What’s All This Then!

There’s nothing like a little mustard on a sausage biscuit or even just mustard on a biscuit (and Karl says, “Mmm Hmmm“). But yesterday, I found that I couldn’t get a single speck of mustard from mustard packs that had seemingly coagulated in our company’s breakroom. I found the ketchup packets much easier to use as I squeezed out this purplish red and black goo onto my breakfast sandwich. This may be part of our company’s new wellness program because the sight and smell of my biscuit suddenly made me no longer hungry. After I regretfully tossed my breakfast sandwich into the trashcan, I submitted the following suggestion to the powers that be:

If it’s not too much trouble, can something be done about the aged condiments in our breakroom? The mustard packets have started returning to seed form, the mayonnaise is old enough for admission to the mayo clinic, and the ketchup can’t catch up to your food no matter how hard you squeeze the packages. Even the salt is older than Lot’s wife! I don’t think their shelf life is supposed to be longer than the life of a shelf.

I know there are all kinds of ways to reduce the cost of a labor force, but poisoning them should not be an acceptable method.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Do you ever feel a little suspicious when sites ask for your email address? Yes, their free newsletter looks like it will give you crucial, life-changing, awe-inspiring information that you’ll never find anywhere else. Their downloadable program will make your life slicker than having baggies on your feet during an ice storm. Their privacy statement says that they won’t sell your address to any one who is handling an estate in a foreign country and needs to return a million dollars to you. Worse still, is that another site whom you would trust with your bank account and your first born, highly recommends signing up for that newsletter or downloading that program.

So I rarely sign up, load down, or give out my email address. Yet, somehow, somewhere, some evil spammer got a hold of my address and lately my inbox quickly fills each day with college offers, book deals, and weight loss promises. So which site violated my trust and my inbox?

Yesterday, I took action. I suspended my distrust and went to a disposable email service site recommended by CNET called sneakemail.com and set up an account. Now if I need to enter an email address, I go to sneakemail, have them generate a unique address that I can use to track where the spam is coming from. Any mail with that address will first go to sneakemail who will then forward it to my real address. This way, I can know who sold my good name. While this won’t help me with my current load of spammers, it will help in the future so I can then pass the word about which sites you should avoid.

UPDATE: sneakemail.com has become a pay-to-use service. As a result, I’ve started using Gishpuppy with excellent results. In fact, I’ve found much easier to use than sneakemail.

Popularity: 11% [?]

This might be one of the questions you get when you leave a comment to one of my posts. I reinstated the “did you pass math” plug-in to try and put an end to the hundreds of spam comments that I’ve been getting these past couple of months. My “Akismet Spam” has been catching them all but there are still several hundred that I have to wade through to make sure a legitimate comment didn’t get caught. So over the weekend, I turned on my next line of defense and waited. Today, instead of a few hundred spam comments, I found 67 waiting for me. Several of them had the same URLs and text but different IP addresses and websites. Are there that many people that have so little to do that they can sit around all day and send out spam? Does anyone have any better suggestions?

Popularity: 12% [?]