Ode to Spam

Again I am getting return messages, "Delivery Status Notification (Failure)", to emails that I never sent in the first place. Their common denominator is that they all refer to viagra and other sexually enhancing or “recreational” pharmaceuticals, to which I have no connection whatsoever. The original messages were never sent by me, but whenever one cannot reach its destination it will be returned to me as if I was the sender. Consequently, whenever one does reach its destination, and statistically there must be many that do, it carries my name. It is clearly visible in the returned original.

So spam agents are using my personal email address as the alleged sender of viagra spam. This is not nice, to say the least. At best my personal email address will end up getting blocked by every spam filter worldwide. At worst I will have people believing that I am indeed a viagra spammer, something which could severely impede upon my social standing.

It is bad enough when email inboxes are flooded by spam from anonymous or nonexistant sender addresses. But this is really low. This is getting personal.

I have nothing nice to say about spammers. They are the kind of people who crash an otherwise perfectly good party and wreck it, destroying furniture, breaking the music records and the stereo, throwing insults at the legitimate partygoers, exposing their and others' genitals to the children, throwing food and drinks around at everybody, urinating on the hostess, and generally spoiling the fun. I would have them locked up if I could. Or better yet, have them labeled “I am a spammer. Kick me!” on their backs, and then release them to the public.

My personal message to the spammers would be: By your actions you serve no purpose; you have no value; you neither earn nor deserve any respect. You are the small group of abusive cowards who spoil it for everyone else, hiding behind anonymity and obscurity. I shall cherish the day that you are found and brought out in the open to face justice.

Incidentally, this message is nearly identical to what I would say to terrorists and certain politicians.

Rant: Mutually exclusive wireless and cabled network cards

Know what's really frustrating? Wireless cards that become automatically disabled when you connect a network cable. What's with that? In tech support, where I work, I sometimes need to remote control the client's PC to help set up the wireless connection. Of course, since we're trying to fix the wireless, we need to connect using a network cable while we do the work. Having the wireless unit then disappear, or become disabled and impossible to enable manually, we're up a dead end. Once the client removes the network cable, the wireless card is re-enabled or comes back online, but then we have no way of remote controlling the computer in order to configure the wireless connection. This is Catch-22 by design, and one of the most stupid features I've seen on a computer.

Now, you might of course argue that I could easily try to guide the client over the phone (I work on the phone exclusively, and have been told by many that I am very good at explaining such things), but having problems explaining even the simplest things to an extremely technically challenged and selectively deaf and blind client is why I need to do it by remote control in the first place.

I've been told that this feature (I'd call it an intentional bug) has been designed so as to improve the battery life of some laptop computers. However, it still happens when the laptop is connected to the mains, not running on the battery.

This occurs on a number of computers, mainly laptops, running both Windows XP and Windows Vista.

The Phoenix Has Landed

Last night got sorta late. I'm not going to say that nothing can keep me up as late as 3AM; that would have been a lie, but this one time I was glued to the computer screen watching a live NASA webcast of the Phoenix Mars Lander during its last hour or so before touchdown, and the first while just after. With only 5 of the last 11 Mars landings gone well, it was going to be a game of odds not entirely in our favour. It was a great relief when everything went not just as expected, but in fact even better. Phoenix is presently alive and well, having sent back the first images of Martian landscape.

What's Phoenix going to do? Aside from photographing rocks and pebbles, along with innocently unexpecting passing Martians, it will dig for water, or more precisely ice. Read up on Phoenix on the NASA site.

Last time I watched a landing of a man-made spacecraft on another piece of rock in the sky I was in diapers, one week shy of three months old, back in 1969. Of course the Eagle had people in it, but I don't think I was able to tell the difference at the time. In more recent times I've read about landings in the paper the next day, or heard about it on the next news broadcast. Watching it live is something entirely different.