Archive for November, 2006
The first time you get a spam message most people think “hey, great, I’m on the map! Someone I don’t know has taken the time to contact me!”. Admittedly this mild ego rush is not long lived and soon you start to see spam as really very annoying as you spend so much of your time deleting it.
If you are able to recapture that feeling you got when you receivied your first spam message and you think that spammers are just normal guys and gals just doing their jobs and selling really interesting (ahem!) “products and services” then we will show you how you can make sure that your “cup runneth over” i.e. that your email inbox is a finely tuned spam magnet!
To start accumulating spam you’ve got to get your email address out there! So join some forums and bulletin boards and flag *not* to protect your email address. Also, if you have a website of your own be sure to proudly include your email address as a hyperlink on the contact page rather than keeping it hidden behind a contact ‘form’. This will ensure that many of the trawlers, automated scrapers and email harvesters that the spammers use are able to find your address.
Send lots of e-cards to your friends (that way they can get spam too!) and signup to lots of newsletters on sites that don’t have a privacy policy. Or if they do have a privacy statement and offer the ability to opt out of the maillist then check the “Let 3rd party companies contact me via email from time to time” box - this will mean that a whole bunch of companies will legally be able to spam you.
An obvious one this one, don’t buy use any antispam / spam blocking software - it’s email that’s been sent to you, its yours to read or delete as you see fit - there’s no reason why some automated system should be allowed to stop messages from arriving in your inbox or delete them automatically once they are in!
Set up and autoresponder on your email account - this will verify that the email account the spammer has emailed to is still active and keep them coming back for more.
Many spam emails have a ‘Remove me from the mailing list’ link - if you get a message from a company that you do not recognise as having communicated with previously then click this link. “Why would I do that if I am trying to collect spam?”, I hear you say (I’ve got very good hearing)… well, because this is another way that spammers can verify that your address is active and that email going to it actually gets read!
When you receive a spam you need to open the message (or at least have it visible in the Preview Pane). Also, make sure that the “Don’t download pictures or other content automatically in HTML e-mail” option in MS Outlook is unchecked (found in Tools >> Options >> Security >> Change Automatic Download Settings…). This will mean that when you receive an HTML spam email the pictures that are in the email will be downloaded from their webserver. By checking which emails are requesting pictures the spammers have a clear idea of which email accounts are active and being looked at regularly i.e. who to spam to again, make sure you are on the list!
Remember that most people, unlike you and I, detest spam and delete it straight away without reading it. For spam as a marketing activity to be a success and therefore a practice that is continued there has to be some payback for the spammer. This is generally that something is sold (commission is made) as a result of the spam campaign or that traffic is generated which, via ads, is converted into revenue. To help spammers justify their actions you need to visit the sites they are advertising - if noone visited sites appearing in spam then spammers would die out. To help stop spammers from becoming extinct you need to give them revenue by at least having the decency to go to the site they have been kind enough to inform you about.
OK, so you’ve opened their informative email and you’ve clicked the link in the email, well done. Now you need to either buy something or click on some of the ads on the page you are looking at. This is how spammers get their money so it’s important that a percentage of spam results in increased sales or else spam would stop, please do your bit to maintain the viability of spamming as a marketing practice.
Check that you’re email setting in MS Outlook doesn’t have any ‘rules’ setup that might filter your email (i.e. delete messages that aren’t addressed to you directly etc) and don’t use ‘junk mail’ options either as this may mean that you don’t get to see all the spam you should.
If you’re just not getting enough spam or, despite your best efforts your spams levels have plateaued then here’s an alternative ways to open the spam floodgates. Consider buying a few domain names and setting ‘catch-all email forwarding’ to point at one of your email addresses. Spam merchants now, by hook or by crook, have databases of registered domain names and so, even without *knowing* that an email address exists, will email info@… sales@… bob@… etcetc@… Setting up your catchall means the spammers don’t receive a ‘bounce’ message (i.e. an automated message saying that the account could not be found) and the spammer therefore thinks he’s struck it lucky and emailed a real account. This email address can then be reused by the spammers for their next campaign.
I have recently started to average about 200 spam messages a day with my best ever being 276 spams in a 24 hour period - I’m sure that with a bit of effort you too could achieve the same levels of spam that I am enjoying presently! If you know of any other ways to boost the number of unsolicited emails you get then let me know!
