I finally had to put this idea into practice... welcome to the first installment of This Week In Spam! Sure, I might miss a week here/there, but I get so much spam every day, it wouldn't be for lack of content.

With all the newfangled techniques spammers have to try getting through blocking & scanning software, there are some funny bits that are put into circulation. I figured this site would provide a great forum to post a little window into my Inbox. It's always annoying to sort through all the spam (a lot still squeaks through the spam filters,) but occasionally I get a gem. This will be the place I'll (try to) collect some of it. So, welcome to the first episode...

Subject: Be a chic master. Pick these superb watches.

(Nice! A watch that will allow me mastery over females?!? Tell me more, you've got my attention, spammer!)

1250+ high quality watches, all from high-status companies.
Our wristwatches have 'manager' scrawled all over them!
Ahh.. now ya lost me there. I don't really want a watch that has the word "manager" scrawled all over it. You had me at "chic master" but lost me on the deluge of "manager" text. Delete.

However, the spam filter evasion text is an interesting read:
moulleen "he sheerness can, indeed," said rollout tip, gazing
she macrander must do something brave or shillalas mildblowing surprising, and no chance for distinguishing leaving the giant cherries to dactylomegaly pound the path behind

So it's a bit messy, but there's a fantastic bit in there... a new word for me that I must thank the spammer for pointing out:

dactylomegaly, dac·ty·lo·meg·a·ly
n : abnormally large fingers or toes

Nice. "Macrander" and "shillalas" don't come up on Dictionary.com, which was a bummer, but we're left with abnormally large fingers or toes, which is just grand.

Thanks spammer. The first episode of This Week in Spam found its muse!

Well, in case you tried visiting my site over the past couple days, you'll see that we're not gone... it was just a major server malfunction. Ya know.. the "web server" that's supposed to "serve the web", or somethin' like that. It had food poisoning or something and had to stay in bed for a couple days. All better now! (I hope.)

Thanks for visiting and sorry about the outage. I'll get back to work now so I can post some random bit of crap that you can't live without.

Okay, I'm not sure if the new AO (adults only) rating for GTA: San Andreas wasn't more appropriate for the game in a lot of ways from day one, but the whole issue is ludicrous in general to me. The story revolves around the latest GTA's unlockable "hot coffee" mode, which is basically a mini-game where you get to directly control sexual acts with Carl's girlfriends. The mode is not very easy to enable for PS2 version, but the PC version is no big whoop... which is where the whole thing started, I think.

Now... the merits (or morals?) of having an interactive sex game, whether blatant or implied are certainly questionable for a huge commercial game like this. The game did have a MA (Mature Audiences) rating already which is s'posed to be 17+ and all that, which seems pretty obvious that we're dealing with adult themes here. However, that's still not the part I want to talk about...

Here's the deal: yet again, our (American) society generally seems to think consenting sex between legally-aged adults is vastly more evil and horrible for our culture than gang members going on wild shooting rampages popping the heads off of various people with big guns. Grand Theft Auto is not a pleasant, cute experience in the first place... and the thought that something like consensual sex is "the last straw" for so many folks just burns me.

I'm sure I could think of more to say on this (and likely something more eloquent) but I think I'll just go fire up the PS2 and run around in Los Santos for a while on my bike. Sure, I might be forced to take out a handful of rival gang members or maybe I'll steal a car or two, but I'll be damned if I even THINK of admiring the tush on that beautiful woman in the park! What do you think I am, some kind of social deviant?! Sex is for hardcore criminals, man! They can lock you up for that shit.

I'm filing this under "complaints" mostly because email is roughly a general comlpaint for me. It's a great thing in my life on some days, but the hassle and crud from things like spam and random blarg just get in my skull with a fervor to block my synapses! I like the overall control over a conversation and the timing of responses, but I need to change something or I'm likely to just pull the plug on all my email addies and start over with a clean Gmail account or something!

So... here's the interesting bit, and the point of this post: I was checking out this blog post called "Five fast email productivity tips" and it's gotten me started again on trying to reform my email habits.

I've talked about Gmail as the possible solution before, and I sure thought IMAP was the answer (don't have time to explain that one right now.) However, I'm just thinking I really only have time to start at the core of my problems and start altering how I manage email in the first place! I am going to work on some of these changes (mostly inspired by that article) and I'll see what happens next. Maybe I'll get around to posting some of what worked for me (assuming something DOES end up working!) but I'm not gonna promise. Heck, I'll prolly be too busy deleting spam to have time to finish this train of thought! BLARG!