I received this one in my mail box today. Well done. Pulled on both my Barack and anti-spam heartstrings.

Subject: Good News

United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC) In Affiliation With Barack Obama Campaign to Assist Scammed Individuals In The Settlement Of Disputes Through Intercontinental Bank plc .

Attention:

How are you today? Hope all is well with you and your family?You may not understand why this mail came to you but kindly read for your perusal and follow the giving procedures for your claim.

The United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC) was created in 1991 as a subsidiary organ of the UN Security Council. Its mandate is to process claims and pay compensation for losses and damage suffered as a direct result of Internet Fraud.

We have been having a confederation meeting for the passed 7 months which ended 2 weeks ago with the then secretary to the UNITED NATIONS. This meeting was first held on the 8th of April 2003. You can view this page for your perusal.

(http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2003/ik344.doc.htm).

This email is directed to all the people that have been scammed in all parts of the world, the UNITED NATIONS in affiliation with Barack Obama Campaign have agreed to compensate them with categorical payment sum of US$ 150,000 each. In its decision 17 of 24 March 2006, the Governing Council established basic principles for the distribution of compensation payments to successful claimants.

This decision was made two months before the resolution of the first instalment of claims before the Commission.

As stated in the Secretary-General’s report of 2 May 2006,it was anticipated that the value of approved awards would far exceed the resources available in the Compensation Fund at any given time.

The Governing Council therefore devised a mechanism for the allocation of available funds to successful claimants that gave priority to the three urgent categories of claims and which, within each category, would give equal treatment to similarly situated claims. Only when each successful claimant in categories “A”,”B”and “C” had been paid an initial amount up to US$2,500 would payments commence for claims in other categories. Accordingly,the  first phase of payment involved an initial payment of US$2,500 to each successful individual claimant in categories “A” and “C”.

However,for humanitarian reasons, all category”B”claims will be paid in full of a total US$150,000. A total of US$3,252,337,997.09 was made available to 1,498,119 successful individual claimants in categories “A”, “B” and “C” under the first phase of payments.

This includes every foreign contractor that may have not received their contract sum, and people that have had an unfinished transaction or international businesses that failed due to Government problems etc. We found your name in our list and that is why you are receiving this email notification.

You are advised to contact Dr Erastus Akingbola of Intercontinental Bank plc , as he is our representative in Nigeria, contact him immediately for your approved bank draft of USD$150,000.

This funds are in a Bank Draft for security purpose, so he will send it to you and you can cash it in any bank of your choice.Therefore, you should send him your full Name, telephone number and your correct mailing address where you want him to send the Draft to you.

Contact Dr Erastus Akingbola immediately for your Bank Draft

Person to Contact: Dr Erastus Akingbola
Email: e.akingbola01@gmail.com
Phone: +234 80246 55800

Thanks and God bless you and your family. Hoping to hear from you as soon as you cash your Bank Draft.

Making the world a better place.

RegardsBan Ki-Moon.

(UN Secretary-General)

http://www.un.org/sg/

* Emphasis added.

This is my attempt at attracting the very few readers within my age group to get out to the polls.

Please vote tomorrow (or, for whenever you read this, today). Not only is it fun, but all the cool kids are doing it.

Seriously, it’s more important than you may think. Make it out to the polls tomorrow and participate in something that will be of great impact to you and your country.

This is gonna be a quick one, because, well… I gotta go spend my Loonies!

I’ll be in Toronto tomorrow for CAST 2008. For those that don’t know, CAST is the Association for Software Testing’s annual conference. On the docket this year is Jerry Weinberg, Cem Kaner, RobSab and many others. I’m excited.

Among the coolness of hanging out with Testing aficionados this week, I get to use the flight from NY to Toronto and back to further my testing history lesson. A few books mentioned to me finally made it to my doorstep, and the flight will give me a great time to read them. So much better than the subway.

What’s also coming out of the pipe (hopefully) soon is a personal project aiming to give a bit of stability to the crazy world of Javascript. I’ve spent the last year writing Javascript for The Open Planning Project, and after a bit of reflection, I feel like I, we, and the collective Javascript writers around the world are back in the relative stone age. Put bluntly and likely inappreciatively, Javascript is the C of browser languages. That’ll change soon, but in the interim — I’d guess four years before it reaches critical mass — we need a bit more stability.

Oh, and let me plug some Obama volunteerism real quick: If you’re interested, a couple volunteers and I are creating voter demographic maps using OpenLayers and Geoserver for Obama’s campaign in North Carolina. You can see a quick (and recent) hack-job here, though it will be password protected soon to accommodate sensitive data. If you’re interested in helping this mapping effort, or you know Obama campaign workers who could benefit from their own instance, feel free to join the OpenPlans project here.

And with that: CASTaways, I will see you tomorrow. Everyone else, goodnight!