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Richy's Random Ramblings

News: Pepsi change from Britney to Ozzy?

December 19, 2002
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[Britney Spears and Ozzy Osbourne]I’ve just read something slightly “strange” in this morning’s Daily Mail newspaper concerning Britney Spears. Basically, Pepsi “is dropping the 21-year-old as the face of its advertising campaign”. Why? “Miss Spears signed with Pepsi in February 2001 in a two-year deal but soon infuriated bosses by being spotted drinking Coca-Cola… She has also been pictured smoking and drinking, which is not the image we want.”

So Brit’s lost the advertising deal because she’s been seen smoking and drinking. I wonder who Pepsi Co will sign up to replace her? Step forward heavy metal singer Ozzy Osbourne who they signed up “following the success of the reality TV show The Osbournes“.

Hang on a rock-picking minute. Is this the same Ozzy Osbourne (real name John Osbourne) who was the lead singer for Black Sabbath, who spent about $1000 a week on drugs, smokes, famously bit the head off a bat in 1982 (and then had to be treated for rabies), has been jailed for theft and burglary, and is known for having been dependent on alcohol?

<sarcasm mode on> Yes – that’s a great improvement isn’t it? <sarcasm mode off>

Personal: Crimbo Shopping

December 18, 2002
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[Leicester Clock Tower at Christmas]I’m glad Christmas only comes once a year! I’ve just finished off my Christmas shopping today and it was tiring to say the least. I had brought most things from Amazon at the end of last month (involving a total of 5 deliveries!), but I still had a get a couple of little somethings (mainly for my GESF and her flatmate).

Whilst Leicester town centre wasn’t too crowded, I did find some people annoying. My “normal walking speed” seems to be 50 to 100% faster than others, hence when I get stuck behind people and they just don’t move I get slightly annoyed. Oh – in the town centre, there’s a kinda “mini-theme park”: the standard “crane grab” machines, “hook a duck” and what’s termed a “Bungee Ride”. Basically you (and up to one other person) sits in this cage and it fires you up into the air (over 60ft) at over 8G’s. Wow! I didn’t have a go as I needed to do some shopping…

Anyway, after having a turkey lunch in Woolworths (not too bad for £4.99), I then grabbed some more cash and went up to Boots to grab a few prezzies. I just hope my GESF and her flatmate like them – the only thing is that due to how they “work” Christmas (they both go back to their individual parent’s houses), I’ve got to ensure the prezzies get there before Sunday. If I send them recorded post tomorrow morning then they should (fingers crossed) get to them on Friday…

I grabbed a few other things, grabbed a paper and then popped along to Maplins to look at a couple of prices. My printer (HP Deskjet 845C) ran out of blank ink late last week (so much for the “running low” warnings) and I had just used my final CD-R (around 60% from a batch were fault 🙁 ), so I needed to grab those. Maplins price for a black ink cartridge (HP order code 15) was £24.99 and a “cake” of 50 CD-Rs (without cases) was £19.99. Not too bad, but I thought since D.A.Computers was just over the road, I’ll pop into there to compare prices (as I’ve been a customer of theirs for over 10 years, been ‘aware’ of them for around 15 – and, in fact, brought my monitor, current computer and printer from them). Their prices? £22.33 for the ink cartridge and £18.22 for a cake of 50 80-minute CD-Rs.

Well, now I’ve just got to wrap everything up and get it ready for posting…*grr* I hate wrapping as well 🙁 Oh well – “Hi Ho, Hi Ho – it’s off to flibblepenguin we go…”

Spam: SpamCop Statistics: A Month On

December 18, 2002
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[Spamcop]Well, it’s now been a month since I commenced reporting a selection of my spam to Spamcop (see the results of my first week reporting).

My spam levels have been quivering between only about a dozen a day (usually at weekends) to the deluge I got yesterday of around 800 🙁 I tend to report each “unique” message to Spamcop (selected on the criteria of “To:” address and “Subject:” being different from the spam I have in my mailbox at that time – some spammers send around 20 mails to the same address with the same subject: only one of those gets reported).

