Great Spam, Part I

Hi Everyone,

So... I have this strange love for finding bizarre spam e-mails. This all started because I have to clear them out of my work e-mail every morning, and have seen some pretty priceless ones over the past few months. I stumbled upon this one today, and thought about posting these in their fullest (I post highlights on my Twitter feed regularly). So here it is, part one of many!

Subject: Awaiting Your Urgent Message.

Hello,

It is times such as this i value the taste of a 1968 Bas Armagnac minty grafted wine or a vacation to the Mediterranean just to take my mind off all the heartaches & pains caused by years of conflict within my family.

I will get straight to the point so that i won't take much of your time.

I am suffering from pancreatic cancer and the medical team over here in Oslo are doing all they can to prolong my days on this earth. A tumor has grown within my pancreas and my system is totally dysfunctional. I can't seem to eat anymore, and my time is growing nearer as each day passes on.

All my life, i have been charitable with my families' wealth; not because i never really worked for it but because i have always had the heart to give to the less privileged so that the Lord can give back to me in his own way.

My time is short, i will not be able to continue this journey anymore but i want to give you the responsibility when i am gone to take custody of my inheritance and spread it across millions of charity homes worldwide. I know you would be wondering why don't i contact the charities myself, but my experiences in the past have made me learn that if you put all your eggs in one basket, it would definitely get squashed. There is a need to spread the wealth around, especially during an economic recession where access to capital is slow.

I will empower you fully but the decision is yours and yours only to make. I need to rest my fingers for a bit but I expect to hear from you, maybe sometime soon because I can't predict my time anymore.

The last of my money is the huge cash deposit of ($21m) usd. That I have with a Bank in London (Abbey Bank Security). I will want you to help me collect this deposit and dispatched it to charity organizations and let them know that it is I, Mrs. Cathy Harder, that is making this generous donation.

I am writing this from my laptop computer in my hospital bed where I wait for my time to come.

You can reply Via my Private Email Address: Mrs.CathyHarder@live.com

Looking forward to hearing from you.



Regards,

Mrs. Cathy Harder

wireless forever!

Something that is near and dear to my heart (and many other people's, as I'm told) is my cell phone. Its brand and style are just one reason why I love my cell phone. The other, bigger, reason is all the freedom it affords me. Not only am I not wired down, as I would be with a land line, but I’m not even restricted to one specific (relatively small) geographic location, as I also would be with a land line. Cell phones allow us to do everything one can do with a land line, and then so much more. When was the last time you texted a friend from your cordless phone? Or live in two cities for four years and keep the same phone number all the way through? It is because of reasons like these that youth in Canada (and I would presume many other countries as well) are leading the migration away from landlines.

According to StatsCan, the number of Canadian households that have only a cell phone (and no land line) is eight percent. But when looking only at households comprised of 19 to 34 year-olds we see that over 34 percent have made that change. Obviously this trend will only grow from here. So why is it such a struggle with Canadian wireless providers to have better and cheaper plans? Why are we forced into three year contracts, a system access fee, and other rediculous charges if we want anything beyond a basic voice and text plan?

The times they are a changin'. Unfortunately our providers are not.

why i even have a blog.

There is really only one reason why I have started up 'the dive'. But first, some story...

I made my Facebook account at the beginning of my first year of university, when the whole network seemed like a little oasis in the vastness of the internet: only university students could join, being validated by our super-important official university e-mail addresses. Over the years of my post-secondary schooling, while studying two of the most traditional degrees within the faculty of Arts & Science, the emerging world of web 2.0 fascinated me.

Four years later I had to get a Twitter account, because my boss asked me to. I had been resisting the Twitter phenomenon for one main reason: just because I'm into all this media stuff, it doesn't mean that I don't have some sort of life unattached from a computer. In fact that's the whole other side of my life- exploring the city and experiencing what Toronto has to offer the average 20-something year-old. Twitter just seemed like something that would suck away any remaining free time after Facebooking time had been accounted for. But now, I tweet.

And thus the digital circle of life just seems more complete with a blog. It's where the social activity of Facebook (the endless amount of events + post-event pictures pushed by promoters from the clubbing district, Church, and the hipster region) and the hyper-interactivity of Twitter can all meld together into the giant blogging extravaganza that is 'the dive'.

So, this is that. No promises made, and we'll see what happens!