spam « Patti O'Shea's Blog

Posts Tagged ‘spam’

The Blog Where Patti Rants

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

First, I updated my website today and added a new Extras page. This is a work in progress, but so far I have a glossary for the Light Warriors series, a list of the theme songs for all my books, and the videos are grouped together. I used bookmarks so it’s easy to access the information you’re interested in seeing.

Now, beware, I’m about to rant.

Today, I received an email from an author I have never heard of before in my life. I most definitely never signed up for her newsletter nor did I enter any contest she might have been running because I don’t enter contests from other authors. I figure they’d rather have a reader win than another writer and I do them the courtesy of not throwing my name in the pool. Yet for some unknown reason, this woman thought it was okay to just add me to her newsletter list. Grrr.

To say this irritated me is understating things. The only way people get on my newsletter is if they sign up for it, or they enter a contest where they are given fair warning that entering will put them on my newsletter mailings–and I haven’t even held a contest in a couple of years. You’d think the law of karma would protect me, but I guess not.

Where do some people get their idea of proper online etiquette? Just because my email address is available on various loops (and this was the email address I use for loop email) does not mean that I’m fair game. If she harvested this address from any of the writing loops I’m on, she violated list rules on top of spamming, and given the genre of her book, I have a fair idea from which loop she might have gotten my name.

This author accomplished thing–she ticked me off. Big time. Enough that I will never buy a book from her. I don’t appreciate spam whether it’s for Viagra, penis enlargement, or an author.

Now extrapolate. She harvested my email address, so odds are good she harvested others–probably a lot of others–and they were spammed, too. Probably a lot of these people are as angry as I am about it. Does she really think she did herself a big favor by sending out this email to all of us?

Don’t spam, people, it’s not nice.

Tags: annoyances, spam, websites
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Vagina Locked and Loaded

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

Today I received a spam mail titled Brittany Spears Shoots Down American Spy Satellite With Vagina. Now I’ve received some strange spam in my time online, but this gets my vote as weirdest. No, I didn’t open the email to see what it was about–the last thing I need is to trigger a beacon letting them know they have a real live email–but the imagination runs wild. :-)

Just think of all the Kegel exercises you’d need to do to strengthen those muscles enough to shoot down an orbiting satellite. I mean seriously, you’d have to do them like 24/7, wouldn’t you to get that kind of power? We’re not talking 30,000 feet here; we’re talking Earth orbit. And of course, that begs the question of what position does one assume to shoot down a spy satellite in this manner? On your back? One leg up?

Can you see the Army enlisting women with these incredible pelvic muscles to launch missiles at terrorist cells? Or how about shooting down an encroaching asteroid before it can smash into Earth and obliterate all life? What would the movie Armageddon have been like if they didn’t have to go to the asteroid in a space ship?

Okay, it’s late and I’m tired enough to attempt to be funny. Probably not succeeding either, but then I’m not funny–it’s my characters who put the humor in my books.

More seriously, who the hell writes these spam mails? And the bigger question is who the hell is opening them and buying whatever these people are selling? Because no matter how cheap and easy it is to send spam, if no one is biting, it would stop. That means someone somewhere is messing up email for the rest of us. :-/

Tags: email, spam
Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

How Did I Survive Dial Up?

Tuesday, November 20th, 2007

As God as my witness, I’ll never go back to dial up ever again! (To paraphrase Scarlett O’Hara.) OMG, I had to use dial up to test load times on various versions of my banner and it was absolutely excruciating. I love broadband and I can’t believe it took me so long to get it. Of course, I still believe they charge way too much, but I think I’d beg on street corners before going backward.

Anyway, the original banner took 1 minute and 30 seconds to load. Absolutely unacceptable. I messed around with gifs and jpgs and compression until I came up with what’s currently loaded. I lost quality–boo–but it’s loading in about 30 seconds. Still too long, but much better than the original. I’ll have to mess around again over the long weekend to see if I can trim the load time some more, but for the work week, I’ve done as much as I can do.

This, of course, took far too much time and I didn’t finish until nearly 7pm.

I volunteered to approve comments on the group blog that I’m a part of and I have to say that I absolutely can’t believe the amount of spam that comes through. We’ve heard about car sales from Socrates and assorted other dead Greek and Roman guys. Fortunately, pretty much all of it ends up in the spam folder, but good grief. Do these people not have better things to do than build spam bots to go around touting used cars? None of it makes it through, so what’s the point?

My red amaryllis is growing nicely. It’s really actually kind of fun because they’re coming up so fast, I can see the difference overnight. When I have flowers, I’ll take pictures. Of course.

Tags: blogging, spam, websites
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Sunny Sunday

Sunday, July 1st, 2007

It took me forever to write about two pages yesterday, which was very frustrating, but at least the work on the actual scenes that needed fixing went quicker. I have a couple of comments from my writing buddy that I have to work on today, but once that’s finished, it’ll just be a final polishing read through.

After working for hours and hours, I went outside yesterday and sat on my deck for about an hour. Fabulous. There was a light breeze, the temperature was comfortable and I was able to watch the birds flying around. It was a nice way to unwind.

Has anyone else been getting the latest spam? The one where the note says, “I found you online and want to chat with you. I’m a 25 y.o. girl and want to show you my pictures.” Or similar type words. This is lame enough, but what I find hilarious is that this 25 year old woman has first names like Jose or Carlos. Um, yeah, you might want to tweak your spam-ware so that it only uses female first names.

Tags: revisions, spam
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Timber!

Friday, June 8th, 2007

The next time I start talking about how boring my day was, remind me that boring is good, okay? Last night, I had a refresher course on why excitement isn’t a good thing.

It was windy here yesterday. Really, really, really windy. We were supposed to have severe thunderstorms to go with the wind, but some dry air was sucked into the storm and we missed out on that–which is probably a good thing with winds gusting above 40MPH. From early in the morning till into the evening, things were really blowing. After I got home from the EDJ, I watched the tree in my backyard (the one with the tree ring) really swaying around.

Well, yesterday evening, one of the trees couldn’t take the stress any longer. Not my tree ringed tree, but the one on my property line with the house next door came down. Not the entire tree, just one of the trunks (It’s a maple tree with multiple trunks going up together.)

We were lucky–it didn’t hit anything except grass and it was one of the smaller trunks.

I’ve been thinking of all the good things this morning. Thank God it didn’t hit anyone or anything. At least it wasn’t the tree I’d just put a retaining wall around. It didn’t hit any power, phone or cable lines. The list goes on.

But even though things turned out pretty well overall, boring is better.

I saw on the news the other day that the spam king was arrested. They said that we’d probably see less spam email because of it, but I have to tell you, I’ve had more the last two days than I’ve had in a long time. I still get the penny stock spam and the drug spam, but now I’m getting spam from “25-year-old girls” who saw me online and want to meet me. Rolling my eyes. First of all, can’t spammers learn to target their audience better? I’m tired of getting email meant for men. (Okay, actually I’m sick of receiving spam, period.) And second, who is stupid enough to fall for this?

I’ve been reading fiction since I finished my WIP, but today I’ve switched to nonfiction. I brought my Polynesian mythology book to work to read during lunch. It’s a textbook, but I’m hoping it’s written in an entertaining style and that something in there triggers my Polynesian heroine’s story. She’s loitering on the fringes of my consciousness, but not talking. Yet.

Tags: accidents, books, life, spam
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »