Saturday, April 30, 2011

SPAM Baiting

This month's entry is pretty lame. It is just an experiment to see if I can get as much spam as possible in my "comments" section for this month. I fairly regularly get crap "comments" sent to a couple of earlier posts which are obviously spambot created based on some combination of words I'd used. I have always filtered them out. BUT THIS TIME my plan is to allow them in for this posting to see what I can collect. So the next few paragraphs are going to use sets of words that I believe might lure spambots into spamming me. These will of course be written innocently (and will probably read like boring drivel) so as to better demonstrate the lack of context needed to attract this sort of attention. Maybe this will fail, but I am curious to see what will happen.

So I was thinking about stuff in my past, you know, sort of dating myself in my mind, but it wasn't so much the date that I was focusing on, as what girls and boys of that day might look like today as men and women. How these groups might look today… In this regard, and regardless of their sex, I wondered if they exercise their imaginations. If they also think back to their past, feeling the weight of the years pressing down on them. Did they make the right decisions, did they experience loss and gain in equal amounts. Did they follow the recipe of their life in ways that allowed each ingredient to play its part? So much food for thought, I suppose. It was too much for my brain to eat in a single sitting, though. So I switched topics.

I wanted to invest some time to speculate on futures. By that I mean, of course, spend some energy on what tomorrow would bring. But to do that, I would have to buy into the whole "today predicts tomorrow" way of thinking that doesn't really hold the same currency with young people today. Young people today seem to me to save their free time mostly for digital media rather than interacting with actual people.

That line of thought depressed me a bit because it seems like nowadays, people my age can't relate as well to the blossoming generation. I would practically need to be psychic to have half a chance to figure out what kids today are feeling. And frankly, it just isn't in the stars for me to be a psychic - nor would I consult an astrologer for that matter… surely they possess no viable alternative to understanding the digital generation. Besides, our cultures barely overlap enough to share that common ground needed for communication. Just the differences in health situations insures a communication gap that no medicine can cure. I don't need a graduate degree to figure that out. Life is education enough, my friend!

Speaking of education, I cannot help but be reminded of my job before I decided to go to college. I worked at a company that built the Patriot Missile, if that rings a bell? Spending so many days of my life at that job made me realize the importance of variety. Day in and day out, the same work, the same faces. The days slipped by - and I wasn't even drinking alcohol! Although if I were still there, I'd no doubt have a beer gut by now. Seems like that is one of the paths to the "American Way" I've heard about. With the other extreme becoming president, like Obama. Seriously, though, I doubt that path was as possible as the beer gut path. Besides, I'm more of a video game kind of guy.

Games that I enjoy tend to be the first person shooters. They suck you in like movies. I even own an old Vectrex game (look it up) that needs some repair. But it was awesome! You'd think with my interest I'd have considered a career in programming. Nope. Too lazy and not quite a good enough thinker or problem solver to do well in that field. Dammit! There's money to be had there, though!

Oh, but I got off the track of health up above. Which reminds me that if I plan to do some traveling next month, I might want to get checked out. Maybe get a shot to protect me from an exotic virus. Hm. Just thinking about health care today makes me wonder about people of the past, like the Trojans who battled across the lands. They never worried about shots. But on the other hand, they probably didn't live as long… Ok, I won't talk myself out of the shot. I will have to download the list of local clinics where my insurance will pay for at least a tetanus booster. Better to be illness free on any trips I take. Don't want to lose my stamina on those long treks through the ruins of Greece or up the steep trails along the Grand Canyon.

Whatever. Maybe I should just be satisfied that I am healthy enough to consider travel, rather than whine about the past. Let's just see where things take us?

I will give this some time and actually ALLOW whatever "anonymous" posts I get to be listed. Any bets as to how many?

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Ok, so I gave it 8 months and I was able to attract 27 spam-bot posts. That's more than 3 per month (although I haven't gotten any for the past two-three months). Compare that to the maybe 1 I get per post otherwise. So clearly I was able to catch some spam-fish! Whoop-de-doo!

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