At the moment, as you may have already noticed, my current host is a free UNIX shell provider called Blinkenshell.org. Many UNIX shell providers claim to offer free accounts but then force you to donate a pre-determined amount of money to get certain privileges. Usually these privileges are necessary for doing anything useful with UNIX. Despite what you might find elsewhere, Blinkenshell is a great provider of truly free shell accounts. All that is required of a new member is that he passes a short quiz and gets two registered members to vouch for him.

    The community is great. Everyone is willing to help each other out with questions, big or small. Plus members get perks that are only available to more then basic packages at commercial web hosting companies, such as PHP, CGI, MySQL and PHPMyAdmin. If you are one of my friends who are interested take a look at Blinkenshell.org to see what they offer.

Thank You Independence (sysop of Blinkenshell) for the great services!

    I decided to start out small and work up to more outrageous tests. If you have any ideas on testing the USPS let me know, I will probably try it as long as it’s not harmful or illegal, obviously.

1. I place insufficient postage accompanied by a quarter. I taped the quarter in place of where the other stamp should have gone. I did not use a return address so that they could not send it back, even though they really are sending it back to me, they just don’t know it! Then I wrote a note on the side explaining my circumstances.The note under the postage says (after I took this photo I added “-thanks” at the end):
   

   Sorry, I didn’t have another stamp but had to send this before the mail was picked up. Here is the change for it.

   (click images for larger view)
   
2. Just to be sure they did not grow suspicious, open the envelope and find nothing, I placed a piece of important documentation.
3. I then sent the envelope off in one of those big blue mailboxes. To avoid any extra suspicion I sent it from another city, Fargo.
4. Usually an envelope arrives at its destination within about three days, however, I did not expect to find this one. But I did. Here’s the proof! When I sent this envelope to myself I did not think it would succeed. In the case of it succeeding I pictured the quarter removed by a postal worker and a stamp in place of it. As you can see in this photo the quarter was left the envelope throughout its travels. The printing over the postage was scattered into a bunch of little specks because there was too much space between the paper and the printer.