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Early last week I investigated the possiblity of joining a local gym. My main reasons for doing so are access to treadmills, so I'm not always running on the streets, and access to resistance machines, since the only weights I have myself are a set of dumbells and, well, my own bodyweight. Having been a gym member before I'm looking for somewhere that is on my commute, since otherwise I'll simply not bother going. And for preference it should be near my house so I can go there on weekends.
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also, nigerian spam: now available by SMS!
May. 8th, 2007 12:12 amThis appeared on my phone today:
From: +2348052970429The country code (+234) is Nigeria. I'm assuming the rest of the number is a premium-rate SMS service with the fund$$ going to the scammer.
To: waider's phone
Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 13:45:45 (IST)
Sir i wanted to remind you of Joe the accountant he has been workin with us diligently for over a year without salary increase.i think he deserves it
A tempting offer indeed
May. 6th, 2006 10:19 pmWe are sending you this invitation to submit your site dspsrv.com to www.dirpedia.com. Dirpedia is a web-directory + wikipedia crossbreed. Your link will appear alongside the wikipedia articles for your main keywords such as "using,further,molestation,put".(my emphasis, natch)
spam on my TV
Jan. 30th, 2006 10:40 pmTonight's line-up includes "The Perfect Penis". I fully expect tomorrow night to have a telethon for Mr. O. Tanabay, son of the late General Mukambe Tanabay, etc. etc. followed by a programme on penny stocks and how they'll make me a millionaire overnight.
minor friday vodafone gripe
Aug. 12th, 2005 07:20 pmI got some SMS spam from Vodafone today. At the end of the spam it said "if you don't want to receive any more messages from Vodafone, call freephone 1800200234" (or words to that effect). So I called, and got on to a voicemail system which announced itself as Vodafone's marketting options voicemail. It informed me that it would walk me through my settings for contact from Vodafone marketting, and that it was important that I confirmed any changes before hanging up in order for them to take effect. So I listened patiently, and pressed "1" when it said "press 1 to continue", upon which it said, "you have opted out of all contact with Vodafone Marketting" and hung up on me. Which is fine; that's pretty much my preferred state of affairs. And, in fact, it's what this actual on-paper confirmation I have from Vodafone Customer Care says, since I previously asked to opt out of all this crap. So now I get to wait and see if they spam me again, at which point I will be having a polite word with the Data Protection Registrar about compliance.
Bob says that this sort of thing happens me because I pissed off the God of Telcos at some point, and I should really just give in to it.
Bob says that this sort of thing happens me because I pissed off the God of Telcos at some point, and I should really just give in to it.
stupid mail systems
Jun. 21st, 2005 10:28 amDear guy with Verizon address who mailed me this morning,
Your query re: Red Delicious albums can be answered fairly quickly with a google search. I found two sites selling Emotional Blur, and one of them also sells Acoustical Blur. Additionally, you could try contacting the band directly through CD Baby, since you mention that you got an album of theirs there. The reason I'm not emailing you this information is that I tried to, and your dumbass ISP is blocking my mail and asking me to jump through some sort of whitelisting hoops to unblock it. Since I have no desire to condone stupid mail systems, I will not be following these instructions. If you never see this information, well, too bad.
Love,
Waider.
Your query re: Red Delicious albums can be answered fairly quickly with a google search. I found two sites selling Emotional Blur, and one of them also sells Acoustical Blur. Additionally, you could try contacting the band directly through CD Baby, since you mention that you got an album of theirs there. The reason I'm not emailing you this information is that I tried to, and your dumbass ISP is blocking my mail and asking me to jump through some sort of whitelisting hoops to unblock it. Since I have no desire to condone stupid mail systems, I will not be following these instructions. If you never see this information, well, too bad.
Love,
Waider.
wireless mouse
Jun. 12th, 2005 11:53 pmLast September, I went to Barcelona to hang out with the newly Linuxised Novell and their posse, many of whom hadn’t actually got the message and looked sort of blank when asked Linuxy questions (hello InstallShield/Macrovision!) and one of whom keeps sending me spam despite my repeated attempts - per instructions - to unsubscribe to their spam (hello AGAIN InstallShield/Macrovision). But I digress. Novell were giving out freebies during the workshops to people who answered questions or generally appeared to have functioning braincells, and dear god but there were a whole lot of people in there who either weren’t trying or shouldn’t have been there because really, I was freewheeling through these sessions and still scored bags of swag.
Anyway. One of my scores was a nice little wireless optical mouse with Novell branding; it’s really an A4Tech wireless optical mouse, but let’s not quibble. I plugged it into my Linuxy laptop and lo, it Just Worked. Having utterly failed to read the manual, I eventually divined that when it blinks the LED on the left side, it’s run sufficiently low on juice that I should change it. It’s not terribly obvious, though, since I tend not to look at the mouse when I’m working. So every so often, the batteries give out, and I’m staring at my screen and shaking the mouse around thinking, "oh no. it’s LOCKED SOLID. OH NO." before I think to glance at the doodad and realise, phew, it just needs new batteries again.
