Beware of variations of a new email Scam where a company will request a quote for various hardware products such as Hard Drives. Scammers are targeting smaller resellers and shops that may not be as “tech savvy” as they should be or not have the resources to fully verify the request is legit. Even if the offer comes with payment such as a Credit Card or Cashiers Check the odds are the check is fake or the Credit Card stolen.

Here is an example of such an email request:

This arrived today in my Inbox and thought I’d toss it out there for comment as I certainly did and my comment is included below as well:

MCP Digital Certificates Now Available for Download To reduce the company's carbon footprint, we transitioned from traditional paper to digital Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) certificates. You can download your certificate at any time. If you require a paper certificate, you may order one through the MCP member Web site. There will be a shipping and handling fee associated with your order. Give us your feedback on the Born to Learn blog.

Well here’s what I think about the above notice or at least what I thought they would actually post on their blog because what I think about “carbon footprints” and “going green” I know they would have deleted:

Going “Green”, “carbon footprint” my …

This is a cost cutting measure just like everything else MS is doing, nothing more. This time however your treating your MCP’s as customers, which I guess they are. Just like the media download requirements for MAPS now this puts the burden on the end user/customer to do what they use to get Microsoft to do as part of the fees associated with the purchase, yes paying for a test and training materials is a purchase.

BTW if there was such a thing as actually being able to track carbon output on a piece by piece basis as you are trying to do by no longer printing Certificates you have just moved your footprint from the Redmond printing office to some distant Geek’s home printer. Oh but wait let’s count each watt of electricity for each router the “Digital Cert” travels not to mention the labor for the data center MS is using to produce the Digital Cert, the labor for the MCP’s email hosting, etc, etc.

Going green , A BIG BS Microsoft!

I ordered some memory a week ago and of course it’s still not here so I pulled up the shipping which just blew me away.

My package which is nothing more than a single notebook DIMM has travelled some 1,300 miles when it started out just 640 miles away. In other words it’s travelled twice the distance as needed, so far taking 5 days to travel what I could have driven in 20 hours.

Just an observation as it just struck me to see this package going North and South like a ping pong ball.