The Great Humor Friendly Spam Is Translate!

I'm having far too much fun reading my spam box via Google Translate. If you haven't tried this game (which I'm called "The Great Humor Friendly Spam Is Translate!"), then you really need to give it a shot. In Gmail, click on your spam folder and then click on any message whose subject is in another language. At the top of the message, you should see a "Translate" link above the body. Click the translate link and read until you stop being able to breathe.

For example, here are some gems from my inbox:

From the Chinese:

why sales staff who are always working attitude, do not want more input?

From a Russian message describing the generic plot of all disaster movies:

It all begins with small problems, then all these problems
noticeable on the Congress is going to scientists and government
and concludes that the planet Earth (town, country, continent)
remain there for long, and starts fighting with the elements
successful or not.

From a Japanese site that appears to be offering dating and/or romantic advice:

I send this email to members of the audience to applicants capped.
Cross your fingers unsubscribe, thank you from the URL at the end

A Spanish ad for spam-based marketing suggests this nugget of wisdom:

GHOSTS ARE NOT ALWAYS GIVE YOU SUPPORT

This came as a shock to me, but I'm slowly coming to terms with the idea that I need to approach the living for my tech support needs.

College Mornings: A Poem or C.P.E.

In the mists of time, I was a student. It was the late 1980s, and I was terrible at it. I was studying computer science at The University of Lowell (which has now eroded into UMass: Lowell), and failing because I spent all of my time either studying things that had nothing to do with class or playing roleplaying games with friends. They were heady days of learning C and Unix while getting myself in trouble with anyone who would pay attention. I found myself reminiscing about it this weekend, and suddenly it seemed to form a poem, so here goes:

4 AM blurring, swimming monochrome before me.
Not bright enough to learn, too bright not to.
To hack in C, shell and Perl all I know.
What rough beast, the nacent Internet swims before me.
Forces gather while I, in key-click slumber
Drift toward rocky shoals of dot-com intrigue.
But innocent, I type; one more demo tweak
Before a dawnlight shuffle home.

Well, there it is. I'm no Cummings, but I hope it was worth a moment of your time to look back with me.

Anti-Piracy Is a Strawman Argument

Piracy. It's a scary sounding thing. We call someone who downloads a copy of a piece of music or movie a "pirate." But file sharing isn't piracy, it's a form of communication. The real problem that the music and movie industries have (when you remove abject greed from consideration) is that the Internet provides the means for everyone to become everyone else's "friend." This breaks the market dynamics on which modern business depends, threatening (in a very real sense) our way of life. But instead of tackling that issue and deciding if there's another way or what we want to do to protect our current model, we brand people pirates and then ask, "why would you support piracy?"