Category: Annoyances

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More “You sent a virus!” garbage going around. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even look at most delivery failure notices, which means I could easily miss errors about mail I really did send.

I got ticked off enough this time that I wrote back to the return address on the warning, matching the tone and structure of their message as closely as possible:

An invalid virus notice was found in an Email message you sent. Your Email scanner recognized a virus as W32/MyDoom-O but did not take into account the fact that this virus always uses a fake sender address.

Please update your virus scanner or contact your IT support personnel as soon as possible as you are sending bogus virus warnings to third parties whose systems are not infected with the virus. This runs the risk of causing unnecessary concern among the less tech-savvy (and extra calls to tech support about the nonexistant virus they fear they have). I would recommend reading up on the phrase “crying wolf” as well.

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Here are a few additions I would make to the building code for public restrooms:

  1. All restroom doors must open outward. If the restroom is large enough to contain stalls, it must be possible to open the outer door simply by pushing with the toe of one’s foot. Sharply-turning doorless corridors that block sightlines are acceptable.
  2. If it is necessary for a restroom door to lock (as is the case with single-person restrooms), handles are to be used rather than doorknobs. Additionally, attempting to open the door from the inside must automatically disengage the lock.
  3. If a restroom displays a sign asking people to wash their hands before leaving, it must be directed at all users of the restroom, not only at employees.
  4. If the outer door can be opened without the use of one’s hands, choice of paper towels, air dryers, etc. is left to the discretion of management. In the event that opening the door does require hands, drying methods provided must include paper towels.
  5. At least one trash receptacle must be within casual tossing distance of the outer door.

Of course, these are mostly ways to mitigate the fact that a disturbing number of people won’t take an extra 30 seconds to clean up on the way out. A better solution might be a device I saw in The Far Side: an alarm which went off whenever someone left the restroom in a less-than-sanitary state, with a blazing sign proclaiming “Didn’t wash hands!”

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Suing JibJab over using the tune and some lyrics of “This Land is Your Land” is like filing a class-action suit against grade-schoolers for using “The Birthday Song” to sing “You look like a monkey/And you smell like one too.” The contention that the song has been “damaged” by its use as parody is ridiculous. Have these people not been outdoors since 1999? Do they not know how long internet fads actually last? Sure, for some people the cartoon will be the first thing they think of on hearing the song for a while, but that will go away. The only reason Badger Badger Badger and All Your Base are still primarily associated with their source material is that they were either widely unknown before the humor emerged (AYB), or were original creations (BBB). “This Land is Your Land” is, or at least used to be, aggressively marketed as an assembly-appropriate song in elementary schools, and children’s brains are much more receptive than adults’. I don’t even think of the cartoon now on hearing the song, but of the inside of my elementary-school cafeteria, the time they accidentally let the record play all the verses, and, of all things, tissue-paper flowers. (God only knows why, as they weren’t used at the same assemblies.) TRO needs to grow up and let people have their perfectly legal fun. Though it would be fun to see them get a trial date a year from now and try to prove there was any lasting damage.

Thtphphtppthtphttt.

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I regularly get bogus bounces from clueless virus scanners that don’t realize the sending address is fake 99% of the time, but this takes the cake:

Sometime last night I received three copies of the same notice from some system in Brazil. They had written their virus warning in Microsoft Word, saved it as HTML without cleaning up all the extra junk, and made it the only part of the message… in Base64 encoding!

If you’re going to send any kind of diagnostic notice by email, you want it to be as simple and widely readable as possible. That means plain text (not HTML or Base64, and certainly not both!) It also means if you do want to use HTML, at least clean it up and include a plain-text alternative. For all you know it’s going to be read by some admin logging into a GUIless server through SSH over a modem connection on a hotel phone line!

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1. Obtain a gun.

2. Provide ammunition.

3. Vote to pull the trigger.

BANG.

And the Democratic party drops off the House floor.

At least, I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. If I lived in Nuñez’s district, I’d be royally pissed that I voted for him (because I probably would’ve) and would be willing to sign any paper that would kick his ass. Democratic party leaders don’t seem to realize that they’re in danger of dying out without this kind of stunt. If you’re going to assert your belief in balance and diversity, you better damn well show it, because it isn’t just voters who write letters to congresspeople.