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Of Spam, blogs and google

A few days after starting this blog, someone sends me an email to my faithful yahoo and it goes

hi manulite,

i saw yo blog at blogspot, and i was wondering are you really from africa? did you grow up in a typical african village? do you think we could be friends? i'd like to learn more about african cultures...

regards,

xxx

So i quickly run to this site thinking damn, my email is displaying all over the place, the next thing i'll have thousands of the so much hated spam mail. not a single reference. i think again, i'm now using the beloved gmail, so if this person got my email ad, they'd have found my gmail address(if they could, i know some can do it somehow). getting worried i think how did whoeva this is get my email address? feeling kinda threatened, i reply

hi xxx

how did you get my email address?

manulite

I can be polite sometimes. so whoever on the other end quickly replies, of course trying to be nice as usual, they tell me about google, how you can type in a keyword and then it sort of gives you everything there is to know about that keyword. It makes sense to me so i launch my firefox (google is one of my 3 home pages!) so i type "manulite", not feeling very lucky, i click Google Search, and everything makes even more sense, i've been around, well mostly looking for help, and mostly about linux, but i've been around.

i've also been not too careful because on more than a handful of those sites my email is clearly pasted for any email harvestors to reap where they did not sow. its not like i'm too worried about it, but the other time i had my yahoo totally flooded with emails from some funny virus that claimed to be microsoft support sending me one of their numerous fixes (though i'm completely pro-linux, and all the pc's i use have to run some flavour of linux).

so but that's how whoever on the other end got my email address. of course we continue to chat on email, he wants us to be friends, and learn the african culture and stuff. I tell whoever it is on th other side, i'm cool with it, (though i might have to read a coupla books to jog my memory on this subject of my african culture).

but still the first email is still quite interesting, i did not write it in full here, but am i really from africa? damn right i am, and i'm too proud not to say it. i've chatted with a lot of people on the internet and i've come across a lot of peeps who still think africa is a complete jungle, they expect the airports to be strips of tar in the middle of nowhere, where planes have to give way to passing animals. well they are not very wrong!

so me and whoever on the other side, we've exchanged a couple of emails where i furnish whoever with a few howto's. e.g "Broadband Internet Under a Tree, How To", "How To Minimize Animal Noises While On Voice Chat" and "How To Ride An Elephant To Work".

of course i will be putting up the how-to site where everyone can download, and in the spirit of sharing i'll also put them up on those p2p networks that are making a lot of noise with copyrights people, only i wont make noise because all this stuff is copylefted.

i am manulite.

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