Lottery Mails

These mails are worth a mention, yes the ones that flow directly to your junk email, and at first were amusing, now you look at them in disbelief, are these emails still going round? Its 2008, surely no one is that stupid to actually believe they have won a national lottery without a ticket?

The emails claim the following amazing stakes: You’ve won 1 million or more UK pounds, this can also be a US based prize, but rarely would you find livestock, food or goods are offered, usually its hard currency, and lots of it.

Besides never having entered any national lottery, you’re still expected to believe that the government is willing you pay you over a million of its hard earned money, even though you do not actually reside in that country. Can you imagine the outrage of real lottery players, should this claim even for a 2nd turn out to be true.

Surely even a blundering idiot can work out that it is indeed nothing more than a time wasting scam, which leads me to the next point. Notice the reply back emails… never an official domain, more than likely a free service such as Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail. EG: johnson.smith85@yahoo.es;

The last question I guess is motivation. I can only think of 3 reasons why anyone would still be willing to waste their time sending out such utter rubbish as this unbelievable trash.

1. Someone/Something (possibly a rare type of cockroach from the planet Nurtard ) wants to entice you to part with your money in some shape/way or form

2. An investigative agency, possibly debt collection is looking for you, and wishes you to respond to initiate some form of communication.

3. Some pimple pasted white skinned teenager thinks he/she might be pulling off the prank of the century if they can get any sort of response.

I would like to imagine that if you are smart enough to use a mouse and a keyboard you are exempt from falling for such a low witted scheme, but obviously there must be at least some idiots out there who seem to take part in this, or else the fad would simply die, if you are such an idiot, please leave a comment.

Microsoft F#

For those Microsoft Developers out there, these are my thoughts on F#.

I personally think a rather bored, and only somewhat imaginative division in Microsoft Development, consisting of some nutty programmers and possibly some researchers have concocted the F# language, what appears to be a mixed bag of development languages and offering possibly some minor advantages, please don’t expect me to actually learn this language, I refuse.

C# is one thing, combined with the power of the .net framework, its a prime example of an excellent language that combines the lessons from other languages, and has a natural C/Java style flow to the syntax.

The best way to describe F# syntax is, imagine for a second what a disaster it would be to port into the .net world vb6 code, mixed with a dose of C/Java and a little PHP on the side. Never mind your side order of fries with that Sir, F# is this disaster.

Once again Microsoft disappoint, instead of allocating funding into researching and fully developing the late promised XAML presentation / HTML replacement, we have once again been delivered distraction, 1/2 working prototypes and a yet growing concern on which technologies to adopt and learn, and which to ignore.

Before you leave, I just want to remind you once again of that awful and dirty word – Foxpro, just incase you forgot.