Down

Today isn’t a good day. Had a very busy weekend (as in, didn’t get to bed before midnight between Friday and Sunday because I had to get stuff done) so I started off tired. Then, I had to go and take the car in to be mended, which meant that I got Adam to nursery nearly 10 minutes late because the traffic into Cambridge is so hideous (journey to garage takes about 15 minutes; journey back home this time took 45 minutes). After that, I had to go to work and move my stuff to a new desk because we want the two people starting today to sit together (and, coincidentally, solve the air-conditioning wars being waged – which had heating units sited 10 feet apart being set to 19°C and 27°C; I’ve no idea why these women feel the cold so much :-) ). In the process, I plugged in the charging unit for my Palm PDA and fused the wing’s power board. Not my fault – my charger works perfectly. It was a badly (dangerously!) wired 4-way extension. So bad that it’s actually scorched the plastic “earth” pin on the tranformer! After all that, I thought I could settle down, but no. My tiredness morphed into aches, then into aches and chills, until I had to leave work early and come home. I’ve got flu :-( .

And, at home, I was faced with the usual huge pile of spam. Since the August bank holiday, some bad person has started using my domain to fake as the source of spam emails – and, as a result, I have had over 50 000 spam bounces in the past 6 weeks or so. The current counts in the folders are 42 607 bounces picked up with filters and a further 1894 “normal” spam messages, but I started off by expunging them as they arrived and I know that there were over 10 000 before I just started leaving them to see how many mounted up.

Spam is bad, folks. Don’t do it – and don’t reply to it, not even with an antivirus or “spam tool” autoreply saying “Your account has been sending spam”. The sources are all faked and a large pile of these pointless messages are coming to me and other innocent folks. All these replies achieve is soaking up bandwidth and causing aggro for innocent people.

And relax… :-)

pax et bonum

Article posted at 7:17pm on 10 October 2005
Category: Computers, Life, Struggling, General