Samuel's Blog

Samuel’s Persiflage #9

October 26th, 2006 at 02:09am

Samuel’s Persiflage Episode Number Nine is ready for download, and is the longest Persiflage to date at just over 85 minutes. There is also a low quality version for the bandwidth impaired here.

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This month’s Persiflage Puzzle has three words of seven, two and seven letters respectively. The clue is “A well known Australian television show with such characters as Amy, Lulu and Morgan”.

The majority of this episode is devoted to the subject of scams and scammers, and includes some conversations with people involved in sending scams by email.

The episode starts off however, with an interview with Clayton Northcutt, a blogger (and contributor on this site) who has spent plenty of time toying with scammers, and publishing the correspondence on his blog. We have a fun discussion about some of the scams Clayton has witnessed, as well as talking about scammers in general, telemarketers, door-to-door sales, and Clayton’s dream of teaching scammers the tricks of the trade…and how to speak English properly.

Then we have a new (hopefully permanent) feature of Samuel’s Persiflage…an unpaid ad break featuring one amusing ad from years-gone-by.

Samuel then pulls a few more letters out of the hat and puts them in the Persiflage Puzzle, not that it seems to help all that much.

After that it’s back to the scams, and false advertising. Samuel rings Soul Communications about their claims that if you sign up with them, you will never have to speak to Telstra again…Soul representative Jessie doesn’t seem impressed, but Xena explains the ad…and confirms that the ad is misleading, just not in so many words.

The listener feedback is filled with interesting feedback…a lot of people want to talk about Leo Laporte’s appearance on Samuel’s Persiflage #8, Boris doesn’t want the “^” symbol removed from the keyboard, John B1_B5 thinks feedback shouldn’t ever be off-topic, Flyguy doesn’t like the Samuel’s Persiflage theme music, and Martin thinks Samuel talks too much.

All listeners are invited to send in more feedback, both in written and audio format. As per usual feedback can be sent to podcast@samuelgordonstewart.com (text, MP3, Wave or Ogg Vorbis), spoken feedback by clicking here or on the button below would be great, or leave a comment below.

Samuel then takes the scammers head on, calling eight of them and seeing how they respond…he plays along with a few, has fun with the idiocy of some, pretends to be Australian Customs with a counterfeit clothing company, and gives some others a peice of his mind.

Then there’s another update of the Persiflage Puzzle, a thought for the month about how people make assumptions, and then, after a very long episode, the end music starts to play, Samuel wraps up the show and reveals the Persiflage Puzzle answer…and only just manages to wrap up before the music finishes.

The Samuel’s Persiflage #9 file itself is available here, and is 1:25:23 in length (78.1MB) at 128kbps stereo. The 128kbps format was decided upon because it produces a very good sound quality, and doesn’t “flatten” any music used in the podcast. I do, however, acknowledge that this is just unreasonable for dial-up, so a 16kbps mono file is also available here. The sound quality isn’t as good, but some people like it. The low quality version is 9.77MB

For those of you who are using podcast software to receive your podcasts, the feed can be found here and if you are using iTunes you can subscribe to Samuel’s Persiflage by clicking here.

Podcast related questions and comments can be sent to podcast@samuelgordonstewart.com or left in the comments section of this post. Spoken feedback is preferred (but not mandated) and can be sent either in MP3, Wave or Ogg Vorbis format, or sent even more easily by clicking the button below and following the prompts.

Samuel

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