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November 21st, 2006
Getting promoted normally means more responsibilty, more money and more opportunities for personal development. To make sure your career becomes stagnant we will highlight some of the main do’s and don’ts to ensure you never wind up getting promoted, earning more money or realising your full potential.
People tend to get promoted for a variety of reasons, for instance:
a) as a reward because they’re good at they do
b) the person shows a lot of potential for development
c) to fill a vacancy from within the company
d) as a means of retaining good workers that would leave soon if not promoted
e) someone is bad at their job but it’s not going to be easy (or pretty!) for the company to get rid of them so they promote the person ‘out of trouble’.
Understanding some of these reasons means that we can formulate patterns of behaviour and character traits that are required if you are to wallow in your current role and never move any higher. The first and most obvious point is *never* to ask to be promoted or apply for a promotion! This first point conforms to the maxim “you don’t get what you don’t ask for”.
It’s ok to be ok at your job but make sure you don’t excel at it. If you become very competent in your current role those above you may feel obliged to promote you, maybe even making you a trainer of new people to the organisation. Going the other way, make sure you’re not the worst at your job too - the aim is to get into your comfy rut, not to get sacked!
Don’t be asking questions about your job and especially not about other areas in the company - don’t appear interested in the running of the business and look bored if anyone starts to talk about the internal workings of the company. Don’t volunteer any ideas for improving the business, no suggestions for making it more efficient, and no thoughts about how the company could make more / spend less money! Shrink your interests to the bubble immediately round yourself and don’t give anyone any reason to suspect you’re (capable of) thinking about a wider picture.
Get on ok with your boss and don’t slag him off to other people behind his back. This means that he is more likely to stay (/ last!) for longer and while he’s got his job you won’t be considered for it! (Note that this is probably the only piece of advice that works both ways i.e. if for some inexplicable reason you did want to get promoted then you should still follow this advice).
Dress in clothes like the other people at your level, not in clothes like your boss would wear. If you start to dress like your boss other people in the company will start to ’see’ you as being from that level - this means that your promotion is less of a mental leap in the imaginations of those above you as, in part, they already see you as ‘one of them’ - don’t dress above your station! A bit scruffy is a good rule but certainly don’t try and adopt the latest fashions from the tramp world!
Have a bit of a lark at work… you spend most of waking hours there so it should be a bit of a giggle right? Right! You don’t want to appear too professional so it would be wise to photocopy a funny body part every now and again, lock someone in the stationery cupboard, or, in true Bart-esque style, ask the receptionist to put a call out for Seymour Butts. Don’t go overboard, you want to be seen as humourously unprofessional rather than a liability that needs to be offloaded with speed!
By sticking to the guidelines above you should be able to get overlooked for promotion again and again and again. If you have any other tips or advice about how, in a world of opportunity, you’ve managed / plan to remain a small fry then do tell!
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November 17th, 2006
Sleep is a darned annoying thing… without enough of it you die, you tend to need it most at the least appropriate times and you can’t bank it for future use! Anyway, I have compiled some tips to ensure that you never get a full nights sleep again and that you live the rest of your life in a zombie-like sleep deprived state, feeling terrible, looking haggard and being generally grumpy!
Top of my list in how to make sure you’re really shattered all the time is to have kids! If you can can bring a new one into the world every three years or so you will me maximising the amount of time you have terrible sleep for. It’s not just the screaming to be fed and nappies changed etc that takes chunks out of your sleep each night, when they get older they’ll be out late and you won’t be able to sleep without worrying about them. Parenthood is not for the feint-hearted, the impatient or those lacking in stamina!
Another thing to do is to have a really badly sprung bed. An uncomfortable bed will be something you can wrestle with all night much to your annoyance and sleep avoidance.
Have a TV / office in your bedroom! From a psychological point of view it’s important for there to be a clear distinction between where you work / watch TV and where you retire! If you’re used to feeling hyped watching action movies in bed etc then you’re not going to find drifting off to sleep the easiest of tasks. So to really confuse your body and ensure that sleep comes far from easilly you should have a telly and computer etc in your bedroom.
