Divine Lunacy

…and they really do walk around like they think they’re normal people. A year and six days ago, I was the victim of comment spam. These unsolicited comments were not made by a computer, as most are; they were made by an idiotic seventh grader, who I am told, stumbled upon my blog whilst searching for diving websites. A small world it is, as this witless seventh grader had yet to realize that he was sitting next to the brother of the person whose blog he was spamming. My retaliatory email to him was ruthless; he was pwned and was therefore speechless. Many ages passed, and this spammer, as all things insignificant do, slowly faded into darkest depths of my mind. From time to time, that which is thought to be lost resurfaces. As I quietly sat eating dinner tonight, a name popped into my head, a familiar name: it was the name of ‘the spammer’, but it is much more familiar now than a year ago. A month ago, a new scout joined my boy scout troop. Coincidentally, he has the same name as ‘the spammer’. (and he’s in the eighth grade…) Let this be a warning to all bloggers: the spammers walk among us!

Filtering internet content serves two purposes: It keeps blood-thirsty lawyers off the schools back, and it makes the school eligible for additional funding. I have previously blogged about how exploitable the schools filters are (manufactured by: 8e6); today we add another chapter to our book of exploits.

Google Talk has been around for a while now, though with the recent additions to gmail, many people are just realizing that they’ve been able to use their gmail addresses as jabber accounts for all these months. Perhaps the school (or those persons who update the master blacklist) have come to the same realization. As of today, gmail is blocked at school. My running joke is that they’ll someday block every website, even Google. This day, it seems, is nearer than many of us would like to believe

I’m perfectly fine with the school blocking offensive content, but what on earth could they have against gmail? If a student isn’t going to do his work, he might as well waste time sending emails, right? And what about those of us who email documents to ourselves? Oh well, I’m sure they’re not smart enough to block SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol: port 25) and POP3 (post office protocol: port 110) (actually, they probably need those. [Sorry, I’m too lazy for acronym tags.]), so I can just install thunderbird in my student folder, right? (they’ll never figure that the students are that smart…) It turns out that there’s an even easier way [for the time being]. The filter blacklists domain names, ip addresses or keywords that may appear in domain names. Google has servers all over the world, and they don’t share domain names, or IP addresses. google.co.uk, for instance, is a server that is local to the UK. The Google personal homepage can be configured to show a preview of one’s Gmail inbox. Accessing one’s gmail account is as easy as displaying this preview and, accessing the Google personal homepage by going to: google.co.uk/ig, and clicking on ‘Inbox’. For now, we bask in the glory of simplicity; later on, perhaps, more complicated exploits shall be sought.

Yes, folks, it’s time for another episode in my Dunkin Donuts epic. If you’ve been reading for long enough, you’ve probably figured that Dunkin Donuts messes up my order every time I buy coffee there. Their coffee isn’t that good, so the least they could do is actually make it to order. With Mike as my witness, i said, at least three times, “medium french vanilla no cream no sugar.” Despite my repeated attempts to tell them to hold the cream and the sugar, I ended up with cream and sugar instead of coffee. I kid you not: my coffee tasted more like sweet cream than it did coffee. After drinking black coffee for several years, I am led to wonder how people can possibly stand it with cream and sugar. Americas supposed ‘coffee drinkers’ are merely wimps who drink sweetened cream and call themselves connoisseurs. Coffee just isn’t the same when diluted with cream…