Ordinary Gweilo

Companies sending spam grow ever more ingenious in their attempts to persuade to read their stupid messages. In the last few days I have received a few emails that appear to be completely blank (no sender, no recipient, no subject). I deleted most of them but then opened one out of curiosity, and it is indeed spam. Is this supposed to defeat spam filters?

Meanwhile, I was posting comments here this afternoon, and was surprised to receive this message:

In an effort to combat malicious comment posting by scripts, I’ve enabled a feature that requires a weblog commenter to wait a short amount of time before being able to post again. Please try to post your comment again in a short while. Thanks for your patience.

All this for $8.95 a month, but I do have to ask whether “commenter” is a real word. In a similar vein, did you know that if you try to use your Octopus card on the same minibus twice within a certain period of time it gets rejected? Even if you go somewhere and then come back again (as I did recently). Bit too clever for its own good, I fear. Like my own blog preventing me from posting comments…

I’ve been trying out Blogjet (following a tip-off by the Geeky Kaiser), but it’s still unable to put the correct date and time on Typepad posts, and randomly publishes draft posts. Not good, and the current beta version expires soon and there’s no sign of a new one*, so it may be on its way out. It’s a good idea, but making it compatible with all the different blogging systems is proving quite a challenge. Plus, Typepad have recently made it a lot easier to includes pictures, which was one reason I was trying Blogjet.

[*UPDATE: BlogJet has ended beta testing and issued a new release, but they haven’t fixed the problem with dates and times on posts]