If you aren’t checking daily Dilbert comics, you should. Here are links to a couple of recent episodes that made me smile real good.
Enjoy.
Firstly, I wanted to let everyone know that I am planning to go to the concert. I’ll be ticket hunting during the coming week. Anyone else wants to go?
Secondly, I noticed a strange thing with Google. My blog comes out as the top first result for the query “deep purple cyprus“. I’ve seconded even the official Deep Purple website. Does anyone know how can I make any money out of it? Just kidding. No, actually, I am serious.
Thirdly, some humor regarding the upcoming concert. I’ve heard a few guys talking the other day:
Someone: Are you planning to go to the concert?
Someone else: I’d go only on one condition – that they won’t play “Smoke on the water”. I’ve heard it way too many times and I don’t want to hear it again.
Someone else else: I must be kidding me. They would be killed and tortured by the crowd in so many different creative ways if they won’t play “Smoke on the water”… I’m sure even they know it and they won’t risk it.
Yet another someone else: I’m sure half of that crowd would pay twice the price of the ticket to just hear “Smoke on the water” a couple of times and nothing else. All they want is to hear it from the original source for once.
That second guy: Oh, well. Tough luck than.
Where I look on the web, everyone is complaining about SPAM. “My Inbox is full of SPAM”, “I am lacking behind because of SPAM”, “My site was SPAMed” and stuff like that. I beileve that everything in the world has its good and bad sides. Such situation with SPAM when everyone is complaining about it is one-sided though. I believe there is some good to be found. Here is my small contribution.
Every time comments in my blog get SPAMed I feel good. You might think that I am such a pathetic loser that SPAM comments are the only kind that I get, but that’s not true. I am soon to celebrate a 1000th comment (that’s a hint by the way). The reason for my joy is my choice of software. Since I migrated to WordPress SPAM stopped bothering me. At all. When yet another script comes in and leaves two or three dozen comments about “online casino” or “morgage bonus” all over my posts, all I have to do is click on “Awaiting moderation” link in the administration interface, scroll down to the “Mark all as SPAM” link, click it, and than click “Moderate comments” button to submit my moderation. That’s it. It probably takes me less time to discard all of these comments than it takes that script to generate and post them. Fantastic!
But my blog SPAM is not the only kind that provides me with good mood. Occasionally, a SPAM message would get through my anti-SPAM software that protects my mailbox. Since these are usually singular messages which are easy to identify and delete, I can afford some time to look inside. More often than not they are pretty funny. Consider this one from today.
From: info@mamchenkov.net To: leonid@mamchenkov.net Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2005 09:01:08 -0700 Subject: Your password has been successfully updated [-- Attachment #1 --] [-- Type: text/html, Encoding: 7bit, Size: 0.5K --] Dear user leonid, You have successfully updated the password of your Mamchenkov account. If you did not authorize this change or if you need assistance with your account, please contact Mamchenkov customer service at: info@mamchenkov.net Thank you for using Mamchenkov! The Mamchenkov Support Team +++ Attachment: No Virus (Clean) +++ Mamchenkov Antivirus - www.mamchenkov.net [-- Attachment #2: approved-password.zip --]
Isn’t it funny? First of all, I am the administrator of mamchenkov.net domain and all services related to it. So I know that this is crap even before I finish reading the Subject line. Oh, wait. I actually know that this is crap even before I finish reading the From email address, because, guess what, there is no such email as info@mamchenkov.net. And, of course, there is no such thing as “The Mamchenkov Support Team”. Or “Mamchenkov Antivirus”. That all is just pure fun! It’s like I would be trying to convince you that you are not you, but that I am you, although I am obviously not. :)
Now that I am thinking about it, I was wrong saying that the Web remembers only the bad stuff about SPAM. There was a lot of laughter on that Slashdot story about some African cosmonaut left on the orbit. And there was this poetry project that was using phrases from the SPAM messages composed into poems.
What’s your SPAM fun story?
Consider the joke told by Richard Stallman that I read in this article:
Once I was eating in Legal Sea Food and ordered arctic char. When it arrived, I looked for a signature, saw none, and complained to my friends, “This is an unsigned char. I wanted a signed char!” I would have complained to the waiter if I had thought he’d get the joke.
Until today, the word “char” had only one meaning to me. It was a computer term, which is used as a declaration of a character or string variable in some programming languages. Such as C, for example.
It turns out, that there is another meaning. Here is a quote from the dictionary for you:
also charr (n. pl. char or chars also charr or charrs)
Any of several fishes of the genus Salvelinus, especially the arctic char, related to the trout and salmon.
Wikipedia entries for those of you who want to learn more on this fishy subject: Salvelinus, Arctic char.
…you see your CPU load graph as a histogram.