News, May 2004
It never rains but it pours. The Edsels now have a booking agent, and as a result we have a plethora of upcoming gigs, some from the agent and some not (see my calendar page for details). The idea of the Edsels playing the Gananoque Casino in May or June has been scrubbed, and we may play a two-nighter there in July or August instead (we do have a one-day gig there tentatively scheduled for the afternoon of July 15). There's been talk of the possibility that the Edsels might play a 50th anniversary gig in Elliot Lake next summer, but we have not yet made any definite plans.
Hot Ice now appears monthly at Groovy's Roti Hut on McArthur on the second Saturday of the month. Among our upcoming gigs are a house party on June 5 and a one-nighter at the Good Companions Centre on June 26. Tickets for the latter event will be available soon.
Allow me to close this newsletter with a warning for those of you who have subscribed to Internet dating services such as match.com or matchmaker.com. As you may recall from my autobiography page and previous newsletters, I met my first girlfriend at 34 and dated her for 27 months, and we split nearly seventeen months ago--a very painful split for me. Having decided in the early part of this year that it was time to stop grieving over losing her, I signed up for memberships on a few matchmaking sites.
On one of them I received an e-mail from someone claiming to be using a friend's account: "I'm Michelle. Come see my profile on SingleFox.com," the message said, indicating the user name. You can't imagine how excited I was at the prospect of having a new significant other after over sixteen months.
Well, I had to create an account on SingleFox to see the profile, and when I did, I was instantly attracted to the woman behind it: she's a trustworthy, tolerant, athletic, toned blonde vegetarian, many of which traits I'd already identified in my profile as things I'm looking for in a woman. So I sent her a message, but SingleFox told me she couldn't read them because she was a trial member too. I tried sending a message to the account from which I'd received the first message, but I wasn't able to get through. I attributed the problem to the fact that I was a trial member and that the other account was on another node--and I gained support for my theory when I created an account on that other node and found out that trial users cannot initiate e-mail conversations.
I was about to give up when I tried looking for the user on match.com, where I have a six-month subscription as MusicBear180, and found her. So I sent her an e-mail telling her of my problems getting in touch with her. However, she sent me a reply saying her name is in fact Tracy, that she had never e-mailed me, and that she had received lots of e-mail from people who had thought her name was something else.
Only then did it dawn on me that Tracy and I and numerous others had been victims of a cruel prank--and there's no way to tell whether a single user or multiple users were responsible for this serious breach of netiquette. It's bad enough we have mischief-makers on the net in the form of spammers, hackers and virus authors--and, in chat rooms such as on AOL Instant Messenger, automated spam messages. But for someone to play on someone's reputation (in this case, Tracy's) and lure other people into a false sense of hope (in this case, mine) is worse than that--it's downright deplorable. These mischief-makers are playing with people's feelings here, and this incident has made me feel both embarrassed and hurt beyond words, both for myself and for Tracy. She doesn't deserve to go through something like this. Nobody does.
So the bottom line is: keep your eyes peeled in such environments, because even online dating services aren't immune to spam.
Hot Ice now appears monthly at Groovy's Roti Hut on McArthur on the second Saturday of the month. Among our upcoming gigs are a house party on June 5 and a one-nighter at the Good Companions Centre on June 26. Tickets for the latter event will be available soon.
Allow me to close this newsletter with a warning for those of you who have subscribed to Internet dating services such as match.com or matchmaker.com. As you may recall from my autobiography page and previous newsletters, I met my first girlfriend at 34 and dated her for 27 months, and we split nearly seventeen months ago--a very painful split for me. Having decided in the early part of this year that it was time to stop grieving over losing her, I signed up for memberships on a few matchmaking sites.
On one of them I received an e-mail from someone claiming to be using a friend's account: "I'm Michelle. Come see my profile on SingleFox.com," the message said, indicating the user name. You can't imagine how excited I was at the prospect of having a new significant other after over sixteen months.
Well, I had to create an account on SingleFox to see the profile, and when I did, I was instantly attracted to the woman behind it: she's a trustworthy, tolerant, athletic, toned blonde vegetarian, many of which traits I'd already identified in my profile as things I'm looking for in a woman. So I sent her a message, but SingleFox told me she couldn't read them because she was a trial member too. I tried sending a message to the account from which I'd received the first message, but I wasn't able to get through. I attributed the problem to the fact that I was a trial member and that the other account was on another node--and I gained support for my theory when I created an account on that other node and found out that trial users cannot initiate e-mail conversations.
I was about to give up when I tried looking for the user on match.com, where I have a six-month subscription as MusicBear180, and found her. So I sent her an e-mail telling her of my problems getting in touch with her. However, she sent me a reply saying her name is in fact Tracy, that she had never e-mailed me, and that she had received lots of e-mail from people who had thought her name was something else.
Only then did it dawn on me that Tracy and I and numerous others had been victims of a cruel prank--and there's no way to tell whether a single user or multiple users were responsible for this serious breach of netiquette. It's bad enough we have mischief-makers on the net in the form of spammers, hackers and virus authors--and, in chat rooms such as on AOL Instant Messenger, automated spam messages. But for someone to play on someone's reputation (in this case, Tracy's) and lure other people into a false sense of hope (in this case, mine) is worse than that--it's downright deplorable. These mischief-makers are playing with people's feelings here, and this incident has made me feel both embarrassed and hurt beyond words, both for myself and for Tracy. She doesn't deserve to go through something like this. Nobody does.
So the bottom line is: keep your eyes peeled in such environments, because even online dating services aren't immune to spam.
posted by Jamie at 11:59 p.m.
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