The Luney Bin: H. Wade Minter

I had a pretty busy non-ComedyWorx week in improv before Thanksgiving.

The first stop was on Tuesday, where I joined most of Destroy All Monsters (Ross, JMatt, Larry Larr, and Moser) in Chapel Hill for a DSI Cagematch.

I was technically one of the founding members of DAM a few years back, before I realized that with a baby on the way I didn’t have time to drive out to Durham and get good at longform improv. However, there’s been a kick to have the Monsters play once a month or so, and I’ve been able to make it out to a couple of shows. And it’s really, really fun. The great thing is that when we play, the objective is not to put on perfect scenes or construct high art – it’s to have fun doing improv. It’s pretty easy to lose sight of that part of the show. Plus, those guys are my absolute favorite people to be on stage with. So even though I haven’t been “in the mix” with the longform, I can step into a show with them and have confidence that I’ll be able to put forth a good effort.

For the cagematch, we were paired against a good DSI team, Community Bike. I think we actually put on the better show that night, but they got the audience votes, so they get to come back next week. As for the Monsters, we’ll probably appear somewhere in January.

Friday night, I made my first trip up to see the folks at Comedy Alley in Richmond since sometime in the Spring. There were several new faces there, but I saw some of my peoples like Tim Dogg, Christine, Jenny, Dustin, and Katie.

I got to voice the show, which was fun. I don’t think Comedy Alley tends to have “active” Mr. Voices like me for their ComedySportz show, so I feel like I can provide them a different perspective when I do my little routine in their house. They have a new full-time Mr. Voice, so he was shadowing me in the booth and taking notes on some things I do that he could incorporate into their show. Richmond had a pretty good crowd in the house, and I think I put on a pretty solid show. Hopefully I can see them again before the AC4 Tournament in April.

Good times, good times.

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If I had any free time at all, I’d probably end up getting sucked into this game. I downloaded the demo and it’s rather addicting. Curse you, Calzonetti!

Of course, once they start asking for money at the end of the demo period, I won’t have any trouble kicking it to the curb. $10 a month is way too steep for a game I’d play like once during that time period. Still, of all the MMORPG’s I’ve seen, this is the only one that even looks slightly appealing.

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A couple of interesting things from the world of sports.

First, my Alma Mater, the William & Mary Tribe, has won the Atlantic 10 football title, and an automatic bid to the NCAA Division I-AA football playoffs. In fact, the Tribe will host nearby Hampton University at Zable Stadium this Saturday. I really wish I could go.

W&M was a regular visitor to the playoffs during my years there, but didn’t generally advance far. Hampton looks tough this year, but hopefully the tribe can pull it out. If they get past Hampton, they could potentially play Delaware and James Madision in an Atlantic-10 run.

The other news is that the former Montreal Expos were re-christened the Washington Nationals today. (The team website is at mlb.com, since of course washingtonnationals.com was snapped up by a domain squatter). While I would have preferred “Senators” for the name, it’s certainly better than the “Greys.” Nationals isn’t a bad choice, it’s just not very interesting. The uniform design has yet to be revealed, but it looks like they kept the old Senators II hats.

As a native Virginian, it’s my duty to support DC teams, so I’ll probably end up getting a hat and jersey for the Nats at some point. Until then, it’s time to sit back and watch and see whether or not the move goes through and new ownership gets put into place, or if the team ends up in Puerto Rico for the year.

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I spent way too much time last night providing “assurances” for CACert.org. Some how Ken Schumacher and I became the de-facto point contacts after the BoFs, so we sat at a table with a stack of forms in front of us, checking IDs and providing points. Then, as other people reached the magic “100-point” threshold, they started assuring us. It was very incestuous. But, I made it up to the magical 150-point mark, so I’m now some sort of super-assurer and can hand out 35 points at a pop.

I finally made it back upstairs around 1am, did some packing, and hit the bed. Too much crypto on the brain made for a restless night, though, and I may have gotten about three hours of good sleep before my morning class. I had to lug my suitcase downstairs before then, though, since I had to check out before my class was scheduled to end.

Today’s class was R4 – Next-Generation Security Tools with Peter Baer Galvin. I’m not the security guy at my job, but I thought it would give a decent overview as to what’s going on in the security space. And it was pretty good in that regard, with a fairly broad “This is stuff you need to think about in security, and here are some tools you might use.” My only complaint is that, like every other tutorial I took, it was late getting out for lunch. The only day I made it into the lunch room while there were still chairs available was the day I didn’t have a morning class. Bah.

