When one number called so often and for so long that I started to recognize it on the called ID, I starter to pay attention. I Googled the number and found dozens of web sites about these phone scams and that many people are receiving the same calls. What are they all about?

The consensus is that they are bottom-feeding scammers out to get your personal financial information for illicit purposes. At the very least they provide a worthless service that they charge either your credit card or phone bill for. Not one poster had any information that could be construed as a legitimate purpose for the calls. In fact, it is all but impossible to reach a real representative of any of these companies.

Here’s what I found out through repeated searches on many of these numbers that called me and sorting through the online complaints sites.

1. These often are the same people but they call from different numbers. In fact, you can’t believe your caller ID because they spoof the information. Calling them back is worthless because you are calling some innocent person whose number they have spoofed. One poor guy in California must have ticked someone off and they retaliated by using his number. The voice mail box is full and I’m sure he long ago changed his number. Mostly, though, they spoof 800 or 866 area code numbers.

2. If you listen long enough, they tell you to press 1 if you are interested and want to speak to their representative. You can cut through all the recorded crap and go straight to a live person if you press 1 right away. I did it several times with several of these callers and it works.

3. Don’t bother with the DO NOT CALL list. That is fine for legitimate businesses who follow the law. These scumbags don’t care. How can you report them? They hide their actual phone numbers. They know they are breaking a bunch of laws and don’t care.

4. I talked to a live person once by pressing 1. I told the guy who answered that I didn’t want their service and asked them to remove my number from their lists. The response I was given? “No way.” I repeated my request to have my number removed and started to tell him I would report them to the authorities. He interrupted me by saying “See you tomorrow. We’ll call you every hour” and hung up. Of course, I was bluffing about reporting him. There is nothing to report but a spoofed number. I wish there was a viable way to pursue these jerks legally, but there isn’t a practical way.

5. Call blocking works. After the jerk above threatened to call me, I added the number to my call blocker. This particular call was on my cell phone and I have an Android app – CallBlockerX – that takes care of the problem nicely. My home phone has a call block list built in as well and I use it. There is two problems with that one, though. It only holds 30 numbers (yes, I fill it up frequently) and it still has to ring once to work. Since the numbers are spoofed anyway, they change them frequently.

6. Another time, I received this kind of call on my cell phone. I was in a adventurous mood, so I again pressed 1 and decided to play along and see what I could learn about the scam. I gave vague answers and did not reveal any personal information. The woman on the line wanted to ‘sell’ me something in the worst way and I let her think she had a live one. She kept telling me they were going to help me get lower interest rates on my credit card. I told her I had more than one, which one did she mean? She couldn’t tell me what bank they worked with. She asked me what interest rate I was currently paying. I said don’t you already have that information, if you are working with the bank? She then said that they worked with Visa, MasterCard and Discover, not directly with the banks. I kept playing stupid, but interested and told her I thought one of the cards interest rates was 9.9% She asked what balance I had on the card I had the highest balance on. She said they could work with me if I had more than a $2000 balance. I told her I had $4000 on a card. She wanted the name of the card issuer. I said that she should already have that information, if they got my phone number from them.

This went on and on for at least 5 minutes. My wife heard me from the other room and was laughing. Finally, the woman realized she wasn’t going to get anywhere with me and was wasting her time (exactly my goal.) She said “Good day!” and hung up.

I hope they keep a list of numbers they don’t want to call and add me to it.

7. I received another call on my home phone no more than a couple hours later. I started to do the same thing. I pressed 1 and waited as the extension rang. They finally answered. I heard some background noise and about half a syllable then was hung up on. Was it a coincidence that I had just wasted the other womans’ time, or did they somehow figure out the connection between my cell number and home number and saw it flagged for being a time waster? I don’t know, but they didn’t want to talk to me and hung up. It was not the same number that called my cell phone, but the recording was very similar.

So what conclusion have I come to? There is not much you can actually prove about these calls. They cover their tracks so that they can’t be found and prosecuted, but I have reached some gut-instinct conclusions about them. They call from many numbers, but they are really only a couple boiler-room operations making a huge number of calls all over the country. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been pestered by them. They use technology to dial numbers and play a recording, hoping for a percentage who will respond to their bait. I don’t believe they are calling truly at random. I believe they know who they are calling and that there is a link from a cell phone to a landline number. I don’t believe they have any actual bank information, although they could be operating from stolen records from a business that has been hacked. They could have partial information that led them to you because they know you have a credit card. Or they could just be fishing. I know they don’t care about the do-not-call list, but I believe they have their own way of marking you as undesirable if you waste their time. I haven’t had a call from them in several days now. It used to be multiple times per day.

Some typical web posts about these calls…
Complaintwire.org
800notes.com
Honeypot.net

We got off Route 80 and went onto the local roads. We went through a small town and saw some Trolley Tours. That might be a way to see this Gap thing. We looked around and decided not to take the tour, but were told of several overlooks up the road where we could see the sites. We went off to the scenic overlooks.