Make sure you drink lots of caffeine. Caffeine mimics adrenalin and keeps you wired and hyper making it difficult for you to unwind and it reduces the quality of the sleep you get. This habit becomes self fuelling because you drink coffee / cola… you sleep badly… you wake up and need a ‘lift’ so you… drink more coffee, round and round you go. So, abuse caffeine, especially later in the day for really unsettled sleep.
Go to bed on an argument. Got a spouse, parent, kid, sibling, friend that you can have a fight with? Go for it, make sure you say lots of stuff you don’t mean in the heat of the moment and that they do likewise and then go to bed without actually making up. You’ll be a seeting tangled mess of anger and guilt that will surely take you some time to wind down from.
Eat a good sized fatty meal before you go to bed. Late night munchies? Have a pizza before you go to bed, this will raise your metabolic rate and keep your body ’stoked’ as it struggles to digest the fat (which is more difficult to breakdown than carbohydrate). Both of these mean that sleep will not come quickly and will probably be quite fitful when it does finally descend on you. Also, in the case of pizza, all that cheese will give you wierd dreams (dude!).
Go to bed at a specific time i.e. before you are tired. Going to bed before you are ready to sleep is a good way to feed your insomniac tendencies. All that tossing and turning in bed getting increasingly frustrated at your inability to become enveloped by sleep will be great at keeping you awake longer and conditioning your body that the bed is not a place for sleeping in, but is really a place for not sleeping in!
Not a very practical one this but if you get the opportunity then move next door to some really noisy, party-animal neighbours. The sound of loud techno music at 2a.m. is not renowned for its sedative effects and the associated sounds of people screaming and shouting, car horns honking and wheels screeching will ensure that you arise bleary-eyed and thoroughly unrested.
Leave the curtains open and / or a light on - the production of sleep hormones tends to be stilmulated by by darkness so lots of light, especially the early morning sun in summer, will ensure that struggle to sleep and then awake early. This is why people in Canada and the Scandanavian countries struggle in Summer so much with their sleep, so I guess takling this to the extreme you could emmigrate to Canada, Greenland, Norway, Finland, Sweden etc…
Sleep on a very narrow bed. Preferably not next to a wall. You will be uncomfortably concious of not wanting to fall off the bed when you roll over and this will be an unsettling distraction when you are sleeping / trying to sleep.
Make sure you are too hot or too cold and just generally uncomfortable. It’s difficult to be soothed by sleep’s calm embrace if there’s beads of sweat grouping on your face or you’re shivering uncontrollably. A couple of blankets too few or too many can take hours of sleep away from you. As indeed can tight bedclothes that threaten to cut you in half or act as tourniques with every move you make.
Have a lumpy pillow - guaranteed to annoy the hell out of the most saintly of people. The icing on the cake would be to have a nylon pillow case - I can almost feel the prickly heat now!
Last on my list is an unusual one as it tends to make you sleep more! Yes drink alcohol before you go to bed - while it does induce sleep it’s the wrong kind of sleep so even if you get an hour more sleep than normal you’ll wake up feeling like you only slept half the night (or worse!).
That’s it, I reckon that by following these tips you’ll be able knock at least three hours of sleep off a day and make yourself look about 10 years older! If you have any other tips about how to feel shattered 24/7 then please share them… assuming you’re not too tired to tell me!
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November 12th, 2006
High blood pressure isn’t a nice thing, it can lead to premature death via kidney failure, stroke, heart attacks to name but a few. Blood pressure tends to rise with age due to a variety of factors including stiffening and furring of the arteries which makes the heart have to work harder to push blood around and this ‘pushing harder’ means higher blood pressure. We have compiled a list of the most effective ways of raising your blood pressure!
The easiest way to boost both your systolic and diastolic blood pressures is to put weight on - the more the better. The bigger you are the more blood you have and the more blood vessels you have and so the harder your heart has to work to ensure that all your body’s cells are getting the fuel, oxygen and nutrients they need. I have an article that outlines the best ways to gain weight quickly if you are stuck for ideas about how to bloat fast.
