Spam
I love it when inappropriate spam comes in one directly after the other. ‘Meet a woman for a private date.’ ‘Get a drone as a free gift.’ Two separate emails, neither appropriate for me, or anyone I suspect, and yet they made me smile. I get so many spam message each day that I have a special programme to weed them out, but I do get to read the headlines before I bounce them back or delete them from the server. The programme, and I can recommend it, is called Mailwasher. It lets you check your mail before downloading it to your computer, reducing the risk of bugs. Recently I’ve been getting about 50 per day from one insistent bot who claims to have my password and has recorded my online activity. Unless I send a huge sum to an unidentified source, my online browsing will be made public. Spam-scam, of course, but some people do fall for it. Still, it made me think what fun they could have (if there was a ‘they’) if they had found my recent online browsing history. Then I thought I’d save them the trouble…
The thing with being a writer is research, it’s one of my favourite parts but then I like everything about creating stories, writing them up, editing them, working with a designer to create the cover, laying them out and then sending them to the great Zon in the cloud (Amazon) and letting people enjoy them, or not – that bit isn’t up to me. But research is also fun, and I do it in a couple of ways. Sometimes I buy and read a book, or go to the shelf and take down one my several reference tomes, and other times, I order a Kindle copy of a book because I want it there and then. Or I use the internet because it’s right there and saves time, though, for specifics, I don’t just take the Wiki-word for it, try and delve into specialist sites. If all else fails, I fall back on asking friends in the know, but, like asking a doctor at a party if she can look at this thing you’ve got, asking friends who are also experts in a field seems like taking advantage at times. So, back to the internet and my recent history. Looking at my research folder in my bookmarks, I find…
Inside the dark reality of Victorian slums. Sunrise and sunset times. Black white photo beautiful man business. (No idea, to do with a cover I think.) A dictionary of Victorian slang. Hats. (?) 550 alternative words for “said”. Backstage in theatres and music halls. Internet anagram server. Fencing terminology. (As in swords, not barbed wire.) Communication breakdown – the Pirate Omnibus. (No idea.) How to commit the perfect murder. — And there I think we should leave it. Oh, another spam just came in, this one to do with a certain blue pill, so I won’t go into detail.
