12 August 2004

I'm bored - who can I pick on I worked on my book tonight quite hard, and should be able to ship a chapter this weekend. That's a important milestone to get over in writing a new book. Now I'm bored though. I don't fancy playing any games, my Biztalk study for the past two days has me all coded out, so I thought I'd have a wander through my junk mail filter in search of idiots. I found a bunch of 419 scammers ("Help, I accident misplaced 30 million bucks and need your bank account to get it back" - you know the thing). I like to spam them back when I'm bored, so the first muppet got this response to his plea for help. WOW - what a fantastic opportunity. Oh no, wait, I'm sorry, I just found out I have a brain and can't possibly help on account of the fact that I'm not terminally STOOOPID! Get a life and a real job The next one claimed to be from the "only son" of some chief doobry wotsname. I did a quick google and found a whole bunch of spam emails from various "only sons" of chief dork muppet, so he got a reply WOW - for an only son you sure do have a lot of brothers and sisters http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&;ie=UTF-8&q=Chief+Vincent+Kamara&btnG=Google+Search Get a life muppet The final victim of my boredom spammage, was yet another dork, but this one claimed to have misplaced absolutely billions of dollars and he chose little old me to help him. How sweet! Here's the response he got. I'm sorry, all I heard then was Blah Blah Blah Blah I'm a brainless criminal Yadda yadda yadda Send me to Jail Sorry about that. So, maybe I can't start a new international trend here. If you get 419 messages pleading for help in repatriating millions or even billions of dollars, reply to them with a bunch of crap. If we all do it then their mailboxes will get filled up and they'll have so much junk to wade through they won't ever stumble across the one or two lonely muppets out there who sadly do fall for this stuff on a daily basis. In the words of Starsky "Do it! Do it!"   11:38:03 PM    comment [] Biztalk 2004 - the journey so far I've spent most of today reading whitepapers and documentation on Biztalk, and watching webcasts on it to get a really good idea of just what it can do, and how it does it, and I have to say I'm impressed. I can't understand why more companies aren't buying into Biztalk right now, especially given the industry wide push to adopt SOAs. Tomorrow I have to work on the demo image that I picked up from Microsoft and start to get some thoughts together on how I am going to present it to the customer, but I have an acheing desire now to just go and explore more. In preparation for the move to the States, Heather and I are selling a lot of books, DVDs, CDs and software on the Amazon marketplace. Each time we sell something we get an email, a section of which needs to be printed out as a packing slip. We also need to stay on top of those emails to go and grab the product in question, pack it, label the packaging and then ship it. It would also be cool to be able to send out an email to say when we receive an order from Amazon to the customer, and also another email to say when we actually shipped the product. ALthough we don't have order fullfillment systems in place here, it seems to me that this would be an ideal test ground for getting up to speed with Biztalk. Just a few small orchestrations, a couple of webservices etc to handle automatically letting the customer know when we get their order, and when we ship it. Some integration with Outlook to give Heather and I instant notifications that we actually need to do something and so on. Hopefully I'll get some time over the next few days to try this stuff out.   12:00:30 AM    comment []

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