A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Opening my Gmail spamtrap these days is like, "Here, let's test your browser's Unicode compatibility."

(Sorry if that says something horribly insulting in a language I apparently don't even have a full font-set for.)

The Bad Astronomer got a great piece of spam I haven't seen before, basically saying "Send me money or I WILL KILL YOU." With a great little story that the author is an assassin who's been paid to whack the recipient, but decided to give them one chance to outbid the client before he follows through. Awesome!

(I chuckle at the comments that are all OMG CALL POLICE, though. Yes, like your local PD can do anything about trolls in Latverian sub-basements hitting the 'send' button on their bulk mailer programs.)

Today was wacky. A kerfuffle resulted from volity.com's highly intolerant mailserver refusing an important mail from a client several days ago, due to the fact that the mail was sent from a hotel with a reputation for spam. The client didn't see the bounce message that the server instantly shot back at them, so they didn't know that I never read the mail. Come Monday morning, frolics abounded. By Monday evening, everything's settled, insert folk juju-dispersal here.

Then had a good Volity meeting. There's only a few steps left before the alpha, which is now slightly late if you want to be a bastard and hold me literally to the dates I called months ago, but it's gonna be close-enough-dammit. Cross your fingers.

During the bits of downtime today, I worked on updating my professional presence. Following a conversation I had with taskboy3000 last week, I'm switching my self-assigned title to "Software Consultant", and have been busily retouching all my resumes and linkedins and such appropriately. I also redid my contracting consulting page, expanding the portfolio section and dropping a lot of the technobabble and buzzwords, reckoning that the resume's a better place for that stuff.

Need to redesign jmac.org. I am tired of the "Big Gray 7" layout that's, what, four years old now? On pages like this, that top bar is just oppressive.

Don't ask me how i found it, but I find this page on a spam blog strangely haunting. Look at those comments, from folks like "Stinky", "Merlin" and "Bob" all groping around in the same machine-generated dialect of broken English, trying desperately to buy or sell the same nonsense object but apparently unable to connect with one another. They make me think of ghosts.

One way or another I'll see the Volity RT spam problem fixed, ehn, sometime this week.

Not today, though. I refuse to take time away from money-making mode to deal with whichever band of eastern-bloc mafia has chosen to smear their shit all over our website. The thought of literally losing money to them really makes me so goddamn angry I can't function.

I'm shutting down all of Volity's SourceForge-hosted mailing lists. Discussions' been moved over to the web forums, anyway.

Yes I see the RT spams and I apologize for them. I thought I had squelched them months ago. Maybe I accidentally reverted that change in recent webwork. I'll check it out when I get the chance.

13,001 13,002 spams in search of a home called Earth.

I heard an interesting "On Point" last week that today's spam largely comes not from misguided entrepreneurs but organized criminal groups, many in Eastern Europe. I was not aware of this.

11,266

My TV is sane again. Apparently the cable box just went bonkers; swapping it out fixed everything. My channel 2 thought that it was the Discovery channel this morning. So even the fake lineup I was getting shuffled itself around more or less daily. What the.

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The thing last night was OK. I got to see Guitar Hero II (which looks very nice; y'all who are waiting for this game will be quite happy with it) and met up with Lee from the show and a couple of his friends. Didn't do any networking of note, for I did not want to. I woulda stayed longer if the Harmonix people there were going to say something, but nobody said nuttin an hour into it so I left once I was done with my beer.

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I am getting hit harder with spam of various kinds lately. I have a record amount in Gmail (though not quite enough for another Grim Milestone yet), and my cell phone is getting daily called by a prerecorded Spanish-language message. I've also picked up two junk livejournal friends-ofs in the last few weeks. Well, one seems to be completely automated, and the other appears to be an actual person who enjoys mass-friending the LJ database occasionally.