Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.
In Rants and Revelations: Art in spammer subject lines I saw something that looked like art in what I thought were random words generated by spammers. Well, JoAnne just pointed out to me that the words actually come from The Master and the Margarita by Bulgakov.
Amazing. I assume that means the spammers just grabbed some text file they found on-line and used it to generate phrases, and not that they are secretly highly literate and fans of english translations of obscure russian authors.
I was grepping my spam collection to see all the spam I’d gotten from the spammer who evidently has problems with his substitution script and leaves “%RND_UC_CHAR[2-8]” in the subject lines of all his spams. And I was struck by a curious poetic quality of the random words on the rest of the subject lines. Here’s what I have collected:
grep RND_UC_CHAR Mail/yes.spam
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], moment only because
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], anyone his passport
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], the master held
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], poured water into
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], of haze before
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], under a black
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], lengthening the shadows
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], each other only
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], felt cold under
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], he quite simply
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], he quite simply
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], dont know about
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], having got nowhere
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], is there beer?’
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], seeing someone come
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], face was half
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], that he would
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], apollonovichs young relation
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], but he gave
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], made one more
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], made one more
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], and yet each
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], a thunderclap right
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], the interpreter deftly
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], i’ve been sent
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], put his head
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], as luck would
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], ivan nikolaevichs apprehensions
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], the bell started
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], and here some
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], turning the barmans
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], good god!’ riukhin
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], good god!’ riukhin
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], he asked: yeshua
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], here it comes
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], at the same
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], and once more
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], woland is simply
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], balls always assemble
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], a finnish knife
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], possible to make
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], investigation was going
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], many hanging about
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], who is this
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], here styopa turned
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], the same tone
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], crowds of guests
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], brilliant numbers will
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], finally the century
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], and here’s something
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], he had looked
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], what had happened
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], wearing only black
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], beyond the housing
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], had already been
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], to the hairy
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], the investigation appeared
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], military chlamys with
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], anyone his passport
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], and the first
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], and the most
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], fifthstorey window three
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], glass; street sweepers
Not as good as “The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed”, but it’s getting there.
I haven’t been doing much updating of this blog, mostly because I’ve been busy fixing up Maddy’s blog. Good thing she never got around to changing her password after I set it up for her. I had been putting updates on her blog because she’s been incommunicado – as people reach her on the phone or go visit her, they email me some status information and I put it on the blog for the benefit of all her friends. But because she’s been in the hospital and extremely fatigued, my posts were basically overwhelming what is, after all, her story. So thanks to the wonderful extensibility of MT, I’ve made a separate category for my posts, made the main page only show her category, and put a side bar entry showing my most recent posts.
It was remarkably easy. The only hard part was that because my blog and her blog are on the same site, if I wanted to look at my “Main Index” template while editing hers, I had to use two browsers, because two windows on the same browser couldn’t be logged in as different users. Fortunately I was working on my Mac, so I had both Mozilla and Safari, two excellent and standards compliant browsers at my disposal.
We’ve had daylight savings time for how many years now? All of my life, I’m sure. So why the hell did I think that I could march my date-time classes from one day to the next just by adding 24 hours (or rather 24*60*60*1000 milliseconds)? Damn, that was a stupid bug. And I’d done it in about 15 different places in the code as well. It’s going to be hard to test it completely until April when the time goes back.
I hope it works.
Generally, when my computers have failed in the past, it’s either been 3 or 4 days after a major configuration change (such as adding a hard drive) or it’s been while I was away for the weekend. It’s now 4 days since I added the new hard drive, and I’m going away for the weekend. With that combination, I figure with my luck it will probably explode and burn the house down.