Not sure what kind of demographic Tide is trying to reach in its latest TV ads for Simple Pleasures, but the R&B $hit they use is loud and annoying. Seriously, I have to reach for the remote control every time it comes on... usually when I'm watching Discovery.

Time to change my brand of laundry detergent, methinks.

An annoying trend emerging in advertising is the abuse of full stops ("period" if you're a 'Merkin). Recent examples of this silliness include, "Doing it right. Before your eyes." and "The Sportscast. Redefined."

Pedantic grammarians will state that it's grammatically incorrect to start a sentence with a conjunction. Whilst true, this structure is often used informally to give the air of an afterthought. This is fine if the following sentence is complete and not just a fragment.

Oftentimes, poster adverts are composed by semi-literate buffoons. An example of this was the local bus transit company's poster that stated, "Your home free New Year's Eve" - doesn't anyone proofread these days?

Season 2 of Canada's Worst Handyman started on Discovery last night. Brought to you by the same folks and hosted by the same smart-ass twerp who presents Canada's Worst Driver.

This time, the contestants are set to build an eco-shed, while Younghusband provides his sniping voice-overs and critique in front of the camera. True, these clueless DIY'ers should probably not be allowed within 50 meters of a power-tool, but let's see how Younghusband would fare in his handyman skills against the others. I'm willing to bet that he would not do much better.

A month on from last month's post, it appears that the Roll Up The Rim To Win "contest" is wrapping up: no more winning losing cups are being dispensed by the franchises I frequent, although you still have until May 27th to redeem your prizes, if any.

So, here's the over-all results:

Number of days worked from February 26th to April 14th: 30 (took a week off of work)
Approximate (conservative estimate) number of coffees: 68 (avg 2.25 coffees)
Number of coffees won: 3
Number of doughnuts/muffins won: 0
Number of iPods, plasma TV's, cars, cash won: 0

Not exactly a 1-in-9 win. Of course, YMMV and it appears people have had better luck. Seems to me that Tim Hortons needs to work on a better way of distributing the cups.

Spammers play the numbers game. They send millions of emails a day, hoping to hit at least a few marks. Any idiot that responds by doing business is pure profit for a spammer. The phrase "There's one born every minute" certainly fits there.

Since no-one wants to let go of their beloved SMTP and come up with a brand new, trust-based email protocol, the only logical step is to make CAPTCHAs an interstitial part of the SMTP handshake for unknown senders. I don't claim this to be my own idea - there's plenty of hits Googling for "CAPTCHA" and "spam". Most of the search results are for discussions on why CAPTCHAs are evil and why they should not be used for website sign-up verifications, because they apparently discriminate against blind users.

Of all the discussions and arguments put forward, there isn't one single FUSSP - only a blended defence (of technological and sociological measures) will make a significant dent in the spam problem. Anyone who tries to think differently from the net-intelligentsia, is labeled an Anti-spam Kook.

So here are the arguments and counter-arguments:

(1) Visual CAPTCHAs discriminate against the blind: yes, they do. But then, logic-test CAPTCHAs discriminate against persons with learning disabilities; natural language-based CAPTCHAs discriminate against persons who don't speak the language used in the CAPTCHA; audio-CAPTCHAs discriminate against the deaf. So, whichever CAPTCHA is used, it will inevitably impact a person with one disability or another. Just as there is no universal solution to the spam problem, there isn't one CAPTCHA that will tell a human from a computer without affecting a minority of people. Trouble is, there are so many vocal tax-payer-subsidised, minority pressure-groups out there, who'd rather tell us to eat our spam than allow one disabled person to be unintentionally excluded. Solution: make alternative contact methods available or have a person assist the user in decoding the CAPTCHA.

(2) Spammers will just hire people to decode CAPTCHAs: perhaps. But remember, spammers play the numbers game. Use this against them. When it becomes prohibitively expensive for even the biggest of spammers to hire manual decoders, the spam will stop. To send 1 million emails and hire X number of flunkies to decode even half of the CAPTCHA challenge-responses in order to reach a handful of marks would just not make it worth the cost or effort.

(3) Spammers will redirect CAPTCHA images/logic-puzzles to their own sites and have people decode the CAPTCHA in exchange for access to pr0n: perhaps. But again, it's all about the numbers. How many visitors (dynamic) could decode a CAPTCHA before it expires? Hot-linking of images is easy to disable anyway.

(4) SMTP challenge-response systems are evil and just add to the spam volume: sometimes. I believe a dynamically-generated 5xx SMTP error message with a CAPTCHA URL is an acceptable method of challenge-response. To accept a message and then reply to it with a CAPTCHA URL is not acceptable. Also, until the original unknown sender is CAPTCHA authenticated, no more 5xx messages should be sent.

It's unfortunate that it's come down to this. But let's not forget that people have been obfuscating (munging) information for a long time - even before spammers started harvesting email addresses from usenet, people used images of email addresses on their websites. Did anyone complain when a blind person couldn't privately email a usenet poster because they had munged their email address? I'm sure I would have noticed the noise from the pressure groups if that happened.

Talking of usenet, here's an extremely inciteful post* made in 2003 by a NANAE regular. I am not going to repost the contents here, as it's archived on numerous sites - just Google for "thank the spammers". Even in 2003, CAPTCHAs were being used to prevent access to WHOIS data miners.

In our zeal to bend-over-backwards to help people who are less abled than ourselves to get onto the 'net, the spammers have been exploiting that good will to pump out their spam. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to be told to eat my spam in deference to the "politically correct" pressure groups.

And anyway, spammers themselves discriminate against the blind since there's a trend to circumvent text-based spam filters by using image text in their spams. Would the pressure groups complain about that? Didn't think so.

I bus it to work - 3 buses at ~1½ hours each way, five days a week - all for nearly the past 4 years now.

I want to do the right thing: save the environment, stop global warming, make the air more breathable for the next generation. All this without the influence of annoying media-whore enviro-kooks like Dr David Suzuki.

But it's becoming more difficult to do the right thing. So many things piss me off with the bus these days:

• waiting around for 30 mins in -20°C weather;


• iTards playing their "music" at the volume of a jack-hammer so that I can hear it all the way from the other end of a 40ft bus - some don't even bother using earphones at all;


• smokers who just have to take one last big drag and board the bus before emptying their deceased lungs;


• jobs-worth bus drivers who will drop me off right at the stop, where all the mud is, even though there is a patch of concrete just 2 meters ahead.

On their own, these are all things I could put up with periodically, even a few months of winter weather, but what actually bugs me the most are the inconsiderate iPod tuckfards playing their tinny $hit, usually R&B or cRap, every fricking day.

So, starting this Spring, I am going for my G1 license. Our little-used second car will help.

One thing that never ceases to annoy me are the flyers that street-spammers stuff into my mailbox. Unlike the email spammers (typically penis enlargement pills and other fake pharmaceuticals) and telejunkers (usually for quasi-charities, duct cleaning and windows) it seems that mailbox spam is not limited to hawking one particular thing.

Tonight, I get home from work to find a religious flyer in my mailbox. I won't mention the faith in question, because (a) it's largely irrelevant and (b) I don't wish to incite hatred by labeling one particular faith as more spammy than another.

The contents of the flyer itself are not worth commenting on - I didn't even waste any time reading it, but what is laughable is the one-liner at the top of the flyer that caught my eye: "Note: This publication uses the Holy Scriptures; discard it with the proper care". Of course I'll discard it with the proper care - it's on plain paper, so it went quite nicely straight into the recycling bin. What did they want me to do with it? Bury it? Cremate it? Mail it back?