I dreamed that it was decided at work we were in need on some extra training on the basics. so, Vadim organized training sessions, mandatory for everyone, on spam handling technique. some girl from the BLOC with medium length straight black hair, and Natasha, were conducting them. Matt was also involved in some technical way.

the class was held during the evening, in some room in a high school or community college with those desks that are like attached to the chairs. we were gathering and gossiping like you would expect in a group of people changing from a work-task and gathering for a class. the dark haired girl was to be conducting the class first but there appeared to be a problem. for her part of the class she needed some mechanical contraption that was on the back of one of those kind of work-trucks you see carrying junk from construction areas and with a rickety frame on a flat bed. the truck was running fine but the contraption was not. finally, right before the class was to begin, a tow truck came and took it away.

the result of this was that Natasha stepped up to conduct her part of the class. it all had to do with spooling this and that and picking spam out of a mail spool. I said I wanted a sample spool of nothing BUT spam. (what I really wanted was a berkeley mail folder but in my dream this was called a spool). nobody understood why, and neither do I, now, but in the dream it made perfect sense. it seemed that none was to be had but finally they found one.

so Natasha gave us all an assignment. this seemed like a good idea to her as the class itself could be cut short and she could go home to her kid. but the assignment was weird. we were to take the spool of all-spam, compress it, insert it as a single header line into an email message, and then run the result through various spam recognition software. once inserted as a header, it should appear to a human using normal mail reading tools like a text header. in vi, it would show up highlighted (like special characters sometimes do, depending on the term type) but it would still read off as text. the header was like an X-header and the value it would appear as would be a sentence.

the class broke up as people went off to work on their assignment. I somehow managed to figure out how to do this. I was very pleased and full of myself for working it out. although a part of my brain wondered why this was useful at all. now Natasha had gone home and the idea was that she would get the assignments over the course of the next work day, and then I guess there was a class meeting the next night where we were to do something useful with this. I wanted to show off and not wait, and I realized that I knew her email address to send it to at home. (the "email addresses" here in my dream are really the AIM screen names. no @anything.whatever involved.)

so I decided to indulge in this desire and to send my email with the huge header set which inluded all the spam in this spool to Natasha's home address. this would also complete the assignment becuase of course there was spam filtering software running on her ISP's systems. I sat down at the desk, which was no longer like those classroom desks, but more like a tabletop video game at a cocktail bar in the 80's. the GUI display was all white. once you logged in, to compose email you had a window, which was a white text editting window, with a daughter window to the right and intruding on the border, which was a hang-ten pair of feet outlined in white. the "from" line was above them, and the right foot had the "email address" (remember it was just a screen name). the left foot I think has the recipient's real name but I don't remember.

because the feet deal with all the information normally placed in the mail header, I wasn't quite sure how to send this email with the preconstructed headers after all. but at this point the dream all falls apart anyhow as my puppy started biting me on the nose to play with her.