Eat as much ‘hard’ fat as you can. Animal fat, butter, lard, cheese, full fat milk, cream, ghee, coconut, palm oil, processed meat products (i.e. burger, hot dogs etc) etc all contain more than their fair share of saturated fat and it is this hard fat that cruises round your blood stream looking for somewhere to latch onto. The accumulation of these fatty deposits on the inside of your arteries results in ‘furred’ arteries which are narrower than they would be on account of the fat that’s clogging them. Narrower blood vessels means a higher blood pressure is needed to get blood through them, so eating fatty meat products or cheesey / creamy foods etc is a great way to increase your blood pressure. Worthy of particular note are the ‘trans’ fats also refered to as ‘hydrogenated vegetable oil / fat’ which are made from vegetable oil that has been made solid (at room temperature) by passing hydrogen through it - these kinds of fats are quite widely used in many processed foods, snacks, cakes, chocolate, biscuits, margarine etc. Anyway, the trans fats / hydrogenated veg oils etc are noteworthy as they appear to be *worse* than normal saturated fat - so double portions of chocolate biscuits all round!
Start smoking or smoke more than you are doing now. Smoking tobacco constricts your blood vessels pretty much instantaneously and if the blood vessels shrink then by definition your blood pressure sky rockets. Smoking is an excellent and efficient way to stress your heart although it’s not as cheap a method of raising your blood pressure as it used to be, not in the UK anyway. Note: if you find the idea of smoking to be an unpalatable way to raise your blood pressure you can console yourself with the fact that because (a) nicotine (the drug that you’re smoking the tobacco for) enters the blood stream so quickly and (b) that it is metabolised from the blood stream in a very short time (i.e. minutes) and (c) that your body becomes tolerant to nicotime very quickly, that you won’t need to smoke for very long before you become physically addicted to smoking. So if you persevere with smoking regularly for the first few weeks you’ll find that you’re over the worst of it and that it soon becomes a craving that demands being satisfied.
Drink too much alcohol is good for another few points on your blood pressures. By ‘too much alcohol’ I mean more than one or two beers / glasses of wine a day. Beware, drinking a modest amount of alcohol (say one drink a day) can actually *lower* your blood pressure so to keep it high make sure you either drink no alcohol or, preferably, drink a bucket load each day.
Make sure your diet is rich in sodium (i.e. salt, MSG etc). Sodium encourages the retention of fluid which equates to an elevated blood pressure. So to push your blood pressure higher you should make sure that you regularly eat takeaways, junk food, processed food, tv meals, tinned food, seafood, salted snacks etc and also add sea salt / sauces to your meals. Note that these kinds of foods tend to be calorifically dense so they will help you put weight on too thereby boosting your blood pressure further.
Avoid or reduce the amount of exercise you do. In scientific study after scientific study it has been shown that regular aerobic exercise reduces your blood pressure and strengthens the heart muscles. So in order to keep your blood pressure high or raise it further you need to become more sedentary. Reducing the amount of exercise you do will mean that you’ll put more weight on (unless you diet) which will further enhance the blood pressure raising effect.
Elevated and constant levels of stress raise blood pressure too. So why not become a city trader or a school teacher (that’s *got* to be stressful!) or become a perfectionist or just one of those people that everyone refers to as a ‘worrier’. Work long hours, don’t take breaks (or holidays / vacations for that matter), skimp on sleep, make sure you commute long distances and don’t practice any ‘relaxation techniques’ like Tai Chi, Yoga or going for casual strolls etc. Tip: if your life isn’t actually that stressful then you can always mimic the effects of stress by consuming caffeine which induces an adrenaline-like response in the body which increases your pulse rate and raises blood pressure.
If you follow the advice above I can pretty much guarantee your blood pressure will go on the up and up! If you have any other tips you have found effective in raising your blood pressure then please let me know.
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November 7th, 2006
With a little motivation and behaviour change I will show you how to pile the pounds on even whilst ‘dieting’! We have compiled the 11 of the biggest and easiest ways to ensure your diet doesn’t work, whatever diet you’re using!
If you want to fail at dieting here’s our collection of Do’s and Don’ts:
1) Skip Breakfast - breakfast is the most important meal of the day and having a good and healthy breakfast can reduce the hunger you feel throughout the rest of the day and therefore reduce the calories you are likely to eat. So it is important that you skip breakfast each day, just have a cup of coffee instead.
