Category: Rant

National “Destroy Your Productivity Day”

Today is “Destroy Your Productivity Day” aka “Half Your Cow Orkers Are Unavailable Because They’re Entertaining Their Children Instead of Working Day”. I think it’s officially “Bring Your Son or Daughter To Work Day” in other quarters.

My Clearcase view is pooched. I can’t see any files below src/, even if I leave the view and come back into it, or doing a “ct setview -cs”. The last time I saw our Clearcase administrator, he was running around the building with his kid on some sort of scavenger hunt. I will probably have to create a new view in order to do any work, which is a pain.

At lunch, though, I got my own back. One of the older kids, a teenage boy, was eating with us and his dad. His dad said they’d seen some digital movie trailers this morning as part of the company activities. I said “So, are they going to show the secret digital print of the new Star Wars movie this afternoon”, and then quickly acted like I shouldn’t have said that in front of the kid. We don’t really have such a print, or if we do, nobody’s told me about it. (We do have a digital print of “The Village”, but only our testers are allowed to show it, we can’t show it to potential customers or even projector vendors.) But the seed is sown. Bwah hah ha.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

Spammers are the scum of the earth!

In the last 24 hours, there were 2541 attempts to deliver mail to xcski.com.

Of those, 1871 (73%) were rejected by the mail server because they came from known spam sites, or because they gave an invalid “HELO”, or various other spam symptoms.

56 messages were to non-existant addresses, either old addresses that were retired (I use temporary addresses when I’m dealing with merchants and retire them when I don’t need to talk to the merchant any more) or spammers with bad address lists (people have been spamming 5bptomblin for over a decade now).

4 messages were to deliberate bait addresses (addresses which I put on comment on the main page of my web site), which are redirected to a spam reporting system called Vipul’s Razor.

311 messages (12%) were caught by SpamAssassin or bogofilter.

Of the remaining 299 messages (12%), at least some of that was uncaught spam, but I don’t know how much because I’m not the only person who gets email at xcski.com. I tune and train my spam filters, so yesterday only one piece of uncaught spam got through to me. But the others here do not train their spam filters the way I do, so they probably get more uncaught than that. But that means that at maximum, 12% of the email xcski.com gets is real, legitimate mail from people who have a reason, possibly a bad one, to send us email. I know for a fact that at least some of that email is from mailing lists that my step-daughters never bothered to unsubscribe from, but which they never read. So the real percentage of wanted email is lower, possibly much lower.

What spammers have done to the wonderful medium of email is criminal.

Subtle isn’t working.

My cubicle is at the south west corner of two very busy corridors, and the south east corner is the doorway to a large conference room. So I get a lot of people passing by, but I also get a lot of “encounter at the corner” meetings happening right outside my cube, but worst of all I get all the pre-meeting and post-meeting mini-meetings happening right outside my cube. Worse still, I hung some pictures on the partition wall. So all these bozos stand just outside my cube having loud conversations, but also bouncing off the wall of my cube, causing my pictures to bounce alarmingly.

I’ve tried to be subtle. Thanks to Rone, I have two pictures made at StClaire.com’s sign customization site, one showing a person with ear defenders saying “Shhh! I can’t hear you”, and another showing a person with his fingers in his ears saying “Danger: This is not a conference room.” But this afternoon I was treated to a good 10 minutes of people leaning against my cube wall and bouncing my pictures. I put on Flogging Molly quite loud so I don’t know what they were talking about. I tried pushing back on the wall a few times, but they didn’t get the hint.

I think my next attempt at being subtle will be a “Wet Paint” sign.

Ok, I’m convinced.

The Ottawa News Administrator’s Group mailing list got the following query. The bit with the quote markers is the start of the ott.events charter.

> ott.events is an unmoderated newsgroup for announcements of seminars and
> the like in and around Ottawa-Hull, Canada. This newsgroup is intended for
> events with no admission charge (unless the charge is sufficient only to
> cover expenses or is donated to charity).
>
> The following topics are NOT permitted:
> auctions/garage sales — use ott.forsale.other
> retail store sales — use ott.business.ads
> open houses — use ott.housing

Well if there are no advertizing for garage sales…which newsgroup would be
allowed ???

I responded “Which part of ‘auctions/garage sales — use ott.forsale.other’ didn’t you understand?” and underlined the part of the quoted text. After all, about the only compensation I get for being a news administrator is to be snarky to idiots. He replied a few hours later:

You should be careful who you’re speaking with. I have a good mind to rip your fucking head off and shit in your hole.

Don’t you ever talk to me again like that.

Colour me convinced. This person is a moron, and deserved all the snarkiness of my first reply. And more. He didn’t want me to “talk to me again like that”, so in my next response, I was much less polite.

If you don’t want your stupidity pointed out to you, you shouldn’t ask
stupid questions. Especially not when the answer to the question is in
your quoted text.

Fuck off, moron.