Transparency of TV competitions

Normally, I avoid watching the TV reality/celebrity shows, where the outcome of who gets voted off relies upon telephone voting. The only exception is Dancing On Ice.

I have always wondered why none of the TV companies will show the actual number of phone votes each contestant gets. They used to do it many years ago. So why have they stopped? I am sure if the audience actually saw how many votes their favourite performer received, they would be more likely to pick up the phone and vote, if their favourite was in danger of being voted off the TV programme. Surely it would be in the TV programmmes interest to increase the revenue it gains from the phone calls, and also it would be more transparent about the voting process. Then they couldn't be accused of fixing the competititon.

I have left a couple of messages to the Dancing On Ice presenter Philip Schofield, in the hope he may redirect me to someone who could actually give a valid response to my question. Who knows, I might be lucky and get a reply from him!

Spam E-mails

Normally, when I get spam e-mails, I delete them immediately. I can also normally work out from which site I had given my e-mail address to, that has sold it on, generating the sudden increase in spam!

Today, I have been highly amused, as I have started to receive spam e-mails at work, and I am very curious to know how the spammers have got hold of it.

I have just received 3 love letters, almost certainly from the same person, but with different names and emial addresses. They all seem to be coming from a Russian girl Tanya/Lusine/Lusi, claiming she is a lonely girl searching for a man's attention. Then there is an email address to reply to.

Now, 6 years ago, I might have been tempted to reply, just to see what would happen next, and maybe have some fun pretending to be interested to see how far they would go to try and squeeze money out of me (learnt the hard way the first time around).

As I am a happily married man to a Belarusian woman, I have no intention of investigating this any further, unless I get my wife to write back to this girl, in Russian! I wonder what would happen then!

As to how this girl has got hold of my work e-mail address, I can only think of two possibilities. First was I had used the work computer 6 years ago to register on a dating website, and then closed the account 5 years ago, although that was extremely difficult to do as the company I work for had massivly restricted our internet access, so it took me a bit of time to find a way to redirect the e-mails to a computer that allowed access to the main website so that I could close the account and stop the spam e-mails coming through.

The other possibility, is that my daughter has sent me some e-mails with her homework attached for me to proof read for spelling and grammar. When I have checked and altered the homework, I send the e-mail back to my daughter. I have only been doing this for the last 3 months. So it seems more likely that the spammers have got hold of my company e-mail somehow through these correspondences.

When I get home, there should be an interesting and amusing conversation with my wife and daughter.