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I used to have an email popup on every page, to make it easy for people to get in contact with me. They're easy to do. You simply say "mailto:myaddress@myisp.com" and the reader's browser and mail client do the rest. Sadly, they also attract a lot of unsolicited advertising, normally known as "SPAM". Many of my friends use a separate address for mail coming from their web-sites, but I still find it hard to sort your beautifully crafted comment from the adverts for guaranteed money-making schemes. So, I crave your indulgence. When you click on the "email me" below, I need you to go to the address line and delete the "nospam" and the underscore. Since most automated programs can't do this, it means there are fewer adverts to sift through and helps me respond to your mail more quickly. Please do email me, though, because I enjoy getting mail from interesting people, even if you pointing out a broken link or a typo. While you're composing the email in the little pop-up window, ponder... I've heard of this Bill Gates fellow and I know he's a bit of a philanthropist. I pretty much doubt, though, that he's ever heard of me, and sadly, even if he has then I suspect he has better things to do with his time than compose chain letters offering me USD1000. If you've got this wonderful money-making scheme, for heaven's sakes don't share it with someone like me who you don't know. That would just be one more person who knows about it, making it even less likely to work. Keep it to yourself, with my blessing, and if you do get rich, I'll stand there and applaud. I have all the biscuit (cookie) recipes I need. In fact, more than I need. If you have a USD200 recipe, fine. Make at least two people happy. Cook up a batch and give them to one of your friends. If divine wrath were going to descend upon me for breaking a chain letter, it would have happened. And if you were ever going to get rich from chain-letter people sending you five bucks, that would have happened as well. I probably know about new viruses before most people., including hoaxes that try to persuade you to delete a perfectly ordinary dll and wreck your windos install. Here's what I do. I check with the software vendors' web sites. Silly of me, I know, but I tend to give them higher weighting than a chain-letter. If, on the other hand, you have a good spoof, send it on over. There is no kidney theft ring in New Orleans. No one is waking up in a bathtub full of ice, even if a friend of a friend swears it happened to their cousin. The (US) National Kidney Foundation has repeatedly requested actual victims of organ thieves to come forward: none have. Not even your friend's cousin. It may well have said half-way down the tail of the message that someone you've never heard of in Sao Paolo has checked it out. That doesn't make it true. What it does mean if the tail of the message is so long that it contains people you've never heard, is that I've probably seen it already. |