I had lunch with Fran and Rob, took a few pictures, then it was time to go.

Ken Schumacher (Fermilab) and Chris Calzonetti (University of Waterloo)

Rob Napier (Cisco/RTP) and Fran “Effendi” Fabrizio (University of Alabama at Birmingham)

Mike Patterson (University of Waterloo) and Marybeth Griffin (Carnigie-Mellon University)

It was rough lugging my suitcase through the bowels of MARTA – no vagrants offering to help this time. The train ride was uneventful, even though there was a passed-out drunk snoring in the seat behind me. I made it to ATL without incident, and shockingly enough was through ticketing, baggage, and security in about 20 minutes. So I had two hours to kill before the plane took off. I passed it by editing some sounds from Comedy City in Kansas City that Randy had sent me a while back.

The plane was full, and the travellers attempting to stuff 80 metric tons of crap into the overhead bin made us late getting off of the ground. But we got to Raleigh only slightly late, and my baby girl was waiting for me when I came down the escalator.

It’s been a long week. I’ll try to do an overall LISA ’04 wrapup tomorrow.

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I did not want to get up this morning. But I did, and stumbled downstairs into a suddenly-more-crowded conference area with my two donuts in tow. My class (W3 – Regular Expression Mastery) was in a weird place, so I had to try to track that down.

The class was pretty good. They went over some of the more theoretical stuff about Regexes, such as state machines, NFA vs. DFA, etc. So it was somewhat interesting to see state diagrams for the first time since Computer Science days. Aaaah, flashback. The other stuff was moderately useful. A lot of it was review, but I picked up a few nuggets that explained some regex mysteries and should prove to be useful in the future.

Lunch with Effendi and Mike again – pseudo-Asian cuisine this time. Then it was off to the Vendor Showcase to get some trinkets and marketing literature. Pens with blinkenlights seem to be the trinket of choice this year. I got a stress ball, a couple of shirts, and a few other things. Listened to a couple of marketing pitches – storage and backup seem to be big this year, as lots of vendors were doing things like virtual tapes, ATA RAID, and the like.

I took a quick power nap, a little quicker than I had planned thanks to Holly calling, then hung out geeking until dinner. The Waterloo crew, Effendi, and Rob Napier went back to Ray’s In The City. I had far too much sushi, but man oh man was it good. I was stuffed when the waiter came by to describe the dessert menu. I heard “Blah blah blah blah blah blah Creme Broulee blah….” Wait, did you say creme broulee? Ok, I’ll have some.

We were late getting out, and late getting back in, so I missed the “Improv for sysadmins” Birds Of A Feather session. Oh well. I did end up going to a BoF for CACert, which was interesting. They’re doing some sort of community certificate authority, and also building a web of trust. So I filled out many a form, showed my ID to lots of people, and eventually collected enough “trust points” to become an “assurer” myself. I stayed in the same room for the PGP keysigning, run by Ken Schumacher from Fermilab. He ran a very efficient keysigning, and I got a few more signatures on my PGP key.

There were no other BoFs that looked interesting, so I retired back to the lobby to perform the PGP keysignings that I’d collected. I ended up at the table with Ken, and somehow we became an epicenter for a mass of CACert assurances. I must have killed a dozen trees with all the forms that were filled out. But it was interesting watching this web of trust develop. So these folks will go back to there respective cities with a link to Raleigh.

I’m getting very tired now, so I think I’ll call the assurances a night and go to bed. Tomorrow I fly back home to my wife and baby bee.

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My schedule permitted me a morning to sleep in today. Of course, my body is still on “baby time,” so I was wide awake by 8:30 and eventually rolled out of bed around 9. I hung around answering email and stuff until 10 or so, then took the elevators up to the 41st floor and took some pictures of the skyline through the windows.

After picture time was over, I went out and hit the mean streets of Atlanta. I wandered south a ways, taking in the sights. There are some pretty impressive buildings, but not much that really drew my interest. I kept seeing what looked like the same chain of coffee houses around, which was odd until I realized that I wasn’t seeing signs for a coffee house, but instead the logo of Georgia State University. It really does look like a steaming mug of java.

