Today we break the 3,000 message mark on the spam count. 3,274 spams in five days to be precise, of which 847 arrived today. Among them were seven genuine messages – two from mailing lists, two identical messages from the same friend who always sends every email twice (perhaps just to make sure) and three comments on this blog, so none of them were really personal emails (the two from the friend were a multi-person joke). It will be interesting to see whether things quieten down on the spam front over the next couple of days. If they do, I guess that points to the fact that for most spammers it’s a Monday to Friday job. I doubt that they will, though.

Ooh, look – two new MacUser people blogs (here and here), both using the excellent Mindsay, which allows you to post using iChat.

I wish you could post to Movable Type that way, as it’s far easier than logging in and typing your entry into a series of windows.

I’ve done a hunt for posting to Movable Type by email and it looks far too tricky to attempt in an evening. Instead, then, I’ve started work on a news parsing site to host on morningnews.co.uk.

Nothing like postponing important jobs until they’re not so tircky, eh?

Day four of the spam count (out of seven) and the tally is roughly 10 times the total for the whole week when I did this back in 2002. Back then I thought 200-odd was pretty shocking, but it’s nothing compared to this.

On a brighter note, today’s payload included 16 genuine emails, but on a downer there was a piece of comment spam on this blog from, of all people, Tesco. Well, I say it was from Tesco, but it was linking straight through to Tesco’s finance services, and the only text inside the comment was a colloquial Tesco ad. I really, really hope it wasn’t actually Tesco or one of its ad agencies. If so, it’s very underhand.

Dip me in chocolate and feed me to the lesbians…

There’s a line you don’t expect to hear at the opera.

…what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fucking fucking fucking fuck…

There’s another one.

In an attempt to get at least vaguely close to culture, Paul and I met after work and went to Jerry Springer, the Opera last night. We got soaked on the way, of course, getting ourselves caught in a thunder and hail storm in Covent Garden. It was one of the most impressive storms I have seen in a very long time, with the hail bouncing high off the roof of the opera house, and finding its way in through the great glass ceiling of the Apple Market, to land on the tables and seats where we were sheltering.

I took pictures, but they didn’t come out so well.

…Slut junky, gay whore, gay whore, skanky skanky slut whore…

Anyhow, when it died down we made a run for the theatre and watched the mis-guided Mr and Mrs Old, and their friends Lord and Lady Even Older filing into the foyer and milling around before taking their seats.

What they thought Jerry Springer was about, I don’t know, but from the level of Diamonique on their fingers I’m guessing they were more QVC than Living TV, so their ignorance is understandable… Needless to say they quietly disappeared during the interval and were absent for the second half.

A weird thing happened last night when I went to take a leek
I ended up pissing on a man with a glorious physique
I said what on earth are you doing on the restroom floor
He said stop asking such stupid questions and piss on me some more

The over the top reviews certainly weren’t exaggerations. It moves so fast, it’s very funny, and the cast sounds great. There is so much going on in the background you never quite know what to look at, and it actually has a fairly intelligent (if highly blasphemous) back story.

The only trouble, of course, is you go home humming the lyrics, and ‘three nippled cousin fucker’ isn’t something you want to be singing on a train.

A record in two ways today. First, the lowest spam count of the week so far (it’s been on a steady decline so I’m wondering whether spam peaks on a Monday), and second, the highest number of genuine emails mixed up among it: 25 from friends and colleagues.

Looking back on when I did this experiment last year, I got about 450 spams for the whole week. The year before that I got about 200. I’m getting more than that every day at the moment, so clearly things are getting much worse, much quicker than anyone has noticed.

Yes, we do write for a living. Yes, we can spell. We’re just not so good at sticking things up in the right order, OK.

Compared to yesterday, today was a fairly quiet day on the spam front. 530 messages in total, of which six were genuine. Two of those real ones were duplicated, so there was really only five. Knock off another one because it was a test we were running at work and you have four. That’s just 0.75% of the total incoming email being real, and spam accounting for the remaining 99.25%. The running total for two days of counting, then, is 1,300 pieces of spam and less than 10 genuine, non-duplicate, non-test messages to my personal account. As a matter of interest, though, my AOL account is spam-free. Seems its filters are very effective.

Well, it’s about time I took a stock of the spam count again. I do it every year and I reckon an update it in order, so instead of just deleting I’ll keep track of the amount of spam I receive over the next week. Today gets us off to a good start with a total of 781 messages received, of which five were genuine and the remaining 776 were spam. Full of offers of vi@gra, xanax, the opportunity to fire my boss and the key to making a fortune on eBay. There would have been less genuine email if I’d not got into a couple of back-wards forwards exchanges. If I’d been relying solely on unsolicited incoming mail the ration would have been closer to 776:3. Note, these figures don’t include my work account. This count is purely from my personal inbox.

Looks like the postal service is changing around here. It’s being improved my ‘merging’ the first and second posts into just one delivery. It makes no difference to me as I’m always out when both collections come anyway, but it’s interesting to see how the Royal Mail justifies the move, claiming they are still one of the best performers in Europe:

Over at the Words Project, yesterday’s posting about the Express translates as this:

I don