·:[ Leefe rates the world… ]:·
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As it happens there is a man selling Sydney Rock Oysters laced with Viagra. His idea was to produce a super aphrodisiac. Perhaps a smart marketing move, unfortunately the same can’t be said about his Internet usage.

He has been trying to promote the idea through a website. And when an email from Google arrived saying saying it was the “fastest growing internet story since 9/11” he went straight to the media.

A story in the Sydney Morning Herald details how the wool was putted over his eyes.

My favourite quote from the story is:

“Obviously, I’m not dumb, if I’d knew there was anything wrong with it at that point I’d have gone ’shit I’m not going to put that on national television on Sunday night’.”

No, he is obviously just gullible and didn’t think to check the email authenticity.

• Oyster man’s Google-gram a hoax (SMH, 6 June 2007)

Hormel Foods, the producer of the canned pork product Spam is trying to stop the dilution of its product name. It doesn’t mind too much that “spam” has become a colloquial term referring to junk email. What it objects to is use of the word “spam” in naming commercial products.

The EU trademark office has rejected its application. Citing the high count of sites using the junk mail meaning in Google. The second site when I checked was “spam.com“, the spiced ham fan club. So its not like it doesn’t appear at all.

I suppose the moral of this story is trademark your product name ASAP.

• Spam-maker loses bid to trademark ’spam’ (SMH, 12 Oct 2006)

I have seen a number of people write incase when they really mean in case.

What’s the difference?

Incase refers to being enclosed within. Like “Incase that penguin in ice”. Also spelt encase.

Where as in case refers to doing something ‘in the event of’ or ‘as a precausion’. eg “you better set the penguin trap, just in case”

• TheFreeDictionary - incase
• TheFreeDictionary - encase
• TheFreeDictionary - in case
• in case - Wiktionary
• incase - Wiktionary
• encase - Wiktionary

As a displacement activity to studying I decided to train SpamAssassin with the last few months of spam email. Uploaded the mailbox of spam to the server and entered the command salearn and got the error salearn: command not found.

Searching the SpamAssassin site and wiki were no help. After a bit of googling I discovered that the correct command is sa-learn, hmm. But the SpamAssassin wiki didn’t even have a page about that. OK, searching for that as a title found nothing, searching for it in the text produced a number or results.

So for those people forgetting the dash and people clicking the title search button rather than the text button I have added salearn and sa-learn pages that direct to the page with the required info.

SpamAssassin wiki: salearn, sa-learn, BayesInSpamAssassin