Spammed to Death

To the few people interested in my Possum Valley blogs, I have to inform you that you will no longer get a notification email that I have posted a new blog.  In fact you probably wont see this advice because unless you casually check my blog from time to time, as I have already deactivated the ‘subscribe’ plug-in.  I have had about 1800 subscribers for some time, quite aware that most were machines as I really don’t know that many people in Russia or Poland.  I really don’t understand what advantage ‘the bots’ give to their originators, but recently I have been overwhelmed by about 20-30 new user subscriptions every day and all those notifications from my website land in my email.  They are all from the same source as the form is the same with “meet Carmen and Alice (or any combination of girls names)” as a link I have never clicked on.  I first thought I may be able to block them as the were mostly from .ru, Russia, but they are coming from all over the globe now on an industrial scale with different domains and countries.  So apart form my own website spamming me to add to the piles of spam I already get about such things as “SEO optimisation” for my website, when I add a new post, my own website adds to the Worldwide Waste of bandWidth (WWW), with thousands of unwanted emails.  I have inadvertently become a spammer myself.

OK, so I have deactivated the subscribe plug-in but still got spammed, so I deleted the app and all data and still got spammed.  I looked at the front end of my site and the invitations to subscribe are gone but I still get a few from “chat with Carla and Simone”.  But the numbers do seem to be dwindling.  

Amongst my IT woes are my tax returns.  The only work I don’t do myself is tax returns.  Australia boasts the most voluminous and complicated tax laws in the world and when you have a business, however small, it is almost impossible to understand.  So I have employed an accountant for the last couple of decades.  In the first few years I used to take in masses of bits of paper for the accountant to muse over.  Then in 2002 I joined the digital era with ‘Quickbooks’ and took in a CD and then a DVD with the data on it.  After a decade, my program was no longer supported by up-dates and the accountant could no longer open the files.  But I found if I emailed the files to them they could open them.  This has worked for the last 8 years or so, but no longer.  I only found out about this last week when Centerlink was hassling me about business detail updates and I realised I had seen nothing from the accountants since I submitted the data in Sept 2018.  Only when I called in did I learn they couldn’t open the files I sent then.  8 months of inaction left me jammed up against a Centerlink deadline to submit my tax returns.  So I was faced with the prospect of purchasing new accounting software and the nightmare of setting up a company and defining accounts and categories of expenses and incomes, suppliers and customers and all that shit.  

Then my accountant emailed to suggest if I printed out a few reports from my program and brought them in they could process my tax return.  So I printed out the data onto 20 sheets of crushed trees, and took them by hand to the office of my accountant who I have never met, and left them with the receptionist.  It struck me as ironic that after 20 years of digital accounting, I had gone full circle and was again submitting my accounts on paper.

In other news, I must apologize to guests that my rebuild of the sauna burnt down Xmas last year has been much hindered by a protracted wet season, other obligations, and now more bad weather with a cyclone in mid May.  Mid May??!! Yeah, OK, excuses excuses, but I am working on it.  I now have the frame and half the roof.

For the forthcoming election I have already voted like 3 million other people who couldn’t endure the puerile debate.  I wasn’t offered my first choice which was the popular option of kidnapping Jacinda Ahern and chaining her to a desk in Canberra.  Then again, perhaps not a good choice as the prospect of the all blacks rampaging in retaliation in the streets of our capital is too frightful to bear.