Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Heroes of Spam

One of the side-effects of switching web servers is the loss of what it transpires was a half-decent spam filter. Now my e-mail address is back out in cyberspace without suitable protection, I'm having to filter incoming mail by hand for the time being. Which is a bit tedious, but does have its advantages.

For instance, just this morning I received an invitation to acquire shares in Patientline from Dickensian sweat-shop mogul Eroll Crim. And then there's the snippets of old Victor Hugo poems kindly passed on by my old friends Guido Noll and Sharita Yocom.

All of which is beside the point, since I don't know what v1@gra is, but if anybody out there wants some I'll put you onto Samson Sinclair, who apparently can sort you out.

Anyway, you've probably figured how this ramble comes back to the subject of Christian Science Fiction (a gentleman who has yet to send me any spam, incidentally). One of the things I dislike about creating fiction is the making up of names, which I'm sure most writers will agree is pretty crucial, especially when it comes to your protagonist and other major characters.

So I'm using this temporary influx of spam as extra inspiration for the characters in Project Seven. Troy Myers, maybe? Donnell Lacey? (Not a very English name though.) I quite like Anderson McMullen though (Andy to his friends). And the girls: Keri Kroese, Roslyn Wettstein, Lauren Broussard and Ophelia Hobbs (odd combination, that one).

Of course if any of the aforementioned names belong to real people: somebody's hijacked your e-mail.

1 comment:

James Miller said...

I got 400 of the Petientline spam today.

You say that you haven't got a spam filter. I get about 7,000 spam messages a day and find that Outlook 2003 handles it very well. I perhaps have three or four spam messages a day in the Inbox and nothing seems to go missing.

http://www.jamesmiller.com/mtmblog/2006/05/spam-fighting-with-outlook-2003.html

It looks like Patientline is pretty terminal, so I suspect that he'll make a lot of money.