Sometimes spam is randomly beautiful…

From: Niki Doubledee
Subject: Few of us ever met Chris McKinstry in person.

You cannot stop services in a clustered environment.
Work basket I could buy Molly’s birthday.
Here’s the method I use.
Wonder how it first struck him.
Harry, whose insides were aching with hunger, jumped off his bed and seized it.
When the bellows finally stopped pumping and the Jacob’s Ladder stopped sparking, the go button turned back to blue.
But first he drank out of the bucket himself.
This will launch and control LINES.
Wonder did he put that bible to the same use as I would.

But then you google a couple of the lines and some of it becomes intriguing:

One of our beloved colleagues, K. Christopher McKinstry, passed away on January 23. The cause of death was an apparent suicide. Chris was well known to the inner circle of chatterbot enthusiasts who cluster around the Robitron mailing list and the Loebner Prize contest. Even among eccentrics and excommunicated outcasts of academia, Chris sometimes expressed views and ideas that seemed incomprehensible and outrageous. His Mindpixel project however produced a unique contribution to A. I. research and no doubt will serve as a valuable corpus for years to come. Few of us ever met Chris McKinstry in person.

A Canadian citizen, he lived in Chile and worked for several years as a telescope operator there. Our view of him will be forever clouded by what is nowadays called cyber disinhibition. Goodbye Chris, we will miss you. It is people like you who make guys like me look normal.

Some of it is sci-fi:

When the bellows finally stopped pumping and the
Jacob’s Ladder stopped sparking, the go button
turned back to blue. A pale wisp of smoke curled from
the bottom drawer, and I heard a muffled yelp. Arlene
and I wrestled the drawer open. Inside was a living
Klave, blinking rapidly and trying to focus his eyes.
Arlene unlatched the side of the drawer, and either
Sears or Roebuck tumbled out onto the deck.

And some is plain disappointing:

You can apply SP2 without restarting your computer by stopping the following services and applications before applying the service pack:

•	Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MS DTC) and the Microsoft Search and MSSQLServerOLAPService services.
•	MSSQLServer and SQLServerAgent services for the instance being upgraded (for example, MSSQL$NamedInstance).
•	Microsoft Component Services, Microsoft Message Queuing, and Microsoft COM Transaction Integrator.
•	All applications, including Control Panel. This step is recommended, but not required.

You cannot stop services in a clustered environment. For more information, see section 3.10.

But I have to say it’s still the best email I’ve had all day…