I made it back in at lunchtime. I waited around for Effendi and Cyanide to get out of class, and the three of us were joined by Chris for lunch. This was the first day I made it into the lunch room while there were still seats available, so I didn’t know how to act with my pick of tables. The meal was unremarkable, but they had canolis for dessert. And Holly can vouch for the fact that I’ve been jonsin’ for a good canoli for a while.

I had a class in the afternoon: T12 – Administering Netbackup with W. Curtis Preston. I’m the “Netbackup guy” at work, so I figured this would be something useful. And it was, as Curtis went over some topics that I hadn’t been exposed to before, such as multiplexing and multistreaming to get maximum throughput from your tape system. I’ll have to investigate putting that into production when I get back.

Met up with the Waterloo crew and Effendi for dinner, and it was apparently my turn to pick. I chose a Mexican place, but it pretty much sucked. The signs up all over the place that read “Absolutely no separate checks!” should have been a sign. I had some fajitas that didn’t have much flavor to them. El Dorado certainly has nothing to fear from this place.

Some vendor was sponsoring a “Beer BoF”, so I hit that this evening. I’m not a big beer fan, but I grabbed a free “Amstel Light” and hung out. It was back to the geek center in the lobby afterward, but I was feeling pretty sleepy, so I left early and headed up to bed.

Tomorrow, I’ve got a class in the morning, but my afternoon is open. I’ll spend some time at the vendor showcase, but may find time for a nap as well.

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The alarm went off far too early today, but I managed to get down to my first class (M7 – Designing, Implementing, and Using PKI to Provide Enterprise Security Services) early enough to snag a coveted spot near a wall outlet. No laptop batteries for me!

The class was fairly useful. It was taught by the two guys who run Cisco’s encryption stuff, providing Public Key infrastructure for everything from HTTP certificates to router authentication to signed software images on VoIP phones. So it’s obvious that they have tread into places in large-scale PKI that few people go. The talk was mostly from a theoretical, rather than a practical, level. Still, it was a good overview of the paths they took to roll out their own Certificate Authority internally. A couple of nuggets I could use if I ever needed to do my own CA stuff.

Lunch was next, as I met up with ISCABBS members Effendi and Cyanide, the only ISCA folks here. We talked about the new interface into the BBS and how it could be used to provide new ways to get at data, as well as provide more user-friendly interfaces than the standard telnet-based stuff we use now.

After lunch, it was on to M10 – Over The Edge System Administration, Volume 1, with David N. Blank-Edelman. That class was outstanding. David is an absolute nut, and as a result the class was infused with this manic energy that kept everyone interested. The class itself was based on thinking about problems in new ways, and using common tools to do things they were never intended to. So we talked about using lpr as a MP3 jukebox (since it takes arbitrary input, queues it, and applies arbitrary output filters to it). Using NNTP as a version control system. Autofilling web forms, filesystems from nonstandard parts, port knocking, and tunnelling SSH through random things. I even got called to the front of the class to read a story from some slides.

I went to dinner with a group from IRC. It was the crew from Waterloo, an English guy, a Cisco security guy from Raleigh, and a guy from Charleston. We hit the Pacific Rim Bistro and, of course, I got sushi again. Mmmm. I had a new thing, a “salmon skin roll”, which was interesting. I don’t know if I particularly liked it, but it was interesting.

After dinner and phone calls, I went back downstairs. I ended up at a table with North Carolina’s own Lance Brown, who I didn’t know was here, along with canucks Chris Calzonetti and Mike Patterson, who are both extremely interesting people. We were all chatting for a bit about politics, Canadian culture, geeky stuff, nethack, etc. Lee Damon stopped back by the table and gave us some old-time religion about cleansing your soul of Microsoft, then it was time for bed.

I get to sleep in tomorrow, with no morning class. That’s going to be fun.

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Today was the first real day of the conference. I grabbed a quick breakfast of Krispy Kreme donuts and headed down to my class, “S9 – Advanced Perl Programming” with Tom Christiansen. Few people know more about Perl than Tom, so it was sure to be time well spent.

We spent a little too much time on the introductory material, but eventually got into things like symbol table internals, process management, Unicode, and more. I found out that the way I was using Data::Dumper to serialize data in the ISCABBS RSS feeds was sub-optimal, and that I should use something like Storable instead. Doing that changed the time for my scripts to reload the saved data from around two seconds to around .1 seconds. Not a bad speedup!

