Category: Activities

Why are spammers such assholes?

Ok, spammers are lowlife lying scumbag thieves. That much is a given, and it’s not exactly news. So why am I upset? Well, because a spam got through my filters. And not just any spam, but a spam advocating a cause I support – helping the UCC get their commercial on the air in spite of anti-gay backlash from CBS and NBC. And to make it worse, it went to one of my role accounts, not my normal account. I occassionally post to usenet with this role account, but almost always just to groups that are local to that role, although sometimes I use it to post to other newsgroups in the region or to the news.admin groups. I never have, and I never will, use this email address to sign up for newsletter or ask for information – that would kill the very reason for having role account.

I immediately fired off a complaint, pointing out that before I got the spam I was supporting the cause, but now that they’ve descended to spam I wasn’t. No response, except a few days later I got another spam. This time I said what I really thought.

What followed was the usual dance of denials, lies, evasions, and general scumbaggery that anybody who has talked to a spammer is all too familiar with.
Some highlights:

If your name wound up on our list without your consent it was assuredly not due to anything intentional, such as harvesting.

Bullshit.

And by the way, a courteous note would have done just as well.

My experience suggests not.

So why am I upset? It’s just business as usual for a spammer, right? Well, except this one professes to be a non-demoninational religious organization, and I sort of expect them to have a moral code. I’m naive that way.

Mail filters written by idiots.

I got an email from my Dad, and since it’s a Microsoft Turd document I tried to bounce it to my work account so that I could read it there. But it bounced:

<tomblin@foo.bar.com>: host mailgate5.foo.bar.com[192.232.121.235] said: 550
    Message refused - Banned text appeared in header or body: 'shit' (in reply
    to end of DATA command)

I piped the message through strings to see where the banned text occurred. It was somebody’s name – “Phil Matushita”. Words fail me.

With a mark-down like this, how can you NOT afford it?

Screen grab from a Garmin GPS dealer.

The price has been marked down from $799.99 to $799.00. Well, I couldn’t afford it before, but now…

(Note: This is not a hint. This is the not the GPS I want anybody buying me for Christmas. If I were in the market for a new GPS, it would be the Garmin 296. Thank you.)

Blast from the Past

One of my former cow-orkers at GeoVision just sent me this picture from one of our pick-up hockey games:

GeoHockey, as we called it, was a blast. I was terrible at it, but it got me a chance to get some exercise. The best part, though, was getting an ice-level view of some really good hockey players. There was one guy, Chris Fanjoy, who played in a couple of leagues, and because he played 4 or 5 times a week his equipment never dried out – you could smell him coming sometimes. There was another guy, dammit I forget his name, who just about danced on his skates – I remember just standing there in awe at what a fluid and natural skater he was. There were several other really good players, and watching them make plays gave you a sense of the game that I never got from watching it on TV.

There was another guy who I was always glad to see, because with him there I wasn’t the worst skater on the ice. He never changed his clothes – he skated in the same black jeans that he’d go to work in.

And there was a guy or two I was always sorry to see – they were good players, but they cared too much about scoring, and not enough about having fun. One of them would cuss me out for not having enough equipment after he’d broken the rules and raise the puck or after I’d limp off after he body checked me to the ground. We didn’t allow body checking or raising because this was supposed to be a fun thing, and some people didn’t have full equipment (namely cups).

We usually didn’t have goalies either – we just turned the nets around backwards and you had to bounce the puck off the back boards into the net to score.

Normally it was so much fun that it was worth the knee pain afterward.