2) Only Eat When You’re Really Hungry - by not eating very often your body goes into starvation mode i.e. your metabolic rate slows right down (the rate at which you burn calories) as your body doesn’t know when it’s going to get its next meal and so it preserves the calories it has already rather than waste them! This means that when you do finally eat pretty much all of it gets stored as fat in readiness for the next ‘fast’. This is a good way to make sure that you don’t shed any weight and bloat faster than a puffer fish.
3) Have a Couple of Big Meals Each Day - when you eat you force your metabolic rate higher for a time which means you burn calories faster - so, from a fat preservation point of view, it’s best to consume the same number of calories as you would do normally but distributed between fewer meals.
4) Eat Sugary / Starchy Foods with a High GI - GI stands for glycaemic index and is a measure of how fast a food that you eat can be converted to fuel (glucose) that gets transported in your blood. After a meal your blood sugar level (BSL) goes up and (in non-diabetic people) this is met with increased insulin levels which help to take this unneeded fuel out of your blood and store it for later use, i.e. glucose in your blood gets changed to glycogen or fat and stored. The higher the GI of the food you eat the quicker you will be flooding your bloodstream with unnecessary fuel that needs to be stored rather than used. Low GI foods on the other hand would offer a slow release of fuel into the blood more inline with the body’s requirement and so aren’t as effective at making you fatter. Also, a time after eating high GI foods your BSL tends to ‘crash’ which can leave you feeling faint, in a cold sweat, feeling weak and very hungry… so you will tend to want to eat some more high GI food to boost your blood sugar level etc etc and the carb loop continues. So, recapping, if you want to fail to lose weight then high GI foods like potatoes, pasta, rice, white bread, cakes etc should never be far from hand and lower GI foods like whole grain foods, fruit, veg, beans, nuts, fish etc should be relegated to the back of your cupboard.
5) Drink Soft Drink / Caffeinated Beverages - soft drinks contain lots of sugar (sucrose) which if you’re not exercising is likely to be converted to fat in quite an efficient manner. Caffeine on the other hand, while it does increase your metabolic rate (i.e. helps you to burn calories), it also makes you crave for starchy / sugary foods. So to keep your weight up you’d do well to keep soft drinks and coffee etc as your main sources of fluid intake throughout the day.
6) Weigh Yourself Every Day - your body weight will naturally vary quite a bit from day to day for no easily isolatable reason. Weighing yourself every day (rather than say once a week) will mean that you will see days where you’ve been ‘good’ and your weight has *still* gone up. This will be a body blow for morale and will make you more likely to give up your diet so weigh yourself at least once a day.
7) Anorexic Supermodel as Your Target - research has shown that having realistic targets helps ensure that goals are met. If you have a ludicrous target as the envisaged ‘destination’ of your diet then you are likely to get very frustrated by your (relative) lack of progress and give up trying i.e. “what’s the point?” syndrome. Surround yourselves with magazine photos of the most underfed supermodels and convince yourself that that is the look you should be striving for.
8) Easy on the Fruit and Veg - fruit and vegetables contain calories so by skimping on these nutrient packed foods means you’ll have earned the calorific right to sniff a cube of chocolate.
9) Bedtime Snack - the night is long right? And you might die if you went all that time without eating mightn’t you? Having a meal or snack just before bed makes use of your body’s reduced metabolic rate whilst sleeping and ensures that you are able to efficiently convert the calories in that late meal into fat. Better still, you can use the fact that you had a late meal as an excuse to forego breakfast the next day!
10) No Extra Exercise - not only do you burn extra calories while exercising you also raise your metabolic rate for a time after you have finished exercising - a double whammy! So to keep the pounds on you should avoid exercise like the plague!
11) Say ‘No’ to Water - don’t drink spring water or tap water. When you are dehydrated your body tends to misread thirst signals for hunder signals so if you are thirsty all the time you are more likely to overeat. Sugary / fizzy drinks are good water replacements as not only are these laden with calories they are also ‘water-robbing’ meaning that you are actually thirstier *after* you have drunk them than you were before - an easy habit that pretty much guarantees you’ll keep hold of your hard earned fat!
If you have found any other methods very effective at stacking on the pounds relentlessly then let’s hear them!
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November 2nd, 2006