Month: September 2007

Spam wars – I get ignored, but will they ignore the courts?

Spam wars are about to get interesting….

Yesterday, I started a small claims court action against a company to have them pay for the spam they’ve been sending to email addresses I run. I didn’t take this action lightly. I had asked them to stop by email, I had asked them to stop by phone, I had asked them to stop by Fax.

In the email, I said that if they send any more I will be charging them 50 per email. When two more arrived a month later I phoned them and they claimed not to have received my email, so I told them the content and I also faxed it. They promised on the phone not to send any more, but less than 24 hours later I got 4 more. All their emails claim not to be spam because they are sent manually… seeing as most of them come in the early hours of the morning, I can give them the benefit of the doubt by guessing they keep strange working hours.

The paperwork has gone, I’ll post information here as time allows.

Charlie's War (David Fiddimore)

One of the books I’ve read that I thoroughly enjoyed was called “Tuesday’s War” by David Fiddimore. In my little write up for the blog, I said I’d like to call David a bastard because (for me at least) the story was so perfect I didn’t want it to end, I didn’t want the ending to be so unfinished and yet i loved the way it didn’t finish as I could live in hope it would continue.

I’m sure he never reads here (does anyone) but fortunately for me he wrote a follow up! Charlie’s War continues the story with our narrator and central character Charlie being sent across Europe to find our heroine Grace.

The detail is this story is just a good as the first (quite an achievement in my opinion) and Charlie makes new friends very different from his bomber crew comrades. He just about catches up with Grace, but this sure could do with a third novel so I can find out what happens. I don’t want to tell you any more about the story for fear of spoiling it. Little things like the people he meets and the things they say that made me stay up to “wee small hours” and beyond just to find out what happened next.

How would I rate it? A close rootie rating of 5 out of 5. The first book was almost perfect, this book can simply be called Great!

The Atrocity Archives (Charles Stross)

Despite not posting to the blog for a while, I haven’t been reading as many books as I would have liked to. It’s a good job I enjoy my work! Still, I have found some time to raid the local second hand bookshop (Past Sentence, Faversham). One of the books I picked up was called The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross. Now, if you are mad enough to read here often, you’ll know I enjoyed a couple of other of his books (Glasshouse, Iron Sunrise, Singularity Sky) so seeing one of his books on the shelf made it a must buy. I confess, the title put me off. I read for enjoyment, the word atrocity doesn’t conjure up nice images for me. Still, I bought it, I did at least start it….

.. in fact, it was so addictive I read it within a few days! Very different from the other Charles Stross books (it was set in present day, not far future), this Sci-Fi fiction referenced everyday things in a not so every day occult stroke multi-dimension stroke zombie sort of way, all the time staying within the bounds of a logic that kept it just believable enough…

Is this book right for you? Well, if, like me, when shopping for something to read whilst passing a supermarket you go for “New Scientist” over “What Car“, then yes. You’ll get some of the techy humour that sprinkled through the book.

About 2/3rds through I thought the story was coming to an end when all of a sudden a completely unexpected twist brought a whole new… erm, story. I’ll not tell you what or how or why, that would spoil the fun if you get to read it. If you have read it, allow me to help you reminisce by saying “CCTV” and “concrete cows”.

Despite my initial reservations over the title, this book gets a rootie rating of 5 out of 5