shadows of echoes of memories of songs

On unsubscribing from some newsletter or other:

'This is the last email you will receive from us. We have added you to our "blacklist", which means that our newsletter system will refuse to send you any other email, without manual intervention by our administrator.'

Er, blacklist? Can't they just take me off the mailing list? Am I missing something, or are they talking rubbish?

I am unsubscribing from a lot of newsletters and things at the moment, having realised that all I do is either a) delete them unread with a faint sense of guilt; b) keep them for ages meaning to read them, before deleting them with a slightly less faint sense of guilt; c) read them and keep them for ages meaning to act on them, before deleting them with a fairly tangible sense of guilt; or d) read them, get angry, and keep them for ages meaning to reply/argue/complain, before eventually deleting them with a sense of guilt mixed with frustration and anger. None of which is doing anybody any good.

Hey, I totally wasn't going to do the diary thing this month because I don't think that counts as Proper Blogging, but I had to get up ridiculously early this morning to get the 7:53 train to London for an excellent Perl course (with added badgers), got back to Oxford in time for another great Oxford Geek Night at the Jericho Tavern, drank some very tasty raspberry beer, and now am really far too tired to blog coherently about anything. Also, I wrote a Wordpress blog post (for one of the other blogs) on the iPhone on the train home, saved it as a local draft, decided I'd be better off uploading it and tried to save it as a full draft, at which point the Wordpress app threw up its hands, showed the spinning wheel of death for a bit, then crashed. Guess where my post ended up? No, I don't know either, but it's not on wordpress.com and it's not on the iPhone. :-( Also, one of our fence-panels got torn off one of our fence-posts, presumably in last night's tempestuous winds (which kept me awake when I was trying to get to sleep in preparation for getting up early); can be fixed, but it'll take more time, more faff, more money.

So, I have a massive list of things I haven't done, minor guilt about things I have done, and general worries about the two sets of things; but I'm feeling enthusiastic about Perl, happy to be in our house even though the fence is falling down, and incredibly positive about the prospect of going to sleep within the next 20 minutes. Good night. :-)