Spam spam spam spam

Well, I survived my first day back at work. Of course, it was made easier by anticipating the fact that I get another holiday in just three months. Hopefully. I haven’t actually had my leave approved yet. I asked the boss as soon as he came in, but he referred me to his boss, who said it sounded ok with her, but that because I would be away for so long, and because another staff member is going to be taking leave at the same time, she’d have to get a temp in. Which means getting approval from *her* boss to spend the money on a temp. So she can’t approve my leave until she hears back from him. Sometimes I really wish I worked for some tiny company with only one layer of management!

The downside of having had a holiday is that I had 255 reports in my inbox from my spam filter, all of which I had to check through in case there were any legitimate emails in there. And yes, in the midst of them all, I did find one genuine email. All the rest were the usual offers to increase the size of bits of anatomy I don’t even have (and I really don’t get this obsession with “bigger is better” anyway – I can categorically state as a woman that there’s a certain size above which my reaction wouldn’t be “mmmm” but “ouch!”), or to sell me watches or software, or to win unfeasible amounts of money. That was a constructive way to spend an hour…

What really amazes me about spam is the fact that it obviously works. Some people out there must be stupid enough to think “oh yes, I really want to buy a genuine rolex and I trust this random website to sell it to me, so I’ll give them my credit card details”. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be worth the spammers’ while to send out all those emails. Hmm, maybe that’s the solution to spam – instead of trying to catch the spammers, maybe we should track down the idiots who actually click on the links, and lock them up somewhere a long way from an internet connection.

On the forum on the Bookcrosser Exchange site, Skyring and I were discussing ways people could track otakuu and my travels, given that we probably won’t have a lot of time for blogging while we’re busy travelling. He suggested that volunteers could be found to post links to photos and blogs (both ours and those of other bookcrossers we meet along the way) so that all our travels end up documented in one place. We haven’t got the volunteers yet, but I have set up a LiveJournal community, Bookcrosser Exchange: World Tour 2008, to act as a central clearing house for the links etc they find.

I’ve gone through and found the various posts otakuu, I, Skyring and discoverylover have made so far about the planning process, and linked to all of them (though I haven’t figured out yet what to do about Otakuu’s posts, because they are all locked – perhaps she’ll agree to unlock posts that are just about the trip, or give permission to the volunteers to copy and paste the relevant bits into public posts). If it works out, it should make a great record of our travels.

(Now, do I post a link in the community about this post, which links back to the community again? It’s all getting a bit circular here!)

Currently reading: Clan Ground by Clare Bell
Currently listening to: One False Move by Alex Kava