Filler 23

I have an interview on Friday afternoon with [Consumer Electronics Giant X]. I'd love to be able to go into it thinking that I'm the right man for the job, but that's a bit difficult seeing as they won't tell me what the job is. So possibly they've got several, and might fit me in wherever seems appropriate, or perhaps they're just being secretive. If I get there and find they're looking for a Flash bunny I'll be miffed.

On the UCL front, I have not so far been able to track down a legitimate academic referee from the early Middle Ages when I was last in college, and I've rewritten my "statement in support" (please employ me because I'm an okay guy, honest, even if I don't have a PhD) about four times and still hate it, and the deadline is at the end of next week, and generally aaargh! But, one way or another, it'll happen.

Following on from an interesting conversation with Alastair on Sunday, I spent some time yesterday composing a post about the ecology of spam and some possible ways to make the blogging environment less susceptible to it, but eventually even just writing about it was enough to sap my will to live, and I scrapped it.

Perhaps I'll try again at some point, but my current feeling is that, ultimately, the problem is not a technical one at all, it's a matter of there being some incredibly stupid and gullible people around, and some incredibly venal and unscrupulous others keen to take advantage of them. It's cannibalism, basically. Everything else -- loss of trust, poisoning of the commons, end of the internet -- is just collateral damage. Short of a full-scale idiot cull, there doesn't seem to be much hope for a solution.

So fuck 'em all. Let's just cut ourselves off from the outside world and live together in peace and harmony in some utopian idyll on a tropical island. Who needs the internet anyway?
Posted by matt at April 21, 2004 02:30 PM