As per here :

1. Grab the nearest book. Don’t search for something cool. Grab what’s actually closest to you.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

“In that we are the same, Mishka,” Provalov agreed.

I get about 50 pieces of spam a day. That may not be as much as some folks see, but it’s definitely enough for me. At one point in time though, I can remember when I didn’t get any spam at all. It was then that I signed up for a newsletter from a discount travel dealer called Travelzoo (they were featured in a cnn.com article).

See, back in 1998, during my first Engineering workterm, I actually signed up for spam. I know, it is not spam if you ask for it, but I was signing up for a weekly specials list for travel that was not available in my area, so I consider it spam. The reason I signed up for it was the company was offering shares for giving them your email address. This was before the dot-bust, so I figured what the hell, I might make something for it. Well, then the 2000-2001 rolled around, the company hadn’t gone public, and most dot-coms were dying, so I kinda forgot about the whole thing.

By that time though, I was getting lots of spam, and their mailing blended in, so I didn’t cancel it. Last summer, while checking my spam box to make sure I wasn’t deleting real mail, I saw one of their top 10 lists. I decide to check out the company, and found they had gone public and were trading for about $6/share. Nothing to get exited about since I only had 6 shares, but I figure I would add them to my messenger stock watch list. We’ll late last year, the stock started to climb, and I decide to sell. In the end, I was able to sell the stock for a few hundred dollars. Granted, this is not quite like winning the lotto, but from now on I’ll look at weirder marketing campaigns with a different light.