7 multiple-choice questions, having NOTHING to do with me or my personality, are going to tell me what people notice first about me? Really!?! No shit!  I took 5 more of these oh so helpful insight generators tonight to prove to myself it was pointless drivel. And some of thier results would be considered offensive to some, no less.

I’m thinking I should just post random shit to my wall, in question / My chosen answer format. It would be more accurate if pulled from one’s ass!

The usual scramble for the ring each month this year – How many of us are accepting the fact that we’re still in a downward spiral?

Met someone nice along the way, this month. We’re seeing where that goes, now.

If you’re like me, you get anywhere from 10 to 25 ‘legitimate’ marketing emails per day, and another 25 to 100 SPAM.

In order to fix the root of the problem, we’d have to truly ‘re-engineer’ how email gets sent & passed ON THE SERVERS. No, you cannot touch this stuff firsthand, but there’s no reason that only Google’s sparkling empire can have proper SPAM identification.

GMail is good, yes indeed. Almost an ivory tower of SPAM identification and eradication.

Yahoo is a shiny glass hi rise, at least. They’re catching up.

But, the rest of us are in the might-tip-over-in-a-high-wind brownstones. Why has no nerd made “SpamAssassin” a worthy modern tool? Where I’ve used it, it is obviously lacking.

S.P.A.M.

We’re hoping Google will index the bejesus out of that, and we’ll climb to the top of the index for Butt Plug.

Doc, I have the nasty cold, maybe some antibiotics. “Sure, yeah, I agree and I’ll prescribe some.” (shuffle out, confidant he heard you)  Receptionist hands you dental floss on the way out.    Really feel heard, don’t you, now?

-

Day 1 – über tech does web work, hosts 50+ domains at one upstream hosting facility. All detectable FTP permissions on all detectable domains are fine, EXCEPT the one we’re trying to whip up some _Fracken Basic_ FTP permissions on TODAY. Go fracken figure!  This is the shit OhChristWhatNow was born from, as you well know.

Day 2 – We call upstream, describe and PROVE the issue for nearly half an hour, complete with an example of how it should take 3 minutes to set this stuff up at -another- domain. “Tech coordinator” assures us he gets it, leave it in his hands. [And then...]

[Drrr!] An hour later 2 help desk tickets appear in an ABsoFriggenLutely useless place [from me to me? Hello!], so they never get to the “Admins” who can correct the matter, nor do either of them address the core issue AT ALL. My replies to them basically bounce back to me, but I didn’t notice this crap right away.

Day 3 – NEW ‘ticket’ upstream, protesting the issue IN EXACTITUDE, and its mishandling the previous day..  NO response the live long day. [Do these people actually come in to work from time to time? Christ] 4:45pm I call in, get the idea once again that they understand the gravity of it, have a clue how to fix it, and understand that the end user is getting PISSED, with good reason at this point. Midnight passes again without a fix..

Day 4 – The only question I’ll have for them at noontime is going to be WTF!?! …  I EXPLAIN the PROBLEM _AGAIN_ and PROVE the issue AGAIN to the nerd at the end of the line. BLAH BLAH BLAH ASAP, BLAH BLAH BLAH. ANother hour wasted on ANOTHER day persuing the same fracking issue that should NOT be an issue for US. Nerd at other end promises someone will call me back (ROTFL!) S..u..r..e  I’ll believe it if I see it..  Needless to say, noone calls

Day 5 – Are you kidding me? I mean, REALLY, are you kidding me? Ineptitude and lack of [read this carefully] R.E.S.P.O.N.S.I.B.I.L.I.T.Y. have been proven to me- we need a capable upstream host, these folk have just lost their will for any degree of customer satisfaction. “blah blah is #1 in customer satisfaction..” Yeah, maybe with your cousin Phil, but you guys suck, in real life. Anything hits the fan, you stick your thumbs up your ass, in stereo.

Day 6 – I know..

Day 7 – For chrissake, yes, I also WISH I was kidding…  Despite their seemingly caring approach of a voicemail at 10:30am Sunday. The moment I go to check shit after their ?fifth? “It’s fixed” message:   Da shit still don’ work, homes!

- I should NOT have to [essentially] train your support staff in how shit like HTTP, FTP, and UNIX permissions work.

- Once reported, it’s _supposed_ to be in YOUR basket, not mine. I’ve had to explain the issue in detail FIVE times, prove the issue FIVE times. This is just beyond friggin ridiculous.

- I’ve been justifiably incensed that noone is willing to take true responsibility for the matter, OR the partial outage that occured back on the 11th & lasted almost 2 days!

Okay, seems like we pissed off the cam whores- they managed to INFECT MY SITE!

Slimy motherfrackers….  if I ever met a malware author in a dark alley…   bring the shop vac, it would NOT be pretty.

Fat ugly men in basements of East Bumfrack, Wisconsin, masquerading as hot twenty-something blond chicks, sending you blind messages from unknown email addresses.
Hurry, give them your credit card info before it’s too late! You’ll miss out on the live sex show (they get a commission on adding members to the roster).

Sideshows: Find yourself intrigued by the online dating site where your ‘free’ account gets 5-15 messages a day, then once you join, it drops to zero- they gotcha. And now that you’re an “insider” & can finally view ‘full profiles’, you can see the hot ones have something like 10,000 friends; they’re BAIT, dumbshit!

- They have stuff that lets their web pages _Know Where You Are_, in a general geographic sense. Does the page say “hot folk from Marmalade, TX” and you’re in neighboring “Dorkville, TX”? Well, it’s just geek tricks, so smarten up, okay?

And now, word has it, they’re abusing the good graces of Yahoo & GMail to use their valid email systems to help bamboozle the masses, as their usual false-message domains get cleaned up and secured.

We predict an absolutely infectious year, with this shit on the rise, viruses for WinBlows getting nastier, and the online hungry & smart trying harder to swindle the hungry.

We need: Legislation to shut down the spammers, and Email in general would have to be burned down & built anew to prevent their bullshit in the future…
Legislation to counterattack the virus authors: an international effort of extradition & cooperation that simply would never happen.
(Rumor has it that a lot of this shit flows out of eastern europe these days..)

For a ton of good tips of shit to avoid: http://www.stijlnet.com/pages/security/