spam spam spam

AOL Time Warner has not had a lot of good news recently. So it makes a change that today AOL is in the news for taking spammers to court. Personally I was so sick of the 14 spam mails I received on monday morning I went and got a paid account with spamcop.net I have to say it is a great filtering system and rather than just deleting the mails you get to report the abuse to relevant isp’s.
On the subject of spam here’s a list of allegedly the top ten from 2002 (compiled by surf control)

Free adult site passwords
Low price drugs (Viagra)
Refinance your mortgage
Nigerian confidential money transfer
Tiny remote control car
Best online casino
#1 Pasta pot
Get out of credit card debt
Meet singles in your area
Copy DVDs in one click

What’s your most despised spam subject line?

see I knew there was a reason I never put pics on the interwebnet

James has published an interesting entry about his friends girlfriend discovering photo’s used without permission in an advert [images taken from here, advert scanned here]
Now aside from the weblog issues, the main problem I see here is that search engines like google and altavista offer the facility to search for images and not pages. Don’t get me wrong I love this facility but when it brings up results [like this] with images which may be copyrighted it poses potential problems.
I was always against having my pic on the web because I work for an ISP and my colleagues could stumble across potentially bad pictures of me. Also the number of my colleagues I discovered with gaydar accounts made me think twice about having images which did not fall into the ‘g-rated’ category.
All in all I think the interwebnet is a useful tool but the potential for abuse is huge.
How many times have we seen the same thing on the web? People ‘borrowing code’ [I fully admit to this on a number of occasions], remember the spot the difference competition between blogger and blogger.com.br? something like that – same but in different colours and language. I’m sure you remember it was pretty big at the time.
So what to do? I see no easy solution to this. In fact one of the things that makes the interwebnet so useful is it’s functionality. Remove some or all of this because of abuse and it becomes a pretty boring place.
No more search for the ugly Iain‘s out there!

okay well i made a

okay well i made a post last night and then decided to move it to my personal journal. It was not really good for public consumption and I figured it would be best. I have had a bit more time to think about what I wanted to say and have thought of some words to express how I am thinking at the moment.
The upshot is that I have been unhappy in London for a while now – I never planned to work in an office, I never planned to work for a corporation and I never planned on being more worried about my salary and expenses than people I care about. Yet this is how I am feeling at the moment – trapped I guess in a world I never wanted to enter anyways.
I did my thesis on eco and rural tourism for god’s sake and here I am working for an ISP doing training. When actually what I want to be doing is hiking in remote parts of the world showing like minded individuals that your 2 weeks vacation needn’t harm the environment and doesn’t have to involve sun sand and 5 star accomodation.
I am not young anymore and if I am going to follow my dreams I need to sort it out fairly soon.
I have quit smoking and alcohol and started to train and get fit in the hopes that it will give me some energy with which to slingshot out of my daily routine. I need to go back to my parents this week end and plan my future see what my options are and come back with a clear and level head. Stop doing what other people expect me to do and actually do somthing for my soul not my wallet.

about

A collection of things written for various reasons to answer questions people had about me whilst they visited the site. It is by no means definitive, I wrote it back in 2002 and I was 32 by that point so you know some things may have been missed out. I should also point out that I have now moved from Streatham to Balham which has been much better for my social life. I still work for the same company but I do less training and more operations stuff.

Some of my friends call me world or mundo depending on where they are from which is kind of wierd really when you think about it – there is this while group of people out there that have no idea what my real name is because all they call me is <scouse>world</scouse>.

I work for an internet service provider, training people in new technologies and proprietary software. In my spare time I like to play with things to see if I can break them or make them work in other ways. I get bored part way through things [low attention span which I am convinced is because I was born 47 days premature]. I go out a lot too so don’t always update stuff, but sometimes I do update and it’s all about being out so read into that what you will. 

History:
On February 9th, 1970 approximately 47 days too soon [due on March 27th boy did they get a shock] I arrived at Fazakerley Hospital in Liverpool. I was so premature that I weighed only 2.2lbs [the exact weight of a bag of sugar]. Back in those days we still used pounds and ounces – none of this kilo malarkey.
I lived in Bootle briefly until my parents moved me to Crosby – my elder brother had been getting into problems [typical scouser? you tell me… he tried to burn down Hugh Baird Technical College with his mate Jamie then aged 5] So by the age of 1 I was living in suburbia, I wasn’t the only one though, Cherie Booth QC lived there and Robert Runcie too. Everything ticked along fine until aged around 7 my parents [well actually my dad] moved us to Blundellsands.

Sensitive child that I am I was crying my eyes out thinking I was leaving all my memories in the old house – not realising that actually it wasn’t that far away – come on give me a break though I was only 7.
I went to Manor High School in Crosby where I made a large number of acquaintences and a few very close friends. Although I lived in the perfect house for parties, that never seemed to happen, well not until after I left school.
I stayed at Manor for sixth form – mainly because I was too lazy to look at going to college and spent most of my time busy with school plays and other social activities. No big suprise then when I failed all 4 of my ‘A’ Levels including General Studies which has to be said is possibly the most piss easy excuse for a subject known to man or child. I also blame BBC Micro and that damn space game [elite] and the strangely addictive Mr Eee for my lack of good grades.

So then onto Southport College for a second round of ‘A’ Levels – the first set of results being pretty useless for further education. Let’s face it here I was after all unlikely to get into gear and look for a job so the only possible choice was University or Polytechnic. I had come to the conclusion that it was extremely unlikely I would get a place at University [although my plan originally was to go to Stirling].

I managed to attain 3 reasonable grades in one year in subjects I had hitherto never taken and then was offered clearing. After pondering what to do next for about 3 seconds I took a place at Polytechnic of North London [yes it was that long ago and yes it is now a University!]
I moved to London and basically never went back. I’ve made lots of friends and lived lots of places and one of the nice things about this site is it helps me keep in touch with people and them in touch with me.

After University I moved home briefly – yes I know I just said that basically I never left London after I moved down – but I did try to live back up North it wasn’t like I didn’t try.
Well anyway I worked in a Quasar centre and made lots of new friends and had lots of parties for which I should belatedly thank my parents for having the coolest party throwing house in the world – except maybe for Tom and Nicole Cruises kids or maybe Bill Gates kids. Essentially it was a pretty nifty pad for parties and we used it for a few months in that phase of my life, which,I look back upon and wonder how I managed to remain STD free for so long.

The lure to move back to London was strong though and after meeting Danny La Rue and being offered a job running his bar I made a split second decision to move to Soho. Split second? Really there was no decision.
I lived in Soho for a while managing bars and then moved out of town. Life got kinda you know different again when I worked for Bass and managed a pub in Putney, again making lots of new friends [most of whom know me by the moniker world] before finally quitting pub work for a more sane existence.

Currently living in Streatham and getting used to the area. Working in Hammersmith and not getting used to the area.
So that’s me really not much more to add – well actually there is this has been 32 years in the making after all. So if you want to know more you know where I am. Oh and did I mention mines a Vodka and Cranberry?

Iain Croll
1970 – 2002