Category: Geekery

Not “Bill Law is dead” sad, but sad none-the-less

In software development, there is nothing sadder than seeing a nice simple and elegant design turn into a mishmash of special cases and exceptions – except maybe having your project relocated to India. And in this case, I’m not close enough to that part of the project to see if it’s just that real life turned out to be a lot more complicated than the design, or if (as I suspect) the guy doing the work is overlooking simple and elegant ways of solving the problems and grafting on complicated band-aids on top of other complicated special case band-aids.

Pulling out the thermo-nuclear trump card

Our QA group works in the basement of this building. I work on the third floor. The only elevator is a freight elevator at the other end of the building, and I think you need your doctor to swear on a stack of bibles that you are legitimately handicapped before you can use it. Consequently, when the QA people need me to come down and look at a problem, I have to haul myself down this steep stairway in one of the danker and more industrial smelling parts of the building. I would like to I avoid it as much as possible. However, one of the QA people, Lisa, always calls me first whenever she has any problem, and she’s not very good at describing what the problem is, so I have to go down the stairs to see her. Unfortunately she’s very nice and pretty good at her job for the most part, so I can’t just tell her to fuck off.
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Today’s jihad

Today I wish to hunt down everybody who makes an email virus scanner that sends back a message to the “From” address telling them that the message that they sent contained a virus, and all the morons who install these things without disabling this option, and kill them. Slowly.

Free clue: VIRUSES FORGE THE FROM ADDRESS, FUCKWADS! The “helpful” message ends up harrassing some innocent third party. And because you all feel you need to customize your “helpful” message some how, it’s impossible to filter these damn things out.

I get over 1000 pieces of spam a day, and all but one or two are filtered out by my spam filters. But I get 10 or more of these virus warnings a day, and most of them get through my filters. So most of the spam I have actually deal with in terms of seeing the “new mail” indication and opening up a mail client and reading it and deleting it are these messages.