe simply "shut up you ignorant buffoon".

I very much trust that the appropriate EU level response to any EU diplomats having visas revoked because we wish for our laws to be respected over here would be to respond in kind. Then the little orange manbaby will have to go to the UK (because the UK is too chicken to take a stand against an obvious bully).

Is America great yet?

The thing is, despite the MAGA mantra, greatness is not something that you can bestow upon yourself. Many people from many countries will proudly tell you that their country is the best in the world. Some of this may be patriotic delusion, but some of it will because they believe that their country, while not perfect, offers a lot that other countries don't which should make it stand out. Canada, Ireland, Norway, France... heck, the "Great" part is even a part of the name of the country that I am from although since we're British we usually just mock that and leave the flag waving nonsense to the UK's own MAGA equivalent, the Reformers.

Greatness is not a label that you can give yourself. It is a label that others give to you. When your country is respected, appreciated, and sets standards that others try to emulate.

This was the United States for a lot of the world. Was.

While their military actions have been dubious to say the least (I'm looking at Bush and Iraq here), the West generally supported them because we knew they had our backs and in return we sent troops and equipment to assist. This partnership maintained a sort of stability in the West (mostly).
Despite the blatantly obvious gun problem, the stark inequalities, and the utterly broken social contract (especially regarding healthcare), the US was seen by many as the place to go. The place where a good dream and hard work could pay off. Certainly there is a lot more money to be made in the US, that's why European tech is often somewhere between crap and non-existant and most EU companies and businesses are beholden to tech solutions provided by American corporations. Put bluntly, OVH here in France could not become the next Google because Europe just doesn't work like that.
And, of course, everybody loves a good American TV programme, from Knight Rider to Friends to NCIS or Poker Face. They are popular and I think it's fair to say that more Americans are household names over here, than vice versa. From David Hasselhoff to Jennifer Anniston to Pauly Perrette to Natasha Lyonne.
How many can name any of the cast of The 7 Lives of Léa? How many have even watched it? (it is on Netflix - complete with dubs in nine languages and subs in many more so you don't need to struggle with French)

However, in a very short length of time, so much goodwill and soft power has been destroyed. So much trust lost. So many changes in the wrong direction within the country - from the loss of reproductive rights to having crazies in important government positions (an anti-vaxxer in charge of the CDC?), and more recently a clause slipped into Trump's "big, beautiful bill" (all thousand pages of it) by Republicans that would effectively neuter judges ability to hold the administration accountable. And let's not talk about the US walking away because The Prez is cosying up with The Bad Guy or the mess that is the tariff debacle...although there is an increasingly plausible argument that they are actually trying to crash the economy so they can buy up loads of things dirt cheap.

Is America great yet? It's actually heading in the other direction, where even rule of law is unreliable and foreign relations are a joke. And we have at least another three and a half years more.

Not going out

Today? I stayed home today as well and spent the early afternoon out with kitty doing the same thing, only this time the temperature shot up to almost-but-not-quite thirty. So I was right on the verge of nodding off as my concentration evaporated as quickly as water on the leaves. In the end it was too much so I took Anna back home with some Felix and took myself inside. I have done a few things but... I have a headache and I don't really recall what I did for the past five hours. Or, at least, what took five hours. So I think I'll make some McNugget-tikka on a pack of Uncle Ben's because the only thing I've eaten today was a lemon cheesecake ice cream when I first went out. In the heat I just don't want to do anything. That's why I've never been attracted to going on holiday to the south of Spain or Florida or anywhere it's habitually above about 25°C.
I feel, right now, absolutely shattered. Thing is, I know me. I know it'll be a miracle if I get to sleep in any sort of a hurry. But, well, I'm going to bring this to a close and make dinner and go to bed.

...and if you're wondering why I decided not to mow, about a quarter of the grass is brown and burnt looking, the stuff that doesn't have much under it. If I had cut it short yesterday and then had the sun beating down, it would all be looking burnt.

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Zerosquare, 31st May 2025, 15:53

I think your knowledge of word processing is a bit out-of-date :)    Both Word and LibreOffice support replacing a picture without changing its parameters. But there's an even easier way: use the PDF export function and choose the small file size/lower resolution option.

Rick, 31st May 2025, 16:24

Good to know that Word finally handles that sensibly. Back when I used to use Word a lot (so 1997ish) even changing printer would cause it to do dumb things. It's one of the reasons that I never really did much document creation under Windows.    As for this day and age, I think Google Docs is about where Word97 was.  Not bad for something running in a browser, mind you.    I've not examined the PrintPDF options in too much detail. Knowing that the default printer manager just passes JPEGs through, it was just as easy to reduce and replace. Only took a few minutes, less time than it would have taken to find an alternative method. 😉

jgh, 31st May 2025, 17:02

I remember when just printing a Word document would trigger "this document has changed, do you want to save it?"

A tree-dwelling mammal, 1st June 2025, 13:17

Word (and Office in general) doesn't actually suck all that much any more.    Word 97? That sucked like a White House intern.    Word 2000? Micro$oft finally did away with the "MDI" (Multiple Document Interface) and allowed each document to open on its own window on the desktop. Which sucked a whole lot less. For some reason Windoze n00bs tend to run everything maximised, completely oblivious to the ability to concurrently run multiple applications.    Word XP? No idea, this one passed me by. I went straight to Office 2003, which was just a tidier version of 2000.    Office 2007 changed the file formats, eg Word now uses .docx rather than .doc files. There was a "loader" app available for Office 2003 so you could use 2007 files. The .docx file format is interesting; it's actually a Zip file containing the text in XML format with any embedded images stored separately within the archive. If you doubt this, create a Word document in 2007 or newer, save as a .docx file then rename the file extension to .zip and open it.    Everything since Office 2007 has been a gradual evolution. Office 2012 supports saving files direct to OneDrive if you're signed in (that's a double-edged sword of course). I believe Office 2016 finally implemented "save as PDF".    I'm currently using Office 2021, which works nicely. I've played around with an evaluation copy of Office 2024, but my copy at least is missing Publisher and a couple of other useful apps. I think my Office 2024 is "Professional" rather than "Professional Plus".    Times really have moved on. Windows doesn't suck anywhere near as much as it once did. It still has trouble when the system is under heavy loading; the other day I was running a video encode in Handbrake which was pegging all available CPU cores at 100% (i5 processor with hyperthreading, so 4 physical and 8 logical CPU cores). I jiggled the mouse to unlock the screen and the machine just sat there with a grey background and the 'spinner' (that's replaced the hourglass) for over 5 minutes before it finally showed the lock screen. This is one area where unix-based systems still win hands down. (And networking of course.)    But to be fair, the security issues on Windows, whilst not completely eliminated, are much less concerning than they once were. Just make sure you have a separate Administrator account and that your normal login isn't administrator level.    PS - Don't worry, I haven't turned into a Windows Weenie. There are still ways in which it sucks. For example if you don't 'tweak' security settings before you start using the system it's still a security nightmare. I'm simply saying that so long as you're using a Pro version of Windows, it doesn't suck as much as it used to, and the 'suck factor' is low enough that you can actually use the damned thing and get some actual work done.

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