The Family Dog

How to Spam Effectively

Here are some techniques on how to spam effectively.

• Introduce yourself like you know the recipient personally. You might have some tender words in your subject line ("dearest", "beloved", "darling", "monkey love") which will immediately appeal to the reader and encourage them to check the message.

• Pretend you're with a government agency or corporation. Believe me, when someone sees a message incoming from the FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, Bank of America, Hormel, Adam & Eve, or even The White House, it is a real attention getter!

• Only use a first name in the "from" field of your messages. I have friends named Claire, Jane, Lexus, Chiquita, all of whom happen to be females with smokin' hot bodies. Of course I will not hesitate to open emails from these lovelies!

• Use a free email provider like Yahoo to send out your messages. Using official addresses is so formal! Use casual addresses instead (like vincentnobi1970@yahoo.com) and you will instantly appeal to the recipient's heart and wallet.

• Mention the name of a famous prescription drug, like Viagra. There is a flat 50% chance that the person reading your message has a penis. Use that opportunity to pimp the most effective erectile dysfunction drug in the world!

• Occasionally misspell words, especially when impersonating a bank. Email can be so boring, everyone has a spellchecker these days. Be different! Tell someone they're going to loose access to their account, or that extra feeds will be charged.

• Make sure your name appears followed by a bunch of abbreviations. I've always paid special attention to emails from my partner in Nigeria, Dr. Clement Okon, MD, PhD, DVM, MBA, ESQ, BS. Your customers will, too! 

That's it! I hope the techniques I've outlined above will help YOU become a more effective spammer.

Twilight - Breaking Wind

Gaia: Soccer Mom?!

Is mother Earth, a.k.a. Gaia, a soccer mom, taking her "children" to practice in a planet-sized SUV?? Original story here.

You and Your Dog

Cannot Modify the Needed File

Upon restarting Windows, my StumbleUpon toolbar in Firefox seemed no more.

I went to the StumbleUpon site and tried to reinstall the add-on, but got this error:

StumbleUpon could not be installed because Firefox cannot modify the needed file.

My setup is a bit unusual in that I have a QSoft RAMDisk drive set up on my 4 GB system to utilize the extra 768 MB or so of PAE memory, normally inaccessible to Windows 7. I configured my system to use a folder on this drive, R:, named TEMP as a scratch space, and set up Firefox to use R:\ for its cache.

I discovered, however, that I'd forgotten to create a little script or batch file to create this TEMP folder on the R: drive. This meant that for some programs that might use the system's default temp space, it might fail, the folder R:\TEMP being nonexistent.

To get around this I simply modified my environment variables for TEMP and TMP to reference the root of the RAM drive, R:\. Now the StumbleUpon toolbar add-on installs successfully.

In case you encounter this error, make sure that you have sufficient space available in whatever folder you tell Windows to use as scratch space, and of course that it exists in the first place and is accessible.

iPhones Don't Kill People...

Center Text AND Images Within ASP .NET

I recently integrated the handy AddThis sharing and analytics tool into an ASP .NET site I'm working on.

Whether due to peculiarities of the markup or browser idiosyncrasies, I couldn't get the widget consistently centered. The widget code lives in a div tag, and despite a popular few suggestions, I simply couldn't get things centered horizontally.

Centering text is no big deal; simply applying a CSS style usually does this well enough:


text-align: center;



Images, however, aren't accounted for by this markup. 

I ended up enclosing the widget in a Table control with the HorizontalAlign attribute specified to "Center", and this did the trick.

Centered!

Much easier to allow ASP .NET to handle the grunt work of emitting the necessary markup in this case than messing (directly) with styles.