Anyway. One of my scores was a nice little wireless optical mouse with Novell branding; it’s really an A4Tech wireless optical mouse, but let’s not quibble. I plugged it into my Linuxy laptop and lo, it Just Worked. Having utterly failed to read the manual, I eventually divined that when it blinks the LED on the left side, it’s run sufficiently low on juice that I should change it. It’s not terribly obvious, though, since I tend not to look at the mouse when I’m working. So every so often, the batteries give out, and I’m staring at my screen and shaking the mouse around thinking, "oh no. it’s LOCKED SOLID. OH NO." before I think to glance at the doodad and realise, phew, it just needs new batteries again.
we are 'hip' to the 'trends'
Jun. 3rd, 2005 10:18 amThis was in some recruitment spam I got this morning:
In addition to the Forums section where you can post technical Q&A's, you can also create your free 'BLOG' account and have an audience of software developers and support professionals to hand.Yes, your very own free 'BLOG' account, complete with scare quotes! How can I resist? Sign! Sign!
unclear on the concept
Apr. 25th, 2005 07:43 pmI sent a complaint to an Irish ISP - one of the biggest - because I received spam from a customer of theirs.
They responded by sending me a spam for their anti-spam product.
They responded by sending me a spam for their anti-spam product.
lorem ipsum SPAM SPAM SPAM
Apr. 8th, 2005 12:19 amI'd swear I just saw a spam email on a list I maintain with honest-to-god GREEKING as the body text. I can't check, because I was nuking spams at the time and it's already gone to that great bitbucket in the sky.
this pleases me
Mar. 24th, 2005 05:09 pmMar 24 13:31:26 klortho sendmail[29702]: j2ODVQMW029702: ruleset=check_mail, arg1=<spamblocker-challenge@bounce.earthlink.net>, relay=parakeet.mail.pas.earthlink.net [207.217.120.150], reject=500 5.0.0 FUCK YOU.AND YOUR SPAMBLOCKER.
Simple and direct. I don't care if noone ever reads it, I'm certainly not going to read a single other earthlink spamblocker message.
Simple and direct. I don't care if noone ever reads it, I'm certainly not going to read a single other earthlink spamblocker message.
more fun from customer service
Mar. 21st, 2005 10:45 amI swear, I must have a global flag on any customer service query I initiate with any company that says, "please do your utmost to not help this person". Admittedly I am biased in favour of using email for customer service as I hate dealing with phones, voicemail, hold music, etc. But you know, if your company offers customer service by email, you should maybe honour that offer, as opposed to ignoring the customers who use it.
Source of this whine:
Source of this whine:
- Sony: I registered, or attempted to register, my NW-S23
MP3ATRAC player on both the European and American "My Sony" sites. The European site doesn't recognise the model, because (I presume) it's American, and the American site doesn't recognise the model because, er, why doesn't it? My emailed query received an autoreply telling me that the issue would be dealt with in "two business days". About a week later I got a generic "thank you we'll pass that to our website people", which didn't answer anything in particular that I'd asked, and on Friday - three weeks after the initial query - I got a "not our problem" mail which - form letter that it is - makes absolutely no reference to the original query and in fact tells me that the part of Sony customer support I reached is only responsible for [list of stuff which covers my query] and I should go ask someone else. Choice. - My good friends at Vodafone are currently mishandling a new query, wherein I have asked if it's possible to block third-party SMS spam from premium-rate services. This, you will notice, is a yes/no question. I didn't phrase it as "if you can do this please do so", but that appears to be how it was interpreted, because after a week I got a message asking me to confirm my account details (over email! how secure!) which I replied to (oh well, can't hurt to tell everyone my seekrits, eh?) and that was a week ago. Vodafone claim to respond to emailed issues within 24 hours.
procrastination, geek style
Dec. 20th, 2004 12:27 pmThe trouble with writing a tool to go through the spam bucket throwing out joe-job responses and virus-bearing mails is that I'm more likely to let it fly when half-written than to figure out some more things it could automatically delete. And when it flies, it takes a long, long time to get through the source data:
3464 of 19259: Mail Delivery Subsystem <MAILER-DAEMON@avp-mail.gin.ru>Only 15793 more to go!
removing spamassassin markup
text/plain
message/delivery-status
message/rfc822
contains spam 18.442/5
3465 of 19259: Mail Delivery Service <postmaster@henderson.inet.fi>
removing spamassassin markup
text/plain
message/delivery-status
text/rfc822-headers
3466 of 19259: postmaster@goucher.edu
removing spamassassin markup
text/plain
message/delivery-status
message/rfc822
contains spam 8.414/5
I'll type slowly so you can understand.
Aug. 24th, 2004 03:50 pm- Email is flawed.
- You can trivially forge an email from dork@example.com and by and large you'll get away with it.
- Various things are being done in an attempt to combat this, but the problem exists, and we have to live with it for now.
- When a spammer forges mail in this way, anything that treats the origin address as authoritative will not in any way affect the spammer.
- This includes your stupid challenge/response system.
- Instead, you will annoy the owner of the forged domain.
- This person most likely already has their hands full dealing with genuine spam, to say nothing of bounce messages (which are an automatic part of the email system, and can not as such be dispensed with).
- You are adding to this person's daily intake of useless crap.
- As one of these people, I am rapidly approaching the point at which I will set up an automated filter to approve spam to your mailbox.
- This should be considered fair warning.
- CHALLENGE/RESPONSE SPAM PROTECTION IS A BURDEN ON OTHERS. STOP USING IT.
