So you became spam?

Funny thing... I was just reading somebody's blog. There was a comment posted on their latest entry which was clearly spam. You know the telltale signs: the user has a rather empty profile, the comment itself is fairly vague and doesn't reference any of the actual content in the blog entry, and insists, no matter how irrelevant it is to the content of the blog entry that you visit his (or her) own blog about stock market trading or whatever....

But something caught my eye this time... the user name was Matt Benson (and followed by some numbers)... which is a strong coincidence that I should stumble on this name since it also happens to be the name of one of my earliest email penpals. I met Matt back when I was a member of MSN (which it was like AOL network and not a series of web services). We were in an anime chat room and he picked up on my real name (my full first name is Benson, BTW) and we had a laugh about it since that was also his last name.

I lost track of Matt some weeks later. For one, my trial membership on MSN had expired. Also Matt seemed to stop logging in... this was all before the WWW was popular by the way, so conventional email was still a year or two away.

Now that I look back at my naive on-line self of the day, I realize I didn't know the guy as much as I thought. Come to think of it, I don't know a thing about him at all. But if this is the same guy and he's setting up spam (which is no more likely than it is unlikely), then I'm severely disappointed in you, Matt. ^_^;;