Mark's personal blog

As most people I get lot of spam email although a lot is caught by greylisting and spamassassin some random emails still make it to my inbox. Today I received a new one and I feel I need to put it here on my blog to share it with everyone. ----------------------- email begin ----------------------- From: "Elena" Subject: Letter to Denmark To: elenfegal@ysmail.ru Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:03:17 +0300 Hi, My name is Elena, I have 32 years and I write from Russian province. I work in library and I can use computer after work when possible. I find your address in internet and decided to write you this letter in despair. I have daughter Angelina, she have 8 years, his father has abandoned us and we live with my mother. Due to financial crisis recently my mother lost job and our situation became very difficult. Prices for gas and electricity is very high in our region and we can not use it to heat our home anymore. Winter is coming and weather becoming colder every day. We very afraid and we do not know what to do. The only available possibility for us to heat our home is to use portable wood burning oven. We have enough wood in our region and this oven will heat our home all winter for minimal cost. Unfortunately, we can not buy this oven in our town because it's price 8190 Russian roubles (equivalent of 191 Euro) and we cannot afford it. If you have an old portable oven and if you do not use it anymore, we'll be very grateful if you can donate it for us and organize transport of this oven to our address (200km from Moscow). This ovens are different, they made from cast-iron and weight 100-150kg. I'll wait your answer. Elena and my family. Russia ----------------------- email end ----------------------- Now don't get me wrong, I do feel very bad for poor Elena, her daughter and her mother. That being said does she have the faintest idea how much it would cost me to ship a 100-150kg cast iron wood burning oven to Russia? I think it would probably be cheaper for me to buy her and her family plane tickets and let them stay at our house for the winter. Maybe I should reply back to her and offer that as an option?

On October 5th I handed in my thesis and today I did my thesis defense. I personally felt that it went very well and I guess my adviser and the external examiner didn't mind it too much ether since I got a 10. To most foreigners it probably wont mean very much but I do think that most Danes think that a 10 i a very acceptable grade. I can therefore now call myself cand.polyt. or civilingeniør or say I have a MSc. in Engineering (or I at least will when I get my diploma). Now ahead awaits real life with a 9am to 5pm job but also a better paycheck than what I have been used to.

Today I finally handed in my masters thesis at the Technical University of Denmark. The title of the paper is "Interactive Questionnaires on Mobile Devices". It has been an interesting process writing my thesis and I hope I have done a good job on it. Hopefully I will do my thesis defense later this month so I can finally say that I am done with my M.Sc. in Engineering (majoring in computer science).