The bastards are grinding me down

As I trawl through the searches of yesterday, the one that catches my eye is ...

• how to server a Gorean Assassin

... but I'm not sure why. As mentioned before, I'm plugged in to the BDSM scene, and I know that in one arm, people live by the Gorean code. Personally, I'm not a fan of it, as I don't see dominance and submission as a male over female thing, rather an individual thing; (if anything, my experience is that the balance is far the other way around) but each to their own. My only worry is the activities that someone is performing on THIS planet, to earn the mantle of a Gorean Assassin.

Trawl is an adequate word for what I have to do to the logs these days. Criminals are now involved in the Internet, but apart from phishing scams, they now seek to glean money from advertisers. "per-click" advertising means that greedy manufacturers will pay the advertising site a set amount for every time that someone "clicks" on their advert on a site. So now the criminals are all about forging these clicks to rip off the company.

That means comments left in guestbooks and on blogs all over the place in the hope that someone will click on them. It got so bad that I had to write my own guestbook script that had logic to filter out certain key words. It reads more like a sexual pharmacy list than a perl script, but it works. Thirteen attempts were made, yesterday alone, to get advertising material on to my main guestbook. Unseen, it records their IP addresses, so when I can be arsed, I complain to their ISP's and get them shut down, but lately I've had a bit of a dissapointment which hasn't done me much good.

On top of that, in the traffic logs, someone is drawing down a load of traffic anonymously; and they are not casually browsing my web site, either. Why they are doing it, I haven't got a clue, but as I pay for that traffic, they are stealing money straight out of my pocket; and no doubt other peoples too. One ISP has already responded and shut down the servers, but they moved straight to another and started again.

Work is also grinding me down. No one seems to believe what I say. Everyone knows better. The best part of twenty years in I.T., experience in international companies throughout Europe, on mainframes and all sorts of technologies, and no bugger listens to me. I'm getting really fu**ed off with the whole business. If it didn't keep the wolf from the door, I don't think I've have a seconds hesitation in jacking it all in and write my autobiography. (I once threatened a friend that I'd do that, when I was aged 20!) But still, my fathers words ring in my ear, "If a jobs worth doing, it's worth doing well," so I'll keep on giving it my best.