Do not be too jealous as I am (pretty sure) that I am the first South African to own a 17" MacBook Pro. :)

Do you know what a CAPTCHA is? It is one of those small graphics people (like me) use whenever a turing test is to be performed - i.e. a human be told apart from a computer. Typically this is used in blogs to allow only human commenters, registering for email/online accounts etc. The idea is to display some warped text on a distracting background so that OCR programs have difficulty recognising the characters from the noise, but not humans. The primary use is to fight SPAM. But...........

......today I received a special SPAM message - unlike the other 22 I receive per day. See, this time the SPAMMERS are using our own tools to defy Anti-SPAM tools... So this is an Anti-(Anti-SPAM) technique? This is starting to get so confusing!!!

Look at the nice ad I got - and recognise the CAPTCHA style of the contents. So precious! I love it!
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I had this problem since long ago when I started using Mac OS X 10.2 - iCal imports .ics files from Outlook just fine - however the entry always gets saved with the wrong time. In specific - it is always moved out by 2 hours. Needless to say this can be detrimental to punctuality. Here is how I fixed the issue...

The first attempt was to google for the issue. However it seemed that I was the only one in the world with this particular problem. Cul de sac.

So I started investigating myself. The fact that the appointments are out by exactly 2 hours implied to me it has something to do with timezone issues, since in South Africa we are at GMT+0200 - also known as SAST. So I opened up the .ics file in TextWrangler and started analyzing it.

For the first time in my life since I got SPAM (and I have received literally tens of thousand junk mail in my lifetime), I had a laugh at the wit of one of the spammers...

Cool Apple Buddy gave me a refund for the notebook - even though they said they could not reproduce the error. I guess the screen shots I presented helped my case.

Now it is just the frustrating wait for South Africa's resellers to get stock...