I had a small-world experience during the first break. I saw a girl in the coffee line whose nametag said she was with UVa. Our conversation went something like this:

Wade: “Hi, I see you’re from UVa, do you know Cliff Woolley?”
Girl: “Yeah, I know him. He works right across the hall from me.”
Wade: “Cool, yeah, he’s a friend of mine.”
Girl: “Oh yeah, how do you know him?”
Wade: “Well, he used to be engaged to my wife before she and I got married.”
Girl: “Oh my God, you’re Holly’s husband! How’s the baby?”

So apparently my reputation precedes me.

After class, I came upstairs to try to fix the havoc that D3Football was wreaking on SkilTech‘s servers, then it was time for dinner. I went down to the concierge desk to check the local menus. There was a group gathered there, but they were planning to go to “Steak and Ale.” I didn’t know those places were still around, but what I remember of them from when they were in Virginia was that they sucked rocks. So I found a southern resturant called “Pittypat’s Porch“ and said I was going there. A couple of other guys thought that sounded better than Steak and Ale, so three of us went together.

So it was me, a guy from George Washington University in DC, and a guy from Reed College in Portland, OR. It was a good meal of fried chicken, biscuits, and collards. Both of the guys were fun to hang around with.

I went back upstairs to do more triage on D3Football, then took the iBook down to geek out on the conference level. I sat by myself for a bit, then moved over to a table where there appeared to be interesting conversation. It ended up with a couple of Unix gurus, Æleen Frisch and Lee Damon, a guy from the University of Waterloo in Canada, a guy from Georgia Tech, and a couple of others. Much good conversation was had. Then, in true geek fashion, the UWaterloo guy and I were on the conference IRC server typing away to a group of people two tables over. It was very sad.

As my laptop battery waned, I decided it was time to call it a night. Came upstairs, called Holly to tell her goodnight, and now it’s almost time to shut down for the day. I’ve got two different classes tomorrow, then I get to sleep in Tuesday morning.

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I bid farewell to Holly and Hayley around 11:30 this morning, took my mom’s minivan (which she and Bill had left at our house last week when they left for St. Thomas), and hit the friendly confines of RDU Airport. I left the van for Mom, since she was getting back tonight, made it through ticketing and security pretty quickly, and hung out playing computer games until I boarded. I had picked a seat near the front, so I boarded last. Of course, I ended up with “Lurch” from the Addams Family in the seat beside me. Guy must have been 6’5, 280”, and he spent most of his time on my side of the seat. Fortunately, the flight was only an hour.

In midair, I realized that in my pre-flight packing, I had neglected to write down the name of the hotel I’m staying at, or how to get there. So I had to call Holly once we hit the ground and get her to go online and tell me what’s what. Once de-planing, I followed the signs in Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport to baggage claim. They have a tram system to move people around, since the airport is freakin’ huge, but I decided “Eh, I’ll just walk. How far can it be?” I said this in Terminal D. It turns out, unbeknownst to me, that baggage in ATL is two sections past Terminal A, which meant I was walking for a good 20 minutes or so. Should have taken the train.

After collecting my bag, I hit the MARTA station. Thanks to the two subway tokens Manish gave me before I left, it didn’t even cost anything. Atlanta got something right that DC didn’t – you need to make your subway line go to the airport. Why Washington doesn’t extend a metro line to Dulles is beyond me. But, thankfully, they did such a thing here, and the ride into downtown was pretty uneventful.

Upon exiting the subway stop downtown, I got accosted by a guy. He said “Where you headed? Marriot? Sheraton?” I told him and he walked me to the hotel, explaining that he was homeless, etc., etc. He didn’t seem too creepy, and the foot-taxi thing is certainly a more valuable service than shaking a can on a corner, so I didn’t feel too bad about giving him a couple of bucks and thanking him for the directions.

The “Atlanta Marriott Marquis” is a pretty impressive hotel. It’s somewhat doughnut-shaped, with the rooms ringing the outside and a big open space in the middle. Vaguely Tylenol-shaped lighted elevators move up and down a central shaft (shut yo mouth!), but otherwise it’s open from the lowest level up to the 40-whateverth floor. It looks like part of the Matrix. Crazy. Unfortunately, the elevator system itself is for crap. Plan on waiting at least 10 minutes for one, and then it’ll be full. They’ve got what appears to be four elevators serving each group of 10-15 floors, so I don’t know what the hangup is. But I’m tempted to start rapelling down the doughnut.

