Wednesday, October 20, 2004
Huh?
Spam that isn't, or is it? And due the power that is hotmail, seeing the pictures in their full Technicolor glory. Confused? So am I.
The text:
Subject: want to know more (from Michael and Lisa)
Hello there
You two sound fabulous. Lisa and I are thinking about going to a commercial party this Saturday. Any plans for you? We’re pretty much first timers (actually, second timers, as we’ve had one great experience so far).
Please try to download these photos. (The curse of my life: IT)
We’re much better than the pictures suggest—please, believe me (Lisa especially: she’s recently lost 5kg and is now a stunning head-turner!)
Hope this works, o/w email right back.
Thanks
Michael [slightly reformatted].
This is odd enough - for a start who is the other person in the "two"? BTW, and this'll be me being dim, but what does "o/w" mean?
And then there are 3 pictures. Two of a woman in a flouncy top and odd hip disguising bits of fabric, one of a bald man writing at a table. Again, huh? I'm now desperately trying to work out the symbolism of the clarinet [or possibly oboe] on the dining table.
When did spam get mundane?
More bizarrely, all the routeing and address details seem consistent. It's like it actually was sent from a latrobe.edu.au address (even the pictures show typically Australian vegetation, heck it even appears to be the right timezone).
This is bizarre. An email, that to all intents and purposes [or all intensive purposes if you are me], appears to have been sent by the head of one the colleges at some Australian university. The guy in the picture even looks suspiciously like the guy shown next to the welcoming message from the head of the college on the university website.
At first I thought it was some novel version of spam, an email oddly bereft of words maligned by punctuation, and the ubiquitous "remove me" link. In fact there is no link in the entire message, and the only interactive part is the return address. So it's not normal spam. So what the hell is it?
The head of part of a university, sending out an email that suggests he might be a swinger? Stranger things have happened. But sending it out to a completely random, slightly nonsensical address, the owner of which happens to be on the other side of the world? It's not going to be legit is it? Hmm, when does the Australian term end? As the website mentions the new intake in February, about now could be the time they break up for the summer. In which case, what better way to finish one's university experience, than by arranging to have the head of the college deluged in angry and bemused responses to slightly perverted spam?
Dr Shortland, I think you may have been hacked.
Well, at least it's a bit more entertaining than strategically placed fish.
Onto other stuff.
What is going on? As yet, there have been a grand total of no responses to yesterday's phone call cost competition. Oh well, I won't tell you the answer[s] yet then.
Weetabix Virtual Games. Does not work in Firefox. So far I've had a [one-line] email back for their customer care peeps, saying "Thank you for your enquiry. This is receiving our attention and we will get back to you as soon as possible" (in full as paraphrasing it would take long]. That was two days ago. I tried using IE instead. It now works. Hopefully I've won a mountain bike (it could have been a digital camera, but it didn't give many details). Which means I've been trying to figure out what size frame I need [it doesn't help the Weetabix website says you can choose S/M/L, but doesn't say what physical size they are, and then doesn't give you a chance to choose]. Internet type research suggests I'm medium-large-ish, as I'd expect, but I don't know which. The give measurements, but then don't say exactly what it is that they are measuring. Hands up if you can define "inside leg" in cycling terms. For a start there's a floor vs ankle debate [shoes or no, where on the ankle?], and then there's the chaos of the other end. One site even seems to think that if one buys 32-32 jeans, then the latter number shows how big the bike should be [there's no accounting for taste, or the diktat of fashion].
How to resolve this? By doing as the Raleigh website says, and visiting my nearest stockist. Who didn't seem best pleased by this action. Possibly due the distinct lack of actual money-bearing custom. Basically I walk into an empty shop, on a rainy afternoon, and there's two guys chatting at the counter. I mill, then hover a bit, having found the right model bike. Eventually the conversation breaks off, and the guy behind the counter looks up. I explain. He takes one look at me and says "Large, depending". I explain further. He says "Large". As the other guy is still hovering, I'm guessing he's not a customer. So I venture to start asking if I might try one. Before I finish the sentence, I'm told "you're a large". Er, thanks. I give up and leave.
Ok, so I know the likelihood of me needing new tyres in the immediate future is low, but most people make some effort to be nice. It tends to help in getting people to come back [ok, so one look at his prices, and most customers might twig that this shop somewhat overprices. In trying to find out the dimensions of this bike, I know the average price is about £139. In this shop, it's only £35 more. So if people have any sense, they go in and try the bikes, and then order one cheaper from a website. Which might explain the guy's bugger off in the first place attitude].
