Catmachine

I realise that I'm just being annoyed at nothing again, but this particular nothing has been bothering me for years, ever since I first started working in an office environment way back in 1989. I usually spot instances of it whilst on my way somewhere - toilet, canteen, refectory, library - it doesn't really matter. The important thing is that I'm in transit. And I will spot them - two people who until relatively recently were obviously also in transit - sometimes one of them might be halfway through a door, another might be carrying a cup of coffee. But their transit has been interrupted by the fact that they've found something to talk about. Now of course there's nothing wrong with this so far. Seeing someone whilst on your way somewhere might remind you of something you had to say to them; instead of putting it off and possibly forgetting, it makes sense to pause in your travels and get it off your chest. The annoying thing starts when I'm on my way back fro...

Spam email seems to be getting worse on an almost daily basis. I do wonder sometimes why they bother - the techniques they use are so basic and flawed that surely only those with a complete brain-bypass would ever be taken in? That's the problem though -it costs nothing to send spam so it's worth sending out even if only one in a hundred thousand are suckered - that's 25 sales if you send out 2.5 million emails (a not uncommon figure). The only way to stop this as far as I can see would be charging for mass emails - I'm not sure how that would work exactly, but it would certainly cause some spammers pause for thought - their number one reason for doing it would have been taken away. What I don't get though is the lengths they go to get around people's spam filters by mis-spelling the keywords or using similar tricks. Surely if you set up a spam filter to discard all emails which mention Viagra it's because you are not interested in purchasing Viagra? So if a...