I registered without incident, picked up the standard Usenix canvas bag for Holly and a couple of free shirts, then got my class material. After looking at the books, I think I’m going to swap out “Oracle Backup” for “Regular Expressions” on Wednesday, but everything else looks good.

Having skipped lunch, I was about to starve, and I knew what I wanted. After asking at the concierge desk, I got pointed to Ray’s In The City seafood place and sushi bar. Mmmm…sushi. And the sushi was great. Wow. Good stuff.

Got back to the hotel, chilled on the wireless for a bit, then went to the New Attendee orientation. This is my 4th or 5th conference, so I’m not exactly “New”, but hey, it was something to do. And it was an interesting hour of talk. I was signed into iChat Rendezvous, and the only other person logged in was the guy speaking. But before I could do some online heckling, someone else in the area set up an ad-hoc wireless network with the same SSID as the official one, which broke networking for the duration of the talk. Boo on people who don’t know how to set up their wireless card.

One nugget of information from the talk was that there’s an internal website, blog, wiki, and IRC server for the conference. None of it seemed to have much traffic tonight, so we’ll see if things pick up tomorrow.

After the meeting, I hung around downstairs with the rest of the geeks, sitting at a table with a student/sysadmin from Brown University. As the battery meter on my laptop went to red, I decided to call it a night. I went outside to try to find a snack and got accosted by more vagrants. Downtown Atlanta – kinda sketchy. It’s very empty on this Saturday night aside from the vagrants. Finding no chips, I came back to the hotel and paid too much for food on the lobby level, came upstairs, called Holly, and here I am.

Tomorrow’s schedule is Perl all day – “Advanced Perl Programming” with Tom Christiansen.

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Updated June 9, 2005

It was like opening a time capsule. I got a quaint little piece of history in the mail today. A chain letter! Yes, before your email inbox was clogged with get-rich-quick schemes, crooks used to have to pay for a stamp to send their crap to you, and you had to go find a photocopier and send your stuff to the people on the list.

So in this instance, “Dick Hollman” tells us a sad story.

My name is Dick Hollman. In September 1999, my car was reposessed. Bill collectors were hounding me like you wouldn’t believe. I was laid off and unemployment insurance ran out. In October, I received a letter telling me how I could earn $800,000 anytime I wanted to. Of course I was skeptical, but because I was so desparate and had nothing to lose, I gave it a try. In January of 2000,my family and I went on a ten-day cruise! In February, I bought a new Cadillac with cash! Today, I am currently building a second home in Virginia and will never work again.

This program works perfectly. I have never failed to make $800,000 on each mailing. It does not require you to sell anything or come in personal contact with anyone. Best of all, the only time yo0u ever leave home is to mail the letters and you can do that on the way to the grocery store, I’m sure you could use $800,000 in the next 20 to ninety days.

Please study this letter very carefully: THIS IS NOT A CHAIN LETTER! This is a perfectly legal money making opportunity. Follow the instructions EXACTLY!

Wow! That sounds great! And he says it’s perfectly legal! How can I refuse?

So the scam is that I need to send $1.00 to six people listed on the letter to “request that you be added to their mailing list (it is this step that makes the system legal)”. Then, I’m supposed to drop off name #1 and add myself to the bottom of the list. Dick helpfully says “an easy way to do this is to retype or print the six names with yours as the 6th on a separate piece of paper and tape over where the names are shown.” Sure enough, it looks like that’s what the person who sent this did.

In case you’re curious, the fine folks who are hoping to build a second home in Virginia are:

1) Terence Lolano from Nampa, ID.
2) Dan Bartlett from Redford, MI
3) Jessie Watkin from Lula, GA
4) Grian Ganky from Cave City, AR
5) Craig Hicks from Clayton, NC (Tarheels represent, yo)
6) Mary Kepley from Franklin, KY (I guess this is the person who sent me this fine business opportunity)

Then, you’re supposed to make 200 copies of your letter, and purchase a mailing list from some company. They helpfully suggest a company out of Phoenix that they say does not “over use” their lists. They also “promise that each name on the peel and stick labels/list has recently requested moneymaking information within the last 45 days.” Boy, I know that fits me to a tee! I request moneymaking information like every day!

In case anyone wants to subscribe the company to some child porn magazines or something, they can be reached at:

Quality Services
18402 N 19th Ave.
PMB 122
Phoenix, AZ 95023

You can tell they’re legit because they have a “Personal Mailbox” based out of a Mailboxes Etc. or something.

