Winnipeg police say they've arrested a scam artist who used an e-mail scheme to con an 84-year-old man out of more than $30,000.

The victim received a large number of e-mails between April and September offering him $1.5 million in exchange for his help in unblocking funds held in an account in Nigeria ... Tempted by the promise he'd become an easy millionaire, the man wired more than $30,000 to Ghana, police said.

Meet Annie!

Annie is the grandmother of my friend Jim. She lives in Toronto, and is 99 years old.

A few years ago, she went to the public library and took some computer courses in order to learn how to use them.

Jim lives in Waterloo, and stays in touch with her via a web cam and occassional instant messaging using MSN on a Windows computer. The photo above was taken from the web cam, and you can see the monitor's reflection in her eyeglasses.

I am not a supporter of the Muslim veil (Niqab or Burka, among other names), as I think it is more cultural than religious. But I certainly do not mind someone wearing it for whatever reasons she may think.

Now,
Elections Canada said that veiled women will not have to uncover their faces to have their identity verified for the upcoming elections.

CBC reports:

I have a picture of Salma, my youngest daughter, titled the girl with the curly hair. Cute picture, proud father, normal blog stuff ...

Today, I got this request from someone called Senthil (assuming he is from India), requesting that I link back to his site about hair care tips and hair loss remedies from that page.

From the meaningless numbers department, drupal.org got its 300,000th issue followup a few days ago.

Nedjo Rogers takes the prize.

No obvious way to know how long it took to reach 100,000, 200,000 and then 300,000. However, it is easy to get from the database, if someone has access and time.

Thanks to: Derek Wright (dww) on the development mailing list.

Facebook has another milestone today.

Asharq Al Awsat, an Arabic language daily published in Britian targeting Arabic speaking readers in the Middle East has coverage on the Facebook phenomenon.

The article discusses Facebook as a social networking platform as well as an alternative media with user generated content. It quotes several professors and "experts" in the field of alternative media.

Gerhard Killesreiter was the person to commit the 80,000th commit in Drupal (contributions and core).

While the 30,000 commits from 20,000 to 50,000 took close to 15 months, it was only 8 months from 50,000 to 80,000.

One of the notable commit messages recently is by bdragon.

His ASCII art in this commit is awesome!

Well, for the last month, I have been in Egypt, on a visit to extended family.

I planned to work via my laptop and had an ADSL installed from Link for that month. On the days I am out of the city, I planned to use the dialup modem.

Sounds like a good plan with all the bases covered. Right? No, wrong!

What happened was a series of unpleasant surprises that left me frustrated.

While I all for a long weekend in the only month that does not have one (February), the proposal from the Ontario Liberals wreaks of a bribe.

These are the same party who lied about not increasing taxes, only to impose a hefty health premium. These are the same party who would rather deprive Jews, Catholics and Mennonites of arbitration rather than grant Muslims the same rights.