Update: Paul Beard notes the apparent scam that Classmates.com is pulling here. Read the comments there for an interesting attempt at astroturfing by some Classmates.com commenter (comment #28).

Once upon a time, I went to Classmates.com and signed up to see what it was all about. Of course, I've been getting emails ever since. I'm not too surprised about that. One day, however, I got an email that said someone signed my guestbook. That, on the other hand did raise my eyebrow. It deserved a look since, well, as you can imagine, given my interests in life, I was not the kind of person to attract friends in a small town high school.

I clicked on through. When I arrived, it appeared that Classmates wanted me to upgrade to see who signed it. I toyed with giving up my numbers for a month of charges, but since the minimum charge is $15 (3 months at $5 / month) I decided seeing who this one soul was could wait until the information was cheaper.

Then, soon afterward, I got another notification that another old skooler signed my guestbook. It was long enough since the first notification where I probably took the same steps as above. The next few months are a blur with all of the activity in my life.

Last month I got another. Suspicious, I decided to look at the list of signing events. That's when I spotted a curious pattern. Here is a shot of the list:

Odd how the number of the month of the signing event is (last event's month + 1). Sure the day of the month is random, but how hard is that to model? It looks like a marketing campaign with a requirement to have a monthly teaser if I've ever seen one. I'd predicted in August that the next would come in September. Let's see how long this pattern continues.