As I scrolled through the collection of work email messages I knew I’d be deleting momentarily, one subject line caught my eye. It assured me that ED is a problem for many people, and promised me a way to take care of it. I thought, “Wow, that’s some really well-targeted spam. How did they know I’m a City of Heroes/Villains player? Why yes, Enhancement Diversity is a sham and a pox upon the playerbase.”
Then I thought some more and… laughed. No, sorry, I don’t have that problem. Thank goodness.
This morning I deleted the third in a series of attempted comment spams, all pointing to one or another subdomain of craigrom.com. (No, I’m not linking them. That’d sort of defeat the purpose of deleting the spam comments, wouldn’t it? Don’t worry. I’ve looked and there’s nothing of note to be found there.) The comments all take the rather odd form of an inquiry as to how one can best access my site’s feed. Uh, if you can’t figure out how to find the (well-linked and automation-friendly) feed link on this site, you don’t deserve to use the feed. Thanks for playing, buh-bye.
You’d think that after all this time, other industries would look at the backlash against comment spam and think, “Hmm, maybe attempting to artificially inflate our Google PageRank in this fashion might not work out as well as we might have hoped.” But hey, never underestimate greedy bastards with more money than sense, eh?
If this keeps up I’m going to need a “Spamhatred” subcategory. Granted, I didn’t have to deal with as much of this in years past, but I’m still glad I made the switch. Deleting the spam manually took far more effort; at least WordPress makes it dead easy, and rarely does a spammer actually get their message onto my site.
I’m something of an armchair etymologist. No, that’s not the guy who’s into bugs. Anyway. Today’s Dictionary.com Word of the Day isn’t actually a word but is instead a phrase. I’ve misused this particular term often enough that seeing the proper definition caught my eye, and upon further investigation I read the following:
deus ex machina \DAY-uhs-eks-MAH-kuh-nuh; -nah; -MAK-uh-nuh\, noun:
1. In ancient Greek and Roman drama, a god introduced by means of a crane to unravel and resolve the plot.
2. Any active agent who appears unexpectedly to solve an apparently insoluble difficulty.
The emphasis in Definition Number One is mine, and highlights what I found most amusing. “Deus ex machina” translates to “god from machine,” and it turns out that it’s a more literal meaning than I originally expected. This is the sort of stuff that puts a smile on my face. I love learning where things came from, especially when it includes colorful, fanciful details such as ancient wire-fu antics.
Of course, because I’m a weirdo, the first joke that popped into my head goes something like, “If it was an old-looking goddess, could you say it was a crone on a crane?”
(As an aside, does it creep anyone else out that my search for “Gil Grissom” on Google turned up at least one slashfic link on the first page of results? Ewww.)
I didn’t set out to spend a week avoiding my writing duties. Truly I didn’t. Time and events just ran away with me, and I wasn’t really in a headspace conducive to cranking out the kind of clever, witty, entertaining verbage that you’ve all come to expect from your favorite hue-impaired waterfowl.
Of course, this means I have a lot of tidbits to share with you. Take the following, for instance. (Please.)
Conversation with treeloverkath at 2006-02-02 09:58:10 on thelittlegreyduck (yahoo)
(09:58:10) treeloverkath: Hey there, I was just on yahoo , i noticed your profile, anyways, you seem interesting. 😛
(09:58:21) thelittlegreyduck: I have a profile on Yahoo?
(09:58:26) treeloverkath: here use this link:www.pure-match.comvu/members/missy_kitty/
(09:58:34) treeloverkath: oopps, I meant to write “.com”, hehe.. search for “missy_kitty”. anyways, my friend is here, i gotta run, tty soon.
(09:58:38) thelittlegreyduck: *snort*
(09:58:52) treeloverkath: do you wanna check out my profile and pictures..?
(09:59:19) thelittlegreyduck: No, I want not to be spammed randomly.
Social engineering spam at its finest. And by “finest” I mean “most annoying and yet rather sneaky.” Note the supposed typo, a trick I suspect is meant to get around certain IM spam blocking plugins by deliberately not matching the website address. Then, of course, I’m supposed to manually type in the “correct” address.
As the kids like to say, “Puh-leeeze.”
Life in meatspace comes with its own sources of amusement, such as the following tidbit of vitally useful information I heard on the bus the other day:
Everything you could want to know on the Internet is on the Internet.
You don’t say!
I’ll leave you (for now) with a random thought that popped into my head the last time I was traveling northward: When you’re on the train, you only see the railroad crossings with their barriers lowered, but this is not their normal state. In what way is the journey you’re on affecting your perspective?
(Yeah. Pretty damned deep for a Friday afternoon. I amaze me, sometimes.)
It’s been the kind of workday in which it takes me until three hours later than usual to check my security logs. Among the constant attempts to hack into my Linux-based webservers, this line struck me as terribly amusing:
unknown (ip-68-178-170-212.ip.secureserver.net): 1 Time(s)
You know… maybe a business inclined to register the domain “secureserver.net” should also be inclined to keep a closer eye on, you know, the security of their servers. I’m just sayin’.
