The Ramblings of Octavo

If you’re reading this you’re either
1) bored out of your fucking mind
2) wasting valuable company resources and wasting productivity
3) 1 and 2
4) Received one of my countless “READ MY FUCKING BLOG” Spams!

Which brings us to the subject at hand: SPAM!! AND HOW MUCH IT MAKES MY BRAIN BLEED.

Now normally I’m a very easy going guy. Sure, I have the odd “YOU LAME ASS MOTHER FUCKING CAMPER!!” outburst in your standard run of a Counter strike session. But yeah, I consider myself a pacifist.

Then I open my mail and lo and behold, kinky_bitch[19] has got to tell me about how she’s sooooooo fucking horny and how she’s just gonna cum all over her sex crazed sister who, gerbil in hand, is quite ready and willing to show you some of the freshest kinkiest shit on the net!! WOWIE!! So, I’m like “Sure, I like Gerbils, I’ll bite”. BAM!!! The frontal and rear lobes of my brain try to touch each other as whole screen gets ass-raped by pop ups, offering everything from Russian Brides to cock rings, installing a zillion Trojans and exploits in its wake!!!

Naturally this doesn’t do much for my reputation with the upper echelons of management, who may or may not have been walking by at that time, or the techies down the hall, who kindly ring me up to ascertain what the FUCK I think I’m doing.

Now I know what you’re thinking: you asshole! Never click on anything un-solicited. BUT THEN WHAT’S THE POINT?!!? The latest batch of spam mails are so undecipherable it’s near impossible to figure out what the hell they’re punting in the first place!

Case in point:

underling unjust Carruthers abates fanfare
depressed downgrade entertain Ukrainians longhand
Kernighan sediments Salton inductions abasement
L ` 0 ` L ` 1 ` T ` A ` S Â Â Â Â H ` A ` R ` D Â Â Â Â AND Â Â Â Â S ` 0 ` F ` T Â Â Â Â P ` 1 ` X odiously gumption blacks reverted Wesson
bachelors commencing Honeywell repulsing snatching
Columbus fisted faucet issuers epithet
WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!! Surely if you’re sending this shit, you had an end goal in mind, right?! Columbus Fisted what?!!? And who is Honeywell, and what’s so repulsing about her snatch?!!

What pisses me off even more is that these freaks are making money out of this while I have to slave away 9 – 5 for a pittance.

The cold hard facts:
According to 2003 statistics, 40% of all email is spam. Every day 2.5 billion porno spam emails are sent – that works out at around 4.5 emails per person per day. And that’s just the porno stuff. Total spam sent per day is about 12.4 billion. You will receive on average 2200 spam emails this year. What’s even worse though is that 28% of these emails get replies and 8% of them result in purchases!!!

Yes, you read that right: 8% of fuckheads with mailboxes actually BUY shit via this mechanism. There is no patch for human stupidity, I guess…

Now, with VoIP just starting to take off, people are already seeing the potential for an entirely new spam market (for more details click here). The worst is that in reality there is very little we can do to stop the pain.

I guess at the end of the day, your world is just gonna get smaller and smaller, and you’ll be forced to reduce your wonderful electronic world to little “Trusted Lists” of people who’ll have the esteemed honor of being able to contact you. Any other mail goes straight to MX hell.

Post written by G-unit, research by Octavo

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I’m sick of shitty customer service. This country (South Africa) seems to have become accustomed to shitty customer service. So much so in fact that, we as consumers are completely gob-smacked and overjoyed by decent service. On the very rare occasions that we receive good service, we rave about it constantly for days. On the other hand, when we receive shitty service we seem to just sit back meek as sheep and accept it. Why I ask you? Our society seems to almost condone and accept shitty service as the norm and that is completely wrong!

That is why I have plenty ‘o retekpa (as Ali G would put it) for people who refuse to accept shit service. People like my buddy Anton are helping (in a small but significant way) to make people realise that they can’t get away with the minimum of effort anymore. Anton recently had a run in with DHL. His complaints were treated with complacency and indifference. Most South Africans would just give up and accept (like sheep) this kind of treatment. Anton however, did not – he fought on and eventually managed to get his problems resolved to his satisfaction.

