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Once again I get all caught up on the stuff echoing within the castle walls and I find it is silent and dark. The drawbridge is raised, the moatmonsters are loosed, and all is quiet. No one has stoked the fire recently and the stone walls of the castle have long since lost whatever warmth they gained from whatever energy source the staff could scrounge to burn during the day. Looks like the last thing the foragers brought in was what once looked not totally unlike a purple Mercury...

I had been off in a far country in the company of my furcritter with no tail, to tell poking the evil Frontier Communications email AdminDaemon for bouncing an email I tried to send to enliven the evening of some friends of mine who are farther west (but not left...)

For your late evening or early morning entertainment, here is what I was trying to send:

Capitol Steps - "Take Ten Pills and You're Fine"

I had properly embedded the link and descriptory phrase in the body of my composition (in other words, it looked just like you see above), and I, as is my usual habit (which is quite unlike a Hobbit) entered the title of this video as the title of the email, stuck on the appropriate names from my address book, and hit 'send'. But all was not well in FrontierComLand, for the evil AdminDaemon chose at that moment to get a femur from a roving coyote stuck in his/her/its craw sideways and upside down. Reacting with a belch of displeasure, the evil AdminDaemon mashed his/her/its BigRed BounceButton (which hesheit got on sale at Staples - a synthesized voice kept saying 'That's Easy'...) and proceeded to cram the contents of my important missive back into my inbox with a splash (that's the default 'you've got mail' sound. Don't know why and too lazy to modify it - probably has to do with the Firefox theme I'm using..) Hearing the sound I checked yon Inbox expecting to find some message of import. Or something. Instead I was greeted by a message that said:

"The following message to  was undeliverable.
The reason for the problem:
5.x.0 - Message bounced by administrator

Should I mention that said evil AdminDaemon generated one of these messages, not just once, but one nicey-new message for each person the email was addressed to. I had eight simultaneous deliveries all identical saying that the administrator for no discernible reason, chose to deem my important electronic communication undeliverable. Every time I tried to send it..

Having spent a day or two of my life trying to be more intelligent than some robidiot brain with questionable programing by a coder whose last project appeared to be an AI replication of NY Mayor Blumborg's brain, I started my ECM attack on this onerous undead creature. The battle began by my generating a reply to each of the bounce messages with the pertinent question, "WHY?", which forced the robidiot to generate a reply that looks like this :

Greetings,

This message has been automatically generated in response to the creation of a trouble ticket regarding:

"Re: Delivery Status Notification (Failure)", a summary of which appears below.

We do our best to answer questions within a 48 hour period, but due to the volume of questions and nature of some questions,
it may occasionally take longer.

Which indicates that I will be getting massive amounts of robidiot replies within 48 hours. It's so nice to be popular..

Anyway, I kept playing with the email, modifying words, links, and such, then sending the message again after each modification, receiving another eight bounce notices to which I replied to generate another eight robidiot replies that informed me again for the eighthormoreish time that I would get yet another eight robidiot replies within 48 hours.

Now, you might be thinking, "Any normal person would have quit trying, or just sent a text message.." Of course, if you actually followed that thought process, I would point out that if you are reading this you too are in the Castle and your name isn't "Normie" either...

All told, it was a learning experience. First of all, I learned that if you reply to the robidiot emailbouncer thereby forcing the robidiot to generate another robidiotic reply that promises you yet another robidiotic reply within 48 hours so that they can attempt to answer the big "WHY?" question enough times, the robidiot gets congestive mumble failure, gathers its bytes into a knot and in a snit tells you that you've bothered it enough. Actually what it says is:

The following message to  was undeliverable.
The reason for the problem:
5.1.0 - Unknown address error 554-'5.7.1 : Recipient address rejected:
<(humble_me)@frontier.net> has exceeded hourly rate limit to support@frontiernet.net. 
See http://postmaster.frontiernet.net'

So, I found out that they really don't want you to ask WHY? - or at least not about 80 times ;-) And, the second thing I learned is that for whatever reason, the evil robidiot AdminDaemon gets apoplectic over the word "Pills". Capitalized. Lower case is ok. Take the word out completely, OK. Remove all the words from the title except "Pills" and the BounceButton cries 'that's easy' and generates eight more bounce notices so it can receive eight more replies asking "WHY?" so it can reply to the reply in 48 hours...

So now that I have shared of my warehouse of knowledge on things of miniscule importance, I turn back to the fireplace. A word of advise.. Purple Ford products don't burn well. If you must, at least remove the tires (ok Moose, tyres ;-) The thick black smoke has attracted the attention of the EPA. They're saying something about not finding a permit to build a castle on this spot. They seem to be hungry so I lobbed several liverwurst and onion sandwiches over the moat to them. On 12 grain bread. WIth Grey Poupon. I get to go play with them now, if they ever get over the moat.. I won't tell them that the moatmonsters love liverwurst because it tastes almost like government worker.. It's so fun having a battle of wits with unarmed victims, er, people..

In the meantime I sit back and wait for my 80 or so robidiot answers to the "WHY?" question. It should be enlightening...

After all I could have asked it "What is the meaning of life..."