1) For the last few months I've been getting literally thousands of spam comments in Japanese to my LJ. I have screening on for anonymous comments, so the spammers must perform a graphics test before posting the comments, a total exercise in futility as I will never read them; as the mood takes me I just go in and delete them all as spam.

The comments all come from 180.250.250.* or 59.136.133.* which are bona fide Japanese ISPs. I've alerted both service providers; both claim to have warned the spammer to stop; the volume did subsequently fll off, and the last such comment was on Saturday. If it resumes, I suspect that there is nothing further to be done than continue deleting the comments as they are posted.

What a sad little bit of low-level harassment! I can't even tell if the comments are insulting (and have no interest in finding out). I suspect it's just two friends (given the two different IP addresses, which sometimes pop up as if in dialogue) having a laugh at the expense of my wasted time. Doesn't seem very funny.

2) On Monday several colleagues and friends alerted me to the fact that they had received Facebook add requests from one "Jeff Shields", whose only link with them appeared to be sharing several mutual friends with me. "Shields" had not sent me any such request, but one look at his profile set off alarm bells – his few "friends" were all friends of mine from very different parts of my life (science fiction, Northern Ireland, Eastern Europe, relatives); and his profile pictures were clearly of two (or three) different people, who however look vaguely familiar (but I sometimes have a terrible memory for faces). I'm sure that nobody in the photographs has any knowledge of this.

I posted an alert on Facebook, and literally dozens of my friends responded that they too had received a friend request from "Shields". I notified my concerns to all those who had friended the account, and most have now de-friended it. I assume that it was an attempt to get me to share confidences with him or her.

I see that he has now added another whole slew of people, leaning towards members of the Democratic Unionist Party in the Greater Belfast area. I don't feel that it's my civic duty to share my suspicions with people I don't know.

Considering what some people have to put up with, this is pretty small beer. And considering the various stuff I've done that may have annoyed people, there's not much point in probing further. It's not the first time this kind of thing has happened, and probably won't be the last.