fine whine

Look at this email
that show'd up in my inbox
this chilly March day :

Hi, Mike! 50% discount for cigarettes!

Marlboro $18.95 
Marlboro LIGHTS $18.95 
Winston LIGHTS $16.10 
Winston SUPER LIGHTS $16.10 
Winston $16.10 
PALL MALL $15.15 
CAMEL $18.95 
L & M $14.72 
PALL MALL LIGHTS $15.15 
SOVEREIGN CLASSIC $15.15 
CAMEL LIGHTS $18.95 
CHESTERFIELD LIGHTS $16.10 
LUCKY STRIKE $18.00 
CHESTERFIELD $16.10 
More 120`s $23.27 
Marlboro LIGHTS MENTHOL $18.95 
PARLIAMENT LIGHTS $23.27 
L & M Menthol $14.72 
LUCKY STRIKE LIGHTS $18.00 
DUNHILL 100's $25.17 
Rothmans KING SIZE $21.80 
L & M LIGHTS $14.72 
L & M SUPER LIGHTS $14.72 
CAMEL MILD $18.95 
PARLIAMENT $23.27

Start smoking today! http://[URL removed]
zqKBaEtL TaFW zgUwRg

As though I'd been waiting for the price to go down before I started lighting up. Riiight.

Still don't wanna write
I just want winter to end
tho' I'll miss my scarf.

Cold weather came back;
nothing to write about;
should just go to bed.

I tell you, everything and everybody's connected. It's merely a matter of figuring out all of the links.

I finally wrapped up watching the first season of Starsky & Hutch this week, and decided to check out what else the titular stars might've done after the show's five year run. I discovered that among other projects, Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser) had directed the governors of Minnesota and California in The running man, one of few movies to show Arnold dying on-screen (even if it is a ruse). The movie's watchable and even features Yaphet Kotto, but isn't as remarkable as some would consider it. That said, Artisan's releasing a super special edition DVD of it any day now that seriously tempts me, though I cannot explain why.

No coincidence there, really. None really struck me until I checked out the credits of Happy, Texas with the wholly adequate Ally Walker playing a banker named Jo. She looked familiar but I could not place her, until imdb revealed her varied career, including a spot in Kazaam. Clicking around that Shaq-fest revealed a connection to the 1929 Buster Keaton silent Spite marriage (remade in 1943 as the atrociously titled I dood it). And here I had just a day before chastised a co-worker for not knowing who Buster Keaton was.

He couldn't even get Abbot and Costello and Laurel and Hardy straight.

Anyway, the idea that a movie with Shaq could reference a Buster Keaton film was enough to boggle the mind, let alone its connections to anything else. My mind was boggled, briefly, as could be expected. But that little "whoa" moment passed, and only then did I notice the man who directed Kazaam: the one and only Paul Michael Glaser.

Whoa.

It would seem that I have joined some sort of elite cadre of website operators, those attacked by a certain blasterattacko@aol.com (I'll call him/her/it/them BA henceforth just because it's a silly name). This BA is very prolific, defiling forums, guestbooks and formmail contact pages all over the web, presumably searching for open mail relays that can be exploited for spamming. The fact that BA shows up on so many guestbooks and bulletin boards would seem to imply that the attacks are in fact automated, probably with some sort of malicious robot searching for common form elements.

Within two days of adding my own contact form I too was hit, but I am not a victim. I'm not using the normal, insecure and easily exploited version of the formmail script but instead a better version from the nms people, primarily because it enabled me to use a hash key for a recipient instead of my email address.

Call me paranoid, but I don't like having my email address in plaintext splashed all over the web, not in this day and age of email harvesting and five dollar CDs of addresses available on eBay. No, I've been there and done that (had my address harvested, not vice versa) and I'm not going to make the same mistake again. I had stupid virus messages (you know, the one with a password-protected zipfile) show up in several boxes, but not all of them, and I'd like to think that means I'm doing something right.

So anyway, go ahead and contact me, but don't expect to do anything else with that page. That means you, BA.

The continued practice of adding of signatures to emails has at times baffled me and at others merely given me pause to wonder. I wonder why it is necessary to have such a holdover from written correspondence when there is a standards-dictated field in every header (well, every normal one) that shows the sender's address and (usually, anymore) name. Why then to call it out a second time? Is it for ego or attention, or merely tradition that the majority of emails I receive at work contain some form of "sincerely, whoever" or "best regards" (and its sinister shorter sibling, "bgrds!") and the like?

Not that I can talk, signing as I do all but the briefest messages with a concise but polite "Thanks, Mike". There is more to it than just that, though, as it is my personal theory that in order to thank someone I need to have made a request or something like it to merit the minor bit of gratitude.

Surprisingly, not every email I send is a request for something, so I feel the need to tack one on just so I can add that simple "Thanks". Generally I toss in a "Please let us know if you have any questions", which for me is enough to then be able to throw on my gratitude (in advance) and rest easily.

There is a point to all of this. A vaguely funny one, too, at least to me.

Today I received a reply to an email that said this:

Thanks
For moment I  do not have more questions.
 
Ernesto

Ah, Ernesto, if only you knew what a laugh this gave me so early this Monday morning.