Halley tour III: The Drewry

Well, one week to go. It's been a short season - we got in late, and we're leaving early. And, as you may have read between the lines, it's been busy. I may have dropped the occasional hint to this effect, like entries titled "busy busy busy"!

And it's not letting up much yet. I'm giving a talk tonight, and have been busy packing and labelling equipment to go back to Cambridge. And there's still code to write. But the bulk of it is done, and if I was hit by lightening tonight, it would be a successful science season.

Actually, if I was struck by lightening at Halley in February, we'd have a hell of a good science paper to publish.

Anyway. I shall continue the Halley tour - started last year with the Simpson and the Laws - by introducing you to the Drewry, which is my current home. The Drewry is a building for summer staff only, and is decommissioned every winter.

The outside:


Note that the Drewry can actually be dragged around by a tractor. On the inside, the decor is a plywood motif, marked with plywood accents:


It's the only two-level building there (the garage, to be fair, is 1.5), with the bedrooms upstairs...

...and one big main room downstairs:

One can eat breakfast here, or watch a movie at night. The social dynamic of the Drewry is interesting. One can choose to socialize here, or back over at the Laws. Everyone who lives in the Drewry does a bit of both, but some people lean towards one or the other. Myself, I spend most evenings at the Simpson, wander through the Laws for a Guinness, keep going to the Drewry, and poke my head in this room for a second before wandering off to bed.

And that's the tour. Again on a different note - this week's chuckle (more of a smirk, really) was at a phishing e-mail I received on my BAS account. Here it is:

Kjære uio.no konto Bruker,

Det vil være en generell oppgradering i systemet mellom Februray 2 til 20
2009.På grunn av anonym registrering av uio.no kontoer og antall
av sovende kontoer, vil vi kjøre denne oppgraderingen for å fastslå
nøyaktige antallet abonnenter vi har i dag.

Du blir bedt om å logge deg inn på uio.no og bekrefte hvis
Kontoen er fortsatt gyldig og sender umiddelbart den folowing:

Brukernavn: :................................( Obligatorisk)
Passord :...................................( Obligatorisk)
Fødselsdato :..............................( Valgfritt)

You don't necessarily need my rusty Scandiwegian language skills to pick up that this is a password-phishing scam to users of the University of Oslo. Sent to my British Antarctic Survey account. Replying to this e-mail sends your info to a Lithuanian address.

Now, as a fellow Baltic citizen (or, at least, passport-holder) I'd like to offer some advice to these aspiring Lithuanian identity thieves about phishing.

The idea of phishing - and any e-mail scam - is to send out mail to a large number of people, and hope that some of the recipients are naive enough to send their personal information back via e-mail to the wrong address. This is best done by impersonating a large public institution - like a bank - where a significant chunk of the general populace has a reasonable chance of being a member.

Sending out a e-mail from the University of Oslo in Norwegian to British e-mail addresses is not a good example of this strategy. And even if it was, a university-enrolled expat from Norway - arguably one of the most computer-literate nations in the world - should not be your target demographic.

Get your feet wet first with some good-old "male-enhancement" e-mails. Then maybe move up to stock pump-and-dumps. Then, once you've got a bit more experience, maybe you're ready to tap that lucrative Norwegian university student segment of the population.