Music thing is doing a pretty cool series on the origins of various little sounds that are played every day: they've covered the THX "deep note", the Macintosh startup sound, the Brian Eno Windows 95 sound and the Intel Inside notes.

To hear the Channel 4 Jingle (notable because it earned its creator £3.50 every time it was played, or approximately £1000 a week over ten years -- not bad for four notes!), it seemed I would have to download RealPlayer.

Credit where credit is due, Real finally include on their homepage a prominent, obvious link to download the free version of the player. That said, I still don't feel well enough disposed towards this company to trust them with my email address. So when prompted for the necessary registration, I type in goober@example.com. (By using example.com, you ensure there's no chance any poor innocent bystander will be spammed).

real.com's response was immediate:

So it seems not only am I not alone in having a serious mistrust of Real's address-harvesting policies, I'm sufficiently not alone that my utterly lame random address has been used before.

(Picking a slightly more random @example.com address worked fine, so it wasn't just a blanket block on the domain.)

There's possibly a lesson in this, somewhere.