Anton’s DHL woes are a worthy topic of posting and I promise I shall write up a full post on that story as soon as I have time, but for now – let’s follow another of Anton’s more recent woes… this one is with his Medical Aid provider – Discovery Health. I will not go into too much detail here as I think Anton’s email does a nice job of illustrating his points. Here follows his email (published with permission).

From: Anton
Sent: 23 September 2004 02:21 PM
To: ‘healthinfo@discovery.co.za’
Cc: ‘vitalityinfo@discovery.co.za’; ‘life_complaints@discovery.co.za’; ‘asktheCFO@discovery.co.za’
Subject: Medical Aid Claim (Deleted) Membership No : (Deleted)

Regards
Anton

If you’re sick of shitty service as well, then stop accepting – that’s the only way we can change the attitudes of this country. If you get shitty service COMPLAIN! Don’t let some manager fob you off with a half-assed excuse, take it higher if you have to. Write letters, shout, bitch moan. You will get noticed eventually.

Cheers for now people!!

As promised, my very first movie review.

WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!

I thought “I, Robot” was a really great movie! It’s probably the best movie I’ve seen this year. I thought Will Smith pulled off his character particularly well - although I could have done without the extended shower scene! Ibis mentioned that she loved the film as well, but primarily because Smith saves a cat at one point :p

The action scene’s are really well done and had me holding my breath on a number of occasions. I think I should also mention that the special effects in this movie were something else altogether! I don’t know how they did those robots exactly, but MAN it was well done!

Once scene particularly struck me, as it was an interesting (if a bit obvious) commentary on modern culture and how it adapts to technology. In the scene, a young US Robotics employee is in Smith’s apartment and tries to turn on the stereo with voice commands. She is confused when the stereo remains stubbornly silent. Finally she finds the “On” button and music blasts out at a high volume - she immediately tries to switch the stereo off and in her panic cannot find how to do it. Smith clicks it off for her with a remote control ala 2000 style. An important message is served to the viewer here: A person’s ability to use and understand new technology does not make them smarter or better than anyone else. Well that’s my take on it anyway!

This movie has a lot of good points - slick effects, gripping action scenes, good acting and a fairly decent plot. It does however have it’s downsides as well.

For instance: One could describe the movie as one long Audi and JVC advert. This movie must have had some kind of really big deal with Audi as their cars feature prominently in this movie. A few of the scene’s and some of the core ideas of the movie could be seen as Matrix rip-off’s if one were so inclined - There is one scene where Smith jumps off a motorbike while shooting at some robots that is filmed in bullet-time. It’s an almost exact replica of a scene with Trinity in one of the Matrix flicks. The whole robot revolution idea, and the scenes of robots fighting in the streets was VERY reminiscent of Animatrix and the ideas put forth there. And finally the idea of VIKI taking over and deciding to protect humanity is the core idea and plot line (even if it was hidden quite well by all the action sequences) for the Terminator movies.

So all in all a most excellent movie that does Will Smith credit. It’s borrowed quite a bit from other movies, but if you can handle that and the in your face product placement you should enjoy this movie a lot!

Today I heard something that sounds too good to be true and is therefore probably completely false, but I thought it might be worth a try, so I intend to try it at every opportunity. Apparently on most elevators (Otis included) you can tell the elevator to go directly to your floor without stopping off at other floors along the way to pick up more people.

I would love nothing more than to do some internet research about this topic, however at the moment our office internet connection seems to be a bit screwed. Thus I present to you this information with absolutely no guarantee as to its accuracy. I will of course post an update as soon as I know more.

Yeah, I can hear what you’re saying “Enough already muppet man, tell us this amazing trick!” - Ok, here it is:

Press the door close button and your floor button at the same time! Now that sounds really pretty simple and the website I read about this had hundreds of posts underneath this article. A large percentage of them seemed to be affirmations that this did in fact work - although there were also quite a few that insisted it didn’t. There seemed to be some confusion to the exact method. Some people said you merely pressed the two at the same time, some suggested you hold the two buttons in for variously 3 or 5 seconds, with some reports stating that they had to be held in for the whole trip.

Anyways the internet is back up at work and I’ve done some investigating, but to no avail. I cannot find any evidence to prove this claim false, but then (and this is probably even more telling) I can’t find any evidence to back it up either.

Cheers for now!