Birthday haul
The haul of presents from yesterday was impressive indeed:
Presents from Andrea Neal Stephenson's Interface (anyone who knows me will know I'm a big Stephenson fan).Films that inspired Kill Bill, HMV boxed set, including Babycard at the River Styx, Zatoichi Meets the One Armed Swordsman, and Lady Snowblood (samurai goodness).Red Dwarf Series IV DVD.Young Ones Series Two DVD (completes my collection; gift from Andrea's mother).A gorgeous full chocolate birthday cake, with a solid chocolate bottles on top..so..yummy (donated by Andrea and her mother).A very nice Parker Frontier pen.An exceedingly small and fairly nice looking TwinMOS Mobile Disk III 64MB flash disk (handy for exchanging files, and taking stuff to uni; works on my Mac to boot).Some nice new tops and a jumper for my wardrobe.A comfortable pair of slippers. From Damian Black Books Series One DVD.
A good time was had by all at China China, and we came home feeling as if rice and noodles had somehow invaded our veins and lungs. Perfect.
I just hope I can make Andrea's birthday as nice as mine was.
Social engineering via spam
I've just noticed that spammers have been able to re-engineer my own first impressions, those gut reactions which dictate to a degree how I would proceed with a particular situation, obviously it's only noticeable with e-mail, but it's there, which is a very scary thing indeed.
Example: The moment I see an e-mail from someone with a very similar name to my own (this can be as easy as them being called Wes or Wesley, and having only a letter in common with my second name, to trigger the search algorithms my brain uses to process the e-mail that comes into my inbox), I immediately think it's spam, due to the common spamming method of setting the originating address for the spam to the recipient of the spam's own address (this is often very easy to catch though, as I very rarely send e-mail to my own address, so a custom rule checks for spam first and actually marks it readily if it is also appears to be sent by me, as I'm also not in the habit of sending spam out either).
You can't handle the tooth..
Josh has weird wisdom teeth.
