Year: 2003

Subject: What If You Died Tomorrow?

Is the subject heading of a spam email I just received. Unfortunately, as with most spam these days, the subject heading bears no relation to the contents of the mail (a devilishly intelligent trick, of course, as I for one will only buy that penis enlargement I’ve been after if it is advertised in an email with the subject heading “Re: Your Details”).

Anyway, so this email wasn’t actually about what it pretended to be about, and it didn’t provide any answers to the existential questions it inevitably raised. What If [I] Died Tomorrow? Well, perhaps it’s a chilling death prediction, but I think the main consequence of my untimely death tomorrow would be that there would be no one around to delete the torrent of pointless, frustrating and annoying spam pouring into my hotmail account on a daily basis.

Since you asked, like.

Update: Experiment

Thinking further about the whole spam issue, I want to try a small experiment to see what happens when you post your email address on a publicly accessible website like this one, so here are two email addresses:

mysp_mtestaddress@hotmail.com

nosp_mplease2 [at] hotmail [dot] com

I discovered when I tried to set these up that, rather ironically, Microsoft won’t let you use the word “spam” anywhere in your email address username.

I wonder how long it will take for these addresses to get spam. Let’s wait and see.

[I have also created a third hotmail account, which will be my control address, to see how much spam you get just for having a hotmail address. I won’t be posting it anywhere or giving it out to anyone.]

I’m not quite sure how we ended up in London’s most overcrowded club (Brixton’s The Living) on Saturday night. Ok, that’s a lie, I know how we ended up there (I wasn’t that drunk… oh, actually, maybe I was: I did, after all subsequently have to be reminded that we’d got on the bus to get there), I’m just not sure why. At some point in the evening, a whole pile of flyers offering free entry had just magically appeared at our table, and from that point on there wasn’t really any question about it. Even the fact that it appeared to be 80s night wasn’t enough to stop us.

From what I can remember, I had a very good night. For the first two hours (well, I did start at 4) it was just me and Sally, but despite my initial fears that no one was actually going to turn up, turn up they most certainly did. They also bought me a lot of drinks (despite going to the cashpoint between the pub and the club, I was quite surprised to find the money I’d taken out was still there in my wallet in the morning; I’m not sure I can recall actually stopping drinking at any point though).

The above photo was chosen mostly for the way it encapsulates the tail end of the evening. The rest of the photos are on flickr.

New Toy

This is my first post on my new laptop, which arrived this morning. It’s very cool; I have a new toy!

I can’t believe I missed this, but the archive of what happened when The Barefoot Quack, er, Doctor (who dispenses laughably daft new-age advice in the Observer magazine every week) went online on the Guardian’s website on Tuesday this week is possibly the funniest thing I have read in ages.

That’s questions like: “Of what, exactly, are you a doctor? Also, I know two people with Multiple Sclerosis. Should they massage their kidneys clockwise or anticlockwise? And what is the correct chant?”

And: “I’ve recently contracted syphillis. Do you have any exercises to cure me of this affliction ? Oh, and I have a friend with full blown AIDS. Would acupuncture help ?”

Even better is the fact that, according to Private Eye, the Observer had to send round the following internal memo:

“The Barefoot Doctor is online on Tuesday to answer questions of healing and health. Safe to say, he isn’t proving wildly popular and the questions are just a tad aggressive.”

The memo then went on to implore Observer hacks to redress the balance: “If some of you could take time out to ask a rather more benign question, then you’ll probably feel better for it.”

I’ve been quietly contemplating the passage of time this week, what with it being my birthday yesterday and all. The big celebration, of course, will be on Saturday (you are coming to the pub, aren’t you? It’s a better pub than it is website, I promise).

26 might not be the rock star death age or anything, but it seems, to me at least, to be a significant step nonetheless, what with it being definitely closer to 30 than it is to 20. At 25 I could cling vainly to the notion that I was still part of that all important 18-25 “youth” target market. Alas, that is no longer the case.

No longer eligible to enter Pop Idol, or buy tickets from STA Travel, this week I renewed my Young Person’s Railcard for the last time. Even worse, yesterday we all had to fill in a survey at work and I had to place myself in the 26 – 35 age group. It’s all downhill from here, isn’t it?

Reliving my childhood

Last night we went to see Finding Nemo, the latest release from purveyors of anthropomorphic kids-films-that-adults-like, Pixar. It was reassuring to see that we weren’t the only people there who had forgotten to bring a small person with them (although given that this was a 9pm showing, not altogether surprising).

I was also amused by the reactions of a woman a couple of rows behind me, who could be heard gasping several times at some of the more, er, dramatic moments.

Still, seeing a kids film last night doesn’t make me feel any less old today.

Home taping is (still) killing music

I’m wondering if I should be worried about the fact that a student in the US is being sued under the DCMA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) for publishing a paper on the Internet telling people how circumvent CD copy protection using the complex method of pressing the SHIFT key, given that I proposed a similar technique back in July. As this week’s NTK points out, the European equivalent legislation, the EUCD, comes into effect in just a couple of weeks, having been passed by Parliament last week:

“The final implementation, signed off by Parliament last Friday (yes, we missed it too), now makes time-shifting TV shows only legal “for domestic use”, bans practically anything else, and puts the DMCA-like clampers on breaking copyright protection.”

Oops. Well then, if you happen to purchase a CD that breaks the Red Book standard (and therefore isn’t technically a CD at all) by employing copy-protection that is ludicrously easy to cicumvent, and foolishly want to listen to the thing on your PC, well, it wasn’t me that told you how to do it. Honest.

Sadly, I’ll be off on the other side of the world, and won’t be able to get involved in Tim Ireland’s plan to chase Bush out of the country next month, but should you be in possession of a posterior and a disliking for the bumbling one, then you may wish to have a look at the details of the planned protest: “Bare Your Bum at Bush“.

UPDATE. It’s also worth mentioning this (non-satirical) site, where you can send a message of thanks to Tony Blair for the steadfast support he has offered to the US over the past 2 years. Apparenly every week the website will be printing out your messages of thanks “on paper” (as opposed to, er, parchment or gold leaf I presume) and sending them to 10 Downing Street. I thought I’d send him a message of my own (reprinted below). Perhaps you’d like to send one too?

Now that the war on terror has been comprehensively won, the terrorists are defeated, Iraq is liberated, peaceful and safe, Afganistan stable and properous, Israel and Palestine at peace, Al-Qaeda defeated and disbanded, Osama Bin Laden and Sadam Hussein captured, North Korea and Iran disarmed… I can sleep easy in my bed knowing that the world is safe once more. We have nothing to fear from the terrorists, as they will surely never attack us again now, and it’s all thanks to you Tony.

Thanks Tony! Thanks man! You more than anyone have made the world a safer place!

Governor McBain

Hitler-loving misogynist becomes governor of California.

Er…

I read my London News Review on the tube into work this morning, possibly in the vain hope that the other people in the carriage might think I’m cool and interesting and at the forefront on some new magazine publishing phenomenon. I’m not sure anyone even noticed.

The magazine is excellent, though, and I will definitely be subscribing, although I am slightly disappointed to see that Richard Herring has recycled one of his old Warming Up entries for his column (that is, assuming he actually knows he has a column; maybe the chaps at hanging day were running a bit short of material and just copied it off the web and didn’t tell him).

Still no news on their launch party. It’s gone from happening “in September” to “the second half of October” to “around the launch of issue 1”. If it’s more than 36 days in the future I won’t be too happy…