The first one answered our questions, in a way. It turns out, the Delaware Water Gap is a US National Park along the Delaware River. At the southern end of the 60-mile long park, where we happened to be, is a pass through the mountains where the river passes through. Thus the “Gap.”

We went on up the road to the next observation point and parked. Walking through the parking area, I spotted a hiker walking down the road. The Adirondack Trail passes through this area. We had seen it cross the road just a short way back. So I wasn’t surprised to see a hiker with full backpack walking along the road. But what caught my eye and made me decide to take a photo was a big white sign with the message “LOVE LIFE” in red letters above his head.

He saw me taking his picture, even from a distance and waved. I waved back, just being friendly and letting him know I enjoyed his sign and appreciated being able to photograph him. He started crossing the road and walking towards me, so I walked down to the edge of the road to meet him. He gave me a card with his information on it and told me how he was walking around the US and had already walked 26,000 miles! Wow!

His name was Steve Fugate and he has a website www.trailtherapy.com.

I asked if he was hiking the ADK Trail and he told me that he had already done that, but was just passing through the area on his latest trip. I told him that I’d send him the picture I took and wished him a good trip. It was all over in a minute or less, but it was quite intriguing and I couldn’t wait to check out his website.

When you run into someone like that, you never know what you are getting into. People with signs often are pushing some religious agenda and you wish you had run the other way, but not Steve. He was doing his own thing and did genuinely wish anyone who would listen to Love Life, so he had a message, but chooses to spread his message by example. On the most basic level, I guess that’s still a religious message, but one we can all agree on. I won’t attempt to try to tell his story – I wouldn’t do it justice anyway – but you can visit his web page and read all about how how came to start hiking and many stories of his travels. It’s a moving and inspirational story and I urge you to check it out. A documentary about him is in the works as well.

I requested an invitation only a few days ago and received it last night. I’ve been playing with it today. I’m sure there is a lot I haven’t discovered about it yet, but I thought I might mention what I have learned so far.

First of all, what is it? As a subscription service, it supplies music over the internet to your computer or iPhone, iTouch, or Android phone. If there are other devices supported, I’m not aware of them yet. Royalties are paid by advertising in the free version. The pay versions are ad-free. At this time most of the ads I’ve seen were for Spotify itself, even if they suggested a particular artist.

You can type in a title of a song or an artist name, and many results will come up. I had to really try hard to stump it. The speed is quite fast, almost letter-by-letter, which is quite nice.

It also will scan and catalog your local drives for music files. It’s interface is very reminiscent of iTunes and immediately found all the music on my C: drive. When I plugged in an external drive with over 100k mp3 files, and told it to search that drive, it took some time to scan it, but not an excessive amount. Once done, searching through that large database of songs was extremely quick. It is the fastest at finding songs of any program I have used, better than iTunes, Winamp or Songbird, all of which are painfully slow once you reach that number of files.

Spotify only allows the program to work with iPods, iPhones and Android devices in the paid versions. This is curious to me, as I’d think the sooner you get people hooked into using one service on their phones, the better. I would have allowed the phone interface, but limited the on-demand music, but who am I?

I’ll admit, my interest in Spotify is probably rather different than their intended audience. I have a large collection of MP3 music that I prefer to manage, rather than pay to hear the songs. I also don’t listen to music at all on my phone. I’ve never plugged earbuds into my Incredible. It has some music on it, but it’s mostly left from my previous phone and lives on the micro-SD card. I’ve never bothered to delete it.

As for finding new music with Spotify, from what I see, there is no suggestion mechanism, like say Pandora or Grooveshark other than some “New Music” lists at the top page. Instead, it seems to need to have you develop a network of “friends” who share their playlists. Very social, but too much work for me at this point. A search of friends on Facebook only turned up one friend using Spotify. This may get better as more people get their invites.

That then leaves me to using Spotify as a interface to my music collection. I already mentioned that I liked the speed of searches in a large library. That’s about as far as it goes. As a player, it’s pretty weak. You can find your songs. You can make playlists. You can play songs and enque more to play. I was having some fun queueing up a list of songs using the search. It was going well and I had a couple hours of music set up to play, then it abruptly stopped. For some reason, all my queued songs vanished and I was left with an empty list. No idea why.

Another annoying thing is sometimes when you search for a song and play it, it adds an entire album to the Now Playing list. There is no way to remove the unwanted songs, either. All I could do was keep queueing songs ahead of the unwanted ones.

When it comes to playing songs, it’s very bare bones. Winamp is far better.

Another thing it really could use, since it’s good at finding songs for your mix, is a crossfade between songs to fill in the silence. There was a very noticeable pause between songs, way more than normal. It was distracting.

If I had no MP3 collection, or if I intended to use it on my phone a lot, Spotify might be useful to me. As it is, it’s main use to me is a player with a really quick search feature. Other then the fast searching, it’s just another in a long list of music players that don’t do what I want or need.

