Category: Spamatozoa

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Spamatozoa

Whisper sweet spamthings in my ear

So I answered the phone today and it was a voice-synthesized, pre-programmed message trying to sell me something.

Whoa, let me back up there a bit. I used to live in Wisconsin, where there were – at least at the time – some very strict laws about cold-calling someone for marketing purposes. I don’t recall ever getting a recorded/voice-synthesized sales call up there, ever. We need those laws in Arkansas. Urgently.

Anyway, I got this call today. The voice was female, maybe one or two steps up from the AT&T TTS demo voices, so maybe these were pre-recorded words and/or phrases spoken by a human and pieced together in the computer, with big gaps between each word – sort of like a Dalek, only slightly more soothing. (But only slightly.) And in listening to this slightly soothing message, I had a revelation: it would help if the person piecing the recorded words together knew, oh, maybe, what the hell they were doing. … Read more

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Spamatozoa

It’s the Hybrid!

Wow, I got something in my inbox that sounds like it was written by the Hybrid aboard a Cylon ship.

Greetings, earl green ardentness cockbrain
Those carpenters are not allowing Erika to write behind the post office. That flight attendant finds the box empty.
Are the rates you have over 7.35%?
Joanne’s mother hasn’t become a bartender. Joseph seems crazy.
Our Company will help you cut that percentage to 5.65%
Weren’t those doctors enjoying skiing? Those science teachers elected him president.
Submit your application:
I’m not a manager. They gave him a book.
Jack found the book interesting. Was Kate’s granddaughter practicing sleeping at the company?
I was encouraging David to dance quickly. I name the baby Susan.

Wait a minute — ardent WHAT??!?
In other news: three ’till I’m free. That is all.… Read more

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Cooking With Code Gaming Home Base Spamatozoa Toiling In The Pixel Mines

I’ve been saying UGH a lot. Does that make me an “ugh-naught”?

Just popping my head in to apologize for not feeling particularly bloggy lately. Some stuff has some up – and admittedly 90% of it is work – that’s left me in a not-even-remotely blogful mood. (I’ve also been trying not to vent about things a whole lot at work either – I’m sure everyone’s as tired of hearing about it as I am of dealing with it. That, and I have to start taking the moral high ground at some point rather than feeding the gossip mill.)
I’ve started conceptualizing another fun little piece, very much along the lines of Olivia vs. Dalek, that I hope to start some shooting on fairly soon. I won’t spill any dirt there, except to say that it, too, involves Daleks. Possibly lots and lots of them by the time I’m done working a bit of Avid magic…
You may have noticed the scads of ads for Amazon.com/.ca/.co.uk/.egbdf gift certificates all over the site. That’s the great thing about the sections that have already been converted into WordPress – I just drop in a smidgeon of code, and wham, it’s on everything. (I’m sure some folks are going “oh, gee, that’s great,” but just remember it helps to keep us “on the air.”) So if you need an Amazon gift certificate, by golly, click one of those handy little buttons. The site can always use the dough.
We have wintry-type weather moving in tonight. I’m actually hoping that it’ll sock us in enough that I can’t make it down the mountain to go to work. (That actually happened last year – when you live out in the boonies, you’re in the absolute last place that anyone’s going to send a snowplow. Instant vacation!) I’d love to stay home with my favorite cats and dog in the world and just relax and not worry one bit about the station. At the same time, I’m hoping this weather doesn’t kill this weekend’s gaming get-together in Bentonville. Maybe it could thaw out on Saturday morning…
Also, congratulations to the spammer whose random name generator came up with the absolute best spammer sender name ever to appear in my inbox: Yomoshiro Guadalupe. I mean, that’s got the staying power of Napoleon Dynamite and then some. 😆
November sweeps ends in one hour. Thank God. The handful of spots I’m not embarrassed about from this latest month of mayhem can be found in my work section, for those interested.… Read more

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Home Base Music Spamatozoa

December 4th!

Doctor Who soundtrackThe release date for the Doctor Who soundtrack is December 4th; there are more details here. This will conclude what’s actually been a very good music year for me – for someone who sits out most everything that actually charts these days, I’ve still been picking up a lot of music this year. (Which, by the way, the L.E.O. CD I mentioned a while back is excellent, definitely worth the wait, and even better than the streaming samples would lead one to believe.)
Sorry I’m running late on theLogBook.com site update for this week; this morning I had a killer fever kick in and all of a sudden, if it was attached to my body, it hurt. I wound up taking one of the pain pills I was prescribed on Saturday, thinking “I’ll get up again around 2 o’ clock and finish the update.” Nope, I didn’t get up until it was time to go to work. I still need to ship out recent eBay wins, and a small piece of paper tells me that a shiny round thing containing the elder Mr. Finn’s latest opus has arrived, but these things didn’t get done today. :-/
I got a spam in my e-mail tonight that isn’t even worth joking about; it entreats recipients to join the craze that is currently seeing “two blogs started every second” because they could be “blogging for dollars!” 🙄 I would go into why this isn’t going to work, but then I realized: I wrote that editorial over seven years ago. (In fact, you can see it right here.) At the time, the subject was quick-start web sites to sell more or less generic merchandise, but the same thinking is just as applicable to this situation: now we’re going to run into a bunch of spammy blogs (as if there aren’t already enough of those around, just aggregating feeds from other sources) that have no reason to exist other than that their creators have been misled into thinking they’re going to Get! Rich! Quick! If you’re going to blawg all over the place, do it because you enjoy it. If you can reap some ancillary benefits from it beyond that, cool, but there has to be a reason for it to be there – and a reason for people to want to read it, because after all, they’re the ones who are supposedly supporting you.… Read more

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Spamatozoa

Bayesian filter helter skelter.

Do you ever wonder about those utterly bizarre e-mails you get with huge blocks of text that make some kind of sense, but just not a lot? That’s a technique used to try to foul up spam filtering software, which uses Bayesian filters to look for certain kinds of words, and certain amounts of words. The randomly generated text is usually encoded as a comment or as text that you’ll never see, so that the real spam – usually HTML-coded – can slip through. After all, all that text isn’t using spam words, and it does feature complete sentences…
Kinda.
Here are some recent dispatches from my inbox that simply are their own kind of poetry. My apologies if you get enough of this in your own inbox, but y’know, sometimes they provide a perverse kind of entertainment all their own. … Read more

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Spamatozoa

I will seize myself briefly

I was double-checking my e-mail this morning, just to make sure that the stuff I was about to discard as spam was really spam, and saw one message that Mailwasher wasn’t sure about. I could tell it was in German, so I cut and pasted it into Babel Fish to see what it said. And I then proceeded to howl with laughter.

Richly by search machines (www.thelogbook.com) Let me one equal get straight. I am lazy and arrogant. Everything is no matter to me, because I am simply much to realm. I am much to realm, in order to sit?berhaupt here and write this text. Therefore I will seize myself briefly. I earn each year more?ber million euro with search machines, without doing much daf?r. Whether it gef?llt you or not, here goes it not around it to you to please, but therefore who you gladly exactly the same realm w?rst like I, otherwise w?rdest you that not to read here! You found this web page, because you know m?chtest as one by search machines rich becomes. There are many sides, which are concerned with in the InterNet how one makes money in the InterNet. Perhaps you already pursued or other idea. And? How were the concepts like that? Do you have to learn a course on a DVD bought around as one become rich? Were you impressed? I not! Not even a little! What do these sides promise? A few thousand euro in the month? Do you want to earn a few thousand euro in the month? That is l?cherlich!

Were you impressed? I not! 😆… Read more