hello, hello, one, two, can you hear me, hello

Welcome.

I am a computer programmer and consultant. In my day job, I write programs that process and analyse electronic data, set up computer systems which exchange information in all kinds of very technical ways using all sorts of Internet protocols and programming languages and operating systems, and I probably know the meaning of 50% of all the 2-to-5-letter acronyms (from AJAX to ZFS) which constitute the secret language of computer geeks. I can set up a website from the ground up, and I can break down a PDF document into individual bits of meaning. But then, I can just barely use my mobile phone to make phone calls, I have no idea how a blog works, and have never actually seen a Twitter message (is it really called a twit ?).

Anyway thus, this is my first blog. It is even my first post to any blog. Be warned.

So, presuming that you are still interested, how did I get to it, and what is this all about ?

Well, I do use email. Not the HTML kind of course, that is for sissies and marketing-types. But I have a mailbox, and like most of them it gets scam emails every day. Not very many apparently, compared to the statements of some of my friends or familiars, so either mine is not a very interesting target or my ISP is doing a reasonable job of filtering them out.
Unlike most of the people I know however, I do not immediately discard the "Urgent Business Proposal" or "Attention beneficiary!" emails addressed to "undisclosed-recipients", but I have taken to reading them, and as it so happens over a period of time my interest in them has grown.

If you read these messages in a certain way, day after day, and you start comparing them and remembering past ones, you will quickly start to find similarities, differences, tendencies, and styles. There is also humor in them, if mostly accidental. And there is even a big central mystery : how can this thing survive, and over decades ?
So there is a subject there, maybe a whole sub-culture, quite dynamic, but apparently totally ignored by our eminent sociologists, anthropologists, and evidently also by our busines and marketing consultants. And while this narrow and bizarre subject may not interest anyone else, it does it for me and I feel like commenting about it.

I could of course have simply kept notes to myself, but that is not much fun, and I wanted to share my observations. So I started swamping my old friend Ty's mailbox with selected quotes and comments, until presumably he could take no more and he gently but forcefully convinced me to start a blog instead, this blog. He even set it up for me, and I strongly suspect that at this very minute he is looking over my shoulder while I type, ready to gently coax me back into the right path if I would show the slightest sign of giving up and targeting his mailbox again.

So for better or worse and probably the latter, and for an undeterminate amount of time and with a healthy dose of scepticism, here it is, the blog about scams and maybe other things besides.