Incompetent Spammer

Look, if you really insist on wasting my time with offers that I am never going to fall for, I would suggest that you first learn to configure the spam software correctly.

From: “Barney Gorman” < %CUSTOM_FINANCIAL_TERMSgestapo@gmail.com>
Subject: Darion Herrera
X-Mailer: Opera7.23/Win32 M2 build 3227
Received: from %RND_HOST
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2006 06:40:08 -0600

Lynda,

%CUSTOM_LINK

Barney Gorman

Now I will never know what random CUSTOM_FINANCIAL_TERM (+gestapo!?!?) that was supposed to catch my attention in this email from RND_HOST, as to make me click on CUSTOM_LINK. Such loss!

Sincerely, %RND_NAME

PS. My guess is that you need to add a % to terminate the special strings, like this: %CUSTOM_LINK%. Good luck.

Blogging at 10,000 Feet

Something new – the airline (SAS) finally got around to providing wireles internet on long-haul flights, so I am blogging this over the ocean northwest of Denmark. Good thing on a 9-hour flight.

I don’t think it will add significantly to the quality of blogging in general, but it turns plane trips into something actually useful.

The ping to back home is 650ms, so no Counter-Strike for today.

A parent’s primer to computer slang

Microsoft has published a hilariously serious introduction to “computer slang”.

While it’s important to respect your children’s privacy, understanding what your teenager’s online slang means and how to decipher it is important as you help guide their online experience. While it has many nicknames, information-age slang is commonly referred to as leetspeek, or leet for short. Leet (a vernacular form of “elite”) is a specific type of computer slang where a user replaces regular letters with other keyboard characters to form words phonetically?creating the digital equivalent of pig Latin with a twist of hieroglyphics.

Another page discusses “10 tips for dealing with griefers“:

Known as griefers, snerts, cheese players, twinks, or just plain cyberbullies, chances are that a kid near you has been bothered by one of these ne’er-do-wells at least once while playing online multiplayer video games such as Halo 2, EverQuest, The Sims Online, SOCOM, and Star Wars Galaxies. Griefers are the Internet equivalent of playground bullies, who find fun in embarrassing and pushing around others.

Not sure what to think about this – it’s all completely earnest and actually useful for the uninitiated, but just with a 1950’s innocence and Microsoft blue colors in the menus. What has the world come to?

Allen Ginsberg’s Light Early Summer Reading

Now for something almost completely different:
The reading list for a course in the “Literary History of the Beat Generation”, taught by Allen Ginsberg in 1977. Links to the actual texts, makes for nice early summer reading.

And yet things do connect: On Terra Nova, Ren Reynolds has posted the question whether one should not discuss grief players (types of people) but rather focus on the act of grief playing (types of behavior).

To which I can only reply with Yeats’ poem Among the School Children:

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?