Here’s a particularly nasty EBay scam. The attempt here is to get the recipient to sign into Ebay with their valid password. If you did sign in, the people who send this out would then have access to your account. It almost caught me, at a tired moment after a hard day retuning accordions.
eBay bid cancelled on item 4385546965
Dear eBay Community Member,
The bid that you entered for the item ( 4385546965 ) has been cancelled.
To view the reason provided for the cancellation Click Here
Regards,
eBay
This is a fairly common scam, not just with ebay but with paypal and online banking sites. I’d ignore any email asking you to login with a url they provide and check your account by manually typing in a valid url into your browser.
If you looks at the html source for the email, you’ll see that the actual url refers to a hacked site used to collect usernames and passwords.
Wow, that’s terrifying … so thanks for the tips, the both of yez!
Finally, how do you retune an accordion, David?
Cathy asked how an accordion is retuned.
Accordions have reed banks. Each row of buttons operates a reed bank. Each reed bank may be compared to a harmonica. Each reed bank is in a particular key.
A B/C box would have one row tuned to the B scale (with many accidentals—like black keys on the piano) and one row tuned to a C row (with no accidentals). By going from one row to the other the box is fully chromatic. The B row supplies the accidentals missing in the C row.
A G/C box lacks a C# and a G#, and the F# is inconveniently located for cross fingering. So I’ve bought the reeds I needed and switched reeds in the G row to give me F#, G# and C# where I need them, in positions corresponding to where they’d be in the B row of a B/C box. Thus I have the accidentals needed to play in “Irish” keys, and other handy duplicates that a normal B/C box would not have.
It gets a bit more complicated because each note has two sounding reeds (or three), tuned a bit differently from each other. That gives the ‘wet’ sound associated with the accordion. These can be retuned so they sound dryer (like Jackie Daly’s box) or wetter (like Joe Burke’s box).
I hope this is clear.