I hate spam

The meetup was a bust- I was feeling unwell and when no one showed up by the 8pm meet time, I told Andrew let's get out of here. I did see 1 chap who looked familiar; I'm pretty sure he was the one I met at the last meetup I tried to go to about 6 months ago. If so, he was a classic inarticulate, female-phobic, internet sort whose interests in SF & F were diametrically opposite to mine. He was a fan of TV/Film derivative series books. 'Nuff said.

I did have a pleasant time with Andrew in the afternoon at least. We had something reasonable to eat at Cosi and he brought me the Life of Brian dvd. We went to Virgin Magastore and they had a $10 DVD sale - so I bought 4 new DVDs and handed them over to Andrew. Two Eddie Murphy films, Trading Places and Coming to America, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and I'll be damned if I can remember the name of the 4th film. I was shocked to discover that Blues Brothers is out of print. I can buy a new copy of the DVD from the resale market at a massively inflated price but the thought annoys me.

Today the new phone line was installed so I finally have reliable access to the internet again.

Alan's really progressing with the rewrite of his online game, Federation. While retaining the charm and attractions of the old, original game, the new one has it's own slightly different but increased charm. It has a great deal more attraction with loads of nifty new features and Alan's only up to working on Trader level. The added years of game design experience show in the more elegant storyline, system development and gameplay design. Yes, I'm prejudiced. I think its a fantastic game. I think Alan's brilliant. Brilliant but modest. Well, ok, brilliant.

Had an interesting chat with the Verizon tech who installed the phone line. He said within 5 years ALL phone lines in NYC will be fundamentaly DSL and all calls carried over the internet (fiber-optic lines). So when someone wants local service or DSL it'll all be the same, they'll just get supplied with a filter for the DSL. Clever.

I'm going to a F&SF meetup at Virgin Megastore's cafe tomorrow night. We'll see if this one is any better than the last one I attended. Frankly the Lunarians meeting are the real thing and so far the only ones worth attending that I've found.

I was voted in to the Lunarians (the NY Science Fiction Society) in January but each month since I've missed the meeting because I've been in the UK so much. I'll finally make the May meeting- and make sure to pay my annual dues.

Spam - hate it. I mean really and truly hate it and the people who send it. I want to have them sent to jail for many years, confiscate all their property, hurt them. A lot.

Seriously, spam used to just annoy me when I was on broadband and using Outlook. The speed of broadband made downloading 1000+ pieces of abominable, sick, sexual offers and drug sales, and fraudulent offers of every kind a quick and almost transparent process. Outlook easily let me set up a simple filter (rule) to separate mail ONLY from people or lists in my addressbook from the vast deluge of spam. It was a snap.

Now however, I'm back on plain old dial-up and downloading the huge accumulations of rubbishy spam takes real time! A lot of time. My time at MY expense. And to protect myself from the increasingly sophisticated malicious crap arriving I'm forced to use Pegasus mail (which I find seriously inferior to Outlook in ALL ways). The worst part about Pegasus mail is the filtering system is so crappy I haven't been able to get it to separate the mail the way Outlook did. This means MAJOR amounts of my time being wasted to manually delete the spam. I hate this!

I hate spammers.

Rat Race - what a trite, dumb, derivative and totally hilarious film! Andrew brought it over and insisted we watch it. We were laughing so hard at times I couldn't breathe. Bad film. Bad, bad, bad,. So bad it was perfect. Each and every little detail was so perfectly horrible. This has to be the funniest film I've seen in ages. I don't mean charming and amusing. I mean laugh so hard your abdominal muscles start to spasm and hurt and you can't breathe.

Absolutely a charm for a boring, lazy, warm spring afternoon with nothing to do.