Krzysztof D'Aardvark

I recevied a spam email today that contained the following text.

Workmen began to edge down the stairs carrying a table. They glared at Gosseyn, then twisted over to Crang. If he failed, there would never be a second chance. With a sharp effort, Leigh steadied himself. Even in that darkness, he found the object within seconds. He was only going to a restaurant.

I'm sure you're aware that spammers use a number of techniques to make the body of their emails look like genuine content. This one is either making up some very good sentences or scraping text from somewhere online.

So, for reasons I'm not sure about (:cough:procrastination:cough:) I whacked a couple of the sentences into Google (with quotes). No result. However, when I stuck the sentences in on their own it came up with a link to some Chinese pages that contained one or several science fiction stories in english. (1)(2)(3).

Each page seems to be a self-contained short story but there does seem to be links between them. Is it a story? Perhaps its a collaborative writing project? Unfortunately, the index page doesn't give any additional clues, unless you can read Chinese.

Tomorrow is polling day for the European Elections. In the 19 years I've been able to vote I've voted in 1 local election, no general elections and no European Elections. However, I will be voting tomorrow.

Why?

Because unless we vote for someone, there's a possibility that one of the more extreme and bigoted parties could succeed. Recent media hyperbole over the expenses scandal has left many voters disillusioned with all politicians and considering not voting. In a proportional representation vote like the European elections this leaves a distinct possibility that parties like the BNP or UKIP, or worse, who can still mobilise their supporters will steal a few seats.

I have no strong affiliation for any party, which is why I rarely vote. So I'm simply going to vote for the party that is closest to my ideals out of the parties that I dislike least.

According to euprofiler.eu, my nearest political party is the Conservative Party. I don't find that particularly surprising so I will probably vote for them. But to be honest, that's only because they're not one of the parties I don't want to succeed.

Image via CrunchBase

I installed the Zemanta plugin for WordPress prior to writing the last blog post. It enhances the WordPress dashboard with a collection of suggested Flickr pictures, YouTube videos and "Additional Reading" blog post suggestions. It will also review the text of your entry and suggest tags and offer links to auto convert word in your entry to.

I found it extremely easy to use and the links it suggests seem vaguely appropriate as do the tags. The auto linking is selective and turn linking words like Zemanta and Wordpress into a single click operation.

We all know that I'm late for everything. I'm actually planning on being deliberately late for my own funeral so as not to disappoint the hundreds of people who've predicted it over the years. However, on this occassion I have an excuse. ME/CFS Awareness Day was yesterday and yesterday I didn't have a working weblog. So today, I'll make amends, of sorts, by posting my first non-"yey, I've got a weblog" post on the subject.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, sometime dismissevly referred to as Yuppie Flu, is a seriously debilitating illness. I'm lucky to have avoided any direct experience of it. Indeed, until I met the campaigning RachelCreative on Twitter, I'd never even met anyone who had suffered from it. I have very little, therefore, I can contribute to raising awareness other than to encourage you, if you've no experience of the illness yourself, to become aware and to read about it.

A very good place to start is RachelCreative's ME/CFS Awareness blog, in particular the list of people who have also blogged about ME/CFS or participated in the Awareness Day or Week If you would like to help yourself, I would encourage you to raise awareness yourself. Perhaps you could start by visiting this blog post by RachelCreative's husband and donate 10 minutes of your time in sponsorship of his bike ride.