Self-pity, and more on spam

Morning. For some reason I am feeling flat and a little sorry for myself at the moment. Maybe it was the fact that M was fast asleep when I got out of bed at 5am. Or the fact that Baubles the Cat purred really loudly and then curled up and went back to sleep as I got dressed. It could also be, in fact it probably is, because yesterday was a relatively unproductive day work-wise. I did:

• read a whole book (The Aware by Glenda Larke – light, easy fantasy)
• make a pot of pea and ham soup (chop up vegies, bung bacon bones and split peas in pot, fill with water, simmer. Too easy really)
• read lots of blogs and browsed a heap of blogrolls on bloglines
• tidy my desk (classic procrastination behaviour, pity my desk doesn’t look that much neater)
• play some Civ 3 (only because writing about Civ 4 made me want to)
• look at my article lots. Key word is LOOK.

I could just stop being so hard on myself and stop worrying about it, because after all yesterday was a day off and not meant to be a day at work, and anything I got done would have been a bonus. It’s just a pity so little got done!

Ok. Self-pity and navel-gazing over for the morning.

(If you have read this far, cheers! I promise I will try to limit the number of self-pitying posts on this blog.)

On another note, MR from work sent me a few links to articles on spam poetry (see my previous post on spam).

There’s Kuro5hin’s spam poetry. The Register in the UK even invited readers to send in some examples, and then looked at them in some detail (some of their examples were far more ornate than my tame ones!). And even the venerable BBC noted the phenomenon – pointing out that these “decidedly non-spammy words in e-mail [are there] to try to convince the filters they are not junk mail.” It didn’t work for my email filter, of course – most of the spam did end up in the spam folder, where they were meant to.

Judging from the dates on these pages, the whole phenomenon of weird text in spam has been around for a while… I am NOT going to look at my spam this morning, I promise.

It’s amusing to think that more people read this blog than I know of. My counter indicates a fair number of views of the site daily, but I always discount the visits as just me and my few readers (you guys who leave comments here). But of course some readers don’t necessarily leave any comments at all.

Categories: navel-gazing, blogging, spam