Ok, a month and a day ago (yep, I should have done this entry yesterday) I purchased 25Mb of “Spamcop reporting” (paying for membership just adds a few fancy things such as ‘past reports’ and ‘amount of spam reported’ – it also removes a few ads and the “parse” time delay). I now have just 10.3Mb left. Yep – in a month, I’ve reported just under 15Mb of spam. My “average usage rate” is 5.53bytes per second or 14.3Mb per month or a massive 174.4Mb per year (that’s an increase of 50.5Mb per year since 3 weeks ago).

At the moment, I seem to be reporting more like 10% of my spam to Spamcop – therefore I receive around 55.3bytes of spam EVERY SECOND: that’s 4.5Mb a day. A month, that’s 136Mb. So – therefore, I receive in the region of 1.63Gb of spam a year.

The good news is that after the well known spammer Alan Ralksy was featured on a Slashdot article (referring to a freep interview) several Slashdot visitors decided to “turn the tables” on him. They’ve signed him up with practically every form of “snail mail” to his home address of 6747 Minnow Pond Drive, West Bloomfield, Michigan, MI 48322, USA. Of course, the other Slashdotters were happy to hear this 🙂

Ralsky was actually sued by the Verizon company and is barred from sending their customers spam late in October… Ralsky doesn’t, however, seem too happy about people taking photographs of his house – Rich Clark has received some threatening phone calls within 24 hours of taking some quite nice photographs.

Oh – and AOL also won a spam case against the spammer outfit CN Productions and owner Jay Nelson.

Are the tables turning against the spammers after so long? I hope so…

Game: Wrath II

December 17, 2002
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[Wrath II]By the same person that made “Lost Your Marbles“, there’s a largish Flash game (which includes Harvey from LYM in the loading screen) called Wrath II.

Starting off with the introduction of “And on the sixth day, God created man. By the seventh day, he’d realised his mistake. And “B—-r!” was the word.” should give you an idea of what you have to do. Still not clued up? Well, the instructions (from “Encyclopedia Satanica”) state: “What a bummer… You created mankind in your own image huh? Bit of a silly thing to do wasn’t it. So naturally, they’ve run amok, and really p—d you off, right? Sounds like punishment time”.

Yes: you finally get to play God! Starting off with just a lighting bolt, as you progress through the levels you get a Hay Bomb (a sort of time delay bomb), a flood, earthquake, “angel of death”, and a “bonzai volcano”. But it’s not so easy to kill those awkward humans, sheep and cattle. Angels, aliens and even the Lord Of Darkness – Satan himself – will try and stop you…

Search: Google Cache oddity

December 17, 2002
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[Google Pigeons]I’ve just noticed a slight “oddity” with my favourite search engine Google. Basically, Google has a cache facility which enables your to see what the page was like when Google indexed it using their Googlebot spider. Extremely handy if the site you are trying to access is unavailable for some reason.

Google also offer the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer users (a Mozilla version is also available) which makes available certain items such as “Search From Toolbar” (saving you going to the Google homepage) and direct access to the cache.

Now, here’s the oddity: Accessing the cache of my blog via the Google Toolbar gives me a URL in the format of http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fblog.rac.me.uk (ok, there are a few more parameters, but I’ve reduced them to “bare minimum”). That link currently shows my blog with the latest entry dated November 13 2002 at 12:31am (entry “Game: Fling That Cow!“) – however, performing a search and then clicking on the ‘Cached’ link produces a URL in the format of http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:QGa9rQIfcj0C:http%3A%2F%2Fblog.rac.me.uk – with a “last entry” date of December 15 2002 08:11pm (entry Movies: Films I’d like to see again) – just 2 days ago.

So: why has Google got two cached copies of the same page? Obviously the search system is using the “fresher” copy, but it’s still given me a reason to stop and think. And what does the QGa9rQIfcj0C bit mean? A bit of playing has shown to me, so far, that it’s a unique identifier for the page in Google’s cache: searching for other pages from my blog resulted in the code “OdxOQ8hwqvMC” (November 12th: Pick On George Bush). “Adjusting” the cache URL to read http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:OdxOQ8hwqvMC:blog.rac.me.uk still shows up the individual entry page instead of the front page (which you would have thought by the format of the URL). fEJraafpn4cC is the code to my Games and Fun category page

Someone else has noticed this at Webmaster World, but no useful information came from that discussion.

Oh well – if I find out anything more (it’ll be interesting to find out if the “cache IDs” remain static over time), I’ll let you all know 🙂