Step 4 is helpful. “While waiting for your mailing lists to arrive, place the letters in the evenlopes and stamp them.” Also, mentally picture the triple-wide you’ll buy with all the money.

When the list arrives, just place the labels on your mail, sit back, and wait for OVER $800,000 IN CASH to come flowing in. Brilliant! Just be sure, as the chain letter says, to “when your money begins to come in, give 10% to your favorite charity or a needy friend with a joyful spirit and share the good fortune.” Your friend’s spirit is certain to be even more joyful when they find out that you’re brain-damaged enough to participate in a pyramid scam. Feel the joy!

It goes on for a few pages of this hilarity. I guess that in this new-fangled age of the internets and high technology, that there are still people in Cave City, Arkansas sitting by the mailbox, waiting for their $800,000. At least this way, I know it cost (according to the letter) $155.00 for them to follow the rules, and they’ll be lucky to get $5.00 back.

Update 6/9/2005

Wow. I never thought a quick post mocking chain letters would turn out to be the most popular thing on the site. But thanks to the magic of Google, I’m apparently the top spot for searches for “Dick Hollman” and a couple of other things related to this chain letter. It’s been interesting watching the comments go back and forth, but I think it’s time to close the comments on this entry.

People seem to be in two camps – the “It’s a scam” camp, and the “It could work if you believe” camp. While I’m sure the second group are very nice people, and mean well, they’re, well, wrong. And I don’t say that just to be mean – here’s why:

• The chain letter scam is, in fact, illegal. Just because the letter cites postal codes and tries to get around the details by saying you’re buying a “service” instead of sending “chain letters,” the fact is that if you took this down to your post office and showed it to the people, they’d say “Yup, that’s a chain letter.” Will you get prosecuted for it? Probably not. It’s still a scam, and still illegal.
• Variants in details. “Dick Hollman” changes his story with every letter someone gets. That alone should set off warning bells that you’re dealing with a work of fiction, not a real person. If you can’t trust the story to get the facts right, why would you trust anyone taking part in it?
• Remember what your momma told you? “If something’s too good to be true, it probably is.” Yet we’re expected to believe that in order to pull in nearly a million dollars in a few months, all you have to do is Xerox some letters and put them in the mail, and wait for the money to roll in. A nice story, one that preys on everyone’s desire to get rich quick with little effort. Hell, I know the deal. I play the lottery when I’m in Virginia. But if it really were this easy, don’t you think everyone would be doing it? Wouldn’t they teach classes on it in business school? Wouldn’t you be able to open the Wall Street Journal and see a business roundtable with a guy who made his money in oil, a woman who led a tech company during the dot-com days, and a guy who sent out chain letters? Again, it fails the common sense test that there’d be this amazing way to make money with no effort that, coincidentally, nobody seems to have ever succeeded with.
• The math doesn’t work. Dick Hollman tells us to take our letter, make 200 copies, and send it out. Presumably each of the people who get it should do the same. So that’s 200 to the sixth power, or if my calculator is correct, that’s 64,000,000,000,000 (yes, 64 trillion people) who would have to get involved for the chain to reach its final stage. Now, granted, the whole premise is that “if only a fraction of the people respond, you’re rich!” That’s true, but the fractions will be much smaller than Dick Hollman wants you to believe. Why? Most people realize that chain letters are a scam and don’t do them. So I’m comfortable saying that you won’t get anywhere near the people you’re expecting.
• Small success does not prove validity. People have been posting “I’ve started doing it, and I’ve gotten $50 back! I’ve gotten $75 back! I got a rock!” Odds are, they’ve about hit their limit. And $75 is a long way from $800,000 – it’s practically a rounding error on that scale. That’s because, again, most people can recognize chain letters as a scam and avoid them. So your pool of people is pretty small.

So, the chain letter you got is a scam. If you participate in it, you may get a few dollars, you may even make back the money you spent on stamps (though with the price of stamps these days, it’s a stretch). But you will not see the promised riches, and you’ll be known as “That chain letter guy.”

I’m closing the comments on this entry, as I really don’t want it to become the one-stop shop for chain letter discussion. For further reading, check these links:

• US Postal Inspector chain letter page
• SoHo Jobs
• Skepdic on chain letters, pyramid schemes, and ponzi schemes
• Snopes on chain letters

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