Comment Spam Extortion Racket?

This comment on Trampoline Systems' blog made me smile -

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments , I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq 454528835 or write me tedirectory(at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

I know you get a lot of spammy comments , I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers....

Kind of like walking into a newsagent and saying "ya know, I can't help noticing you got a lot of paper in here... that's kind of a fire trap, ya know what I'm sayin?"

If this guy really does know a lot of spammers, I'm sure someone out there knows a lot of Federal Agents who'd like to talk to him - his ICQ number and email address are in the quote. ;-)

OMG, I'm a PHB....

Last week was something of a milestone for me. While gathering my thoughts for the daily stand-up on Friday, the realisation suddenly dawned - I'd had a really busy week, but I hadn't actually written a single line of code all week. I hadn't even fired up my IDE....

So that's it - I am now officially "Management". How did this happen? Seems like just five minutes ago that we were four guys around a table - one CEO and three techies, building stuff. I'd sometimes spend entire days in the office coding away on my own. Now there's 13 of us, and that's just the permanent staff, not counting contractors and non-exec directors, and I've just spent the whole week running around like the proverbial blue-arsed fly, organising, cabling, battling with MS Project, on the phone with suppliers, dealing with customers, in meetings and conference calls, discussing product strategy, allocating work.... etc etc etc... anything, in fact, except coding.

It's funny how things change. Ten years ago I was the hardcore techie sniggering at the back of the room, thinking that the managers just didn't get it and that I would never be in their place. Now I'm the Pointy-Headed-Boss - and I'm actually OK with that... this stuff needs to be done, and I'd rather I dealt with it than have my team disturbed.

...I mentioned this in the stand-up, and was of course greeted with an appropriate chorus of cat-calls, ironic cheers, and a cry of "MAAAANAGEMEEENT WAAAAAAANNNNKKKKEEEEEERRRR!" (thanks Peter!)
So it's nice to know that although the faces change, the culture doesn't.