Why can’t someone make a good digital music player? Here’s a quick list of players I love to hate:

Winamp: My favorite, but far from perfect. Plugins and addons make it customizeable, but AOL’s relegating it to a poor stepchild status has left it high and dry. If they had spent as much effort on the player as they did on visualizations and skins, it would really be something. But I really don’t want a player that looks like some steampunk console out of a Jules Verne story.

Windows Media Player: Forget it. Microsoft is clueless and as a music player, I’ve never gotten comfortable with it. It’s the only player I’ve ever seen that defaults to an icon view with album art as the icons. I know some people who do like it, but I don’t like how it wants to go online and download “information” to retag your music. It’s a little better as a video player, but I still avoid it.

iTunes: No. That simple. The windows versions are crap.

Real Player: Another overbuilt, do-it-all, but do-nothing-well program.

Foobar 2000: Open source player that is the rival to Winamp for my top choice. I can do things with Foobar I can’t do with anything else, yet it’s spartan interface and endless versions that are all slightly different annoy me. As does lack of a good media management scheme.

Try as it might, it couldn’t stick and didn’t accumulate except on the furniture. It made an interesting day, had it been just rain, it would have been depressing. But snow made it a bit interesting.

It wasn’t really cold, either. I went outside several times with just a sweatshirt and worked in my garage for a few minutes in my shirtsleeves.

The last two months have been spent pretty much all with robotics. So much so, that I haven’t been skiing this winter at all. One day out to Holimont has been all I have done.

The robotics team finished their build season and we worked furiously up until the last minute when we had to seal up the robot in a big plastic bag until our regional competition in Pittsburgh. We spent the last weekend working on it at the Kenan Center, our local recreational center, where they let us use some space to practice and work on the robot while school was closed for part of the spring break.

While we were there, we invited several TV stations to come interview the team and we had three outlets take us up on the offer. Some of the video footage can be found on the Team Website: warlocks1507.com

I had a week or so off, then was off to the Fingerlakes Regional at RIT in Rochester where our team wasn’t competing, but I volunteered to work to help out. I spent a day as a Robot Inspector and two days as a Safety Advisor. It was a lot of fun and gave me a lot of insight into the other side of the competition I’d never seen before.

Seeing the game play out and the strategies of the other teams playing was useful too. Many members of our team attended as spectators on Saturday to see some matches first hand. I know the experience helped us at our regional the following week in Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh was our first regional event and being held the second week of the series, it gave us a chance to find out the nuances of the rules and see how the refs were going to interpret the rules. That was the main reason we decided to attend it instead of Fingerlakes.

My wife and I drove to Pittsburgh a day early, pulling the team trailer. Two other vehicles worth of team members did the same and we arrived on Wednesday evening with time to unload the still-bagged robot and out pit equipment at the venue the evening before the regional. It was nice not having to rush the morning of…

As for the competition, we did very well. There were problems. There always are. Mechanical, electrical, programming, all reared their ugly heads and fought us every step of the way, but we stuck with it and stayed very competitive. We placed 2nd after the elimination matches by a very narrow margin and ended up choosing the alliance that won 2nd (Silver medal) for the regional. The team that kept us out of 1st place? Our old friends Team 1114 from St. Catherines ON and their alliance mates Team 1503 from Niagara Falls ON. Both teams are teams we’ve played against before and ended up in the same position. Team 1114, the Simbotics, are multiple-time Championship winners and keep producing top-notch robots every year. We have to compete at a high level to stay with them each year.

We also won some other awards. A Coopertition Award based on helping other teams during the regional. That was a nice surprise. We always help out other teams if we can, but being recognized for it was a pleasant surprise.

We also won the regional’s award for the Best Web Site. For a number of years, we always submitted our web site for judging, but never paid a lot of attention to winning any award. We got a few honorable mentions, but no wins. Last year, we wondered why and took a look at the judges report. We found out there were a few key things they wanted to see in a team web site that we weren’t doing properly. So this year, we worked hard to make sure our site fit all the criteria that FIRST set for team web sites. It must have worked. Other than general guidance, and a little server maintenance, I let our web team do all the work, so it was 100% a student built site too. That makes the award even sweeter.

So, we’ve been back from the Pittsburgh regional a couple days now, but are still thinking and working on our plan for the St. Louis competition at the end of April. The robot has been resealed in it’s bag and the whole thing packed in it’s big wooden crate and will be picked up tomorrow for shipment to St. Louis. That’s the way it works; no working on the robot allowed, it ships directly to the next event. That doesn’t mean we aren’t working. We’ll be working on spare parts, programming and thinking about strategy until then.

Work on my cycle tour is at a standstill. With the St. Louis event at the end of April, I won’t be able to hit the road until sometime in May. That’s probably fine, the weather should be good by then. I’ll begin working on that soon.

We have more TV coverage coming this week with the robotics. They’re interviewing the team after our Pittsburgh success again.