All I need to do now is finish off my accompanying letter (which is me saying you haven't given me a choice so far, so before it gets made for me, large please) and post the claim form [which I just scanned, JIC, 1]. Weetabix strongly recommend registered post. Do I, don't I? I probably do just in case, but now I have to sort that out. And what's registered post do anyway? Allows the post office to say "well we know it went in to the system..."?
[1]. Just in case. Not the Joint Intelligence Committee, who can tell you everything you need to know about spliffs.
So does this bike thing mean that karma works? Well, as I got a mountain bike stolen a couple of years ago, I now get a new one free, is that how it works? Perhaps, except there is the fact I choose the bike over other prizes because I'd had one stolen, and therefore didn't have one. And then there is the problem of how the universe deals with the person who cleared out the university bike sheds [although he left the ornamental bikes, which have obviously sat there unmoved over several decades, with no-one daring to move them], I mean how many bikes can one person get stolen? Don't try pointing out that legal justice will be his karma, as most of the thefts never got reported, and somehow I get the impression that the police don't really consider it a high priority. But given Devon and Cornwall Police's response to every car in one car park having the windscreens removed and the radio nicked, or the way missing cars always turned up burnt-out in the same place on Dartmoor, or how things could walk out of locked rooms in locked buildings, it's hard to know quite what exactly is their priority.
Hmm, I sound happy there don't I? It's just I'm never that convinced about some police. But as my interactions with the come down to 3 instances so far, maybe I ought to do more sampling (not that I'd want to obviously). Once for having a brake light out, which I had actually checked worked before the journey (for once). The policeman seemed most pissed off that despite pulling over an aged C-reg car late on Friday night, in an area where the prevailing attitude towards officialdom's bits of paper is a little lax (the locals also treat those strange marks on the road as purely decorative), that I and the car had the right bits of paper, and that he could find nothing else wrong with the car [The car of course wouldn't start about twenty minutes after this, but that's completely irrelevant].
The second incident [actually first thinking about it] was also me driving the same car. I got pulled over just outside home (having decided that backing into the drive in front of a police car with blue flashing lights wasn't quite the done thing). I had apparently been driving too slowly for that hour of night. Ignoring the implication that speed limits do not apply after midnight, I managed to confuse the hell out of the two policemen. Asked where I lived I pointed to the house. Didn't go down well. I give the address. I give the registered owner of the vehicle. I give the address of the registered owner of the vehicle [the same]. I give them all sorts of other details. They don't seem to have noticed that the road we were standing in, and the road the car lived and I lived in are the same. As for me explaining that I approached the traffic lights slowly [and it was red after all], because otherwise they don't react, and you sit at red forever...well, I think they were beginning to wonder why they bothered getting out of their car by this stage. It was farcical really.
The third was me trying to report that my bike had been stolen. I ring one number, and am told to go the police station in person. It's a long hike from campus. I get there. Nothing they can do, I have to ring a number. I ring. They suggest either going back to the police station, or using the website. I opt for the website. It keeps failing. I email the support address. No response. I keep trying the website. It doesn't work. I get an email back from presumably the support section (as I hadn't given my email address to anything else) which stated "status success". Status of what, or merely that something has a status? I assume it means I've got the report through. Then I worry I haven't, so try a couple more times, still no luck. I try phoning, and get a series of "not us"s. I give up. I hear nothing more. So maybe it did work, maybe it didn't [the complete lack of a bit of paper needed for the insurance claim suggests this], or maybe there were 56 mountain bikes reported stolen from the same address.
A few months later, and headlines proclaim that reported crime is drastically down since X. Coincidentally X is when they launched the crime reporting website.
So no great reason to have immense faith in the police.
Other stuff.
Waiting rooms are fun. Especially when it allows one to giggle at the March 2004 issue of Wallpaper*. The idea that Wallpaper* past issues do not spontaneously combust after 30 days, is bizarre enough, but the sheer infomercial nature of it is ridiculous. Advert or magazine piece? The adverts are fractionally better edited.
So I was laughing at the folly of the "Boring Cool People" [scroll down], and then upon getting home I notice that the bin in the Dyson adverts is Brabantia. No comment.
Anyhoo,
