I have a sister who is a chronic email forwarder. You probably have a forwarder too. You get an email that is:

Subject: Fwd: Fw: FW: Something!

And all the text is crazy indented and screwed up and there are headers with a hundred email addresses you must work through.

Or, it is an attachment, of an attachment of an attachment of an email that is a dead link about 50% of the time.

I have blocked email from my sister. I hate that crap.

Now, I get it at my job. From the CEO no-less. I can’t decide if I should correct his emails or not. Here is the latest, with all the screwed up text fixed: 

NO GAS…On May 15th 2007
Body: Don’t pump gas on may 15th
Body: ..in April 1997, there was a “gas out” conducted nationwide in protest of gas prices.  Gasoline prices dropped 30 cents a gallon overnight.

On May 15th 2007, all internet users are to not go to a gas station inprotest of high gas prices. Gas is now over $3.00 a gallon in most places.

There are 73,000,000+ American members curren tly on the internet network, and the average car takes about 30 to 50 dollars to fill up.

If all users did not go to the pump on the 15th, it would take $2,292,000, 000.00 (that’s almost 3 BILLION) out of the oil companies pockets for just one day, so please do not go to the gas station on May 15th and lets try to put a dent in the Middle Eastern oil industry for at least one day.

If you agree (which I cant see why you wouldn’t) resend this to all your contact list. With it saying, ”Don’t pump gas on May 15th”

And here is the easy to find website to put an end to it that no one ever seems to search for before they forward these things.

HOX0Rd

Please, before you forward another crazy ass statement or warning or other hot topic that was forwarded to you by some unknown source, go to Google and search for a bit of the text or the title and the word “hoax”.

     Ok, language, sexual situations, and generally disgusting…

     But uhh … yeah …

     This is exactly why Internet Dating sucks.

     I just deleted 991 spam since last night at 9PM.  One from a spambot known only as RastaCamel, coming to us from an open proxy in Russia, ends its hundreds of nasty pr0n links with the following:

See later![b] With best wishes, RastaCamel [/b]

P.s.
[i]Please don`t delete this topic.. My kitten is very hungry and I must to work for buy to her Whiskas :(( Thanks![/i]

     Kitten-guilt to promote pr0n spam.  Wow.

     Considering the subject matter, it’s probably a good thing, then, that the last Kitten Guilt craze was debunked by The Good Reverend in 2005…

     However, this math may be flawed, considering that he didn’t account for the the fact that kittens have nine lives…

     Something Kevin said the other day —

Noticed in my stats today that one of the search phrases to get to the church was “I hate Mark Steel.” Look, you’re getting famous!

     — stuck with me, although as a humorous sidenote.  I loved it!

     I’ve also seen a sudden surge in Google searches for “i hate mark steel.”  I love that sort of thing.  I also saw several of the blogs from our blogroll in the top 30.  But, why all the hate?
     Alternatively, I decided to check out “i love mark steel,” to find that I’m actually ranked #26.  I hate that.  I didn’t see much familiar around there, either.  C’mon, where is the love, people?

     I mean, I’m not saying I’m the world’s smartest man or the greatest living American or anything like that… But I do have a reasonable amount of knowlege about how this stuff works. 

     This is all a joke to me, and this post is just a silly experiment.  I’ll post the outcome in a couple of days, as I think it might teach someone a little something about SEO…

     Besides, I’ve already labeled John Kerry as the World’s Smartest Man… albeit, sarcastically.  And the antidisestablishmentarian in me still believes Bill Gates is the greatest living American…

[ UPDATE - 26-Apr-2007 @ 9:26PM EDT]

     THAT’S what I’m talkin’ about!  I moved up from #26 to #1 in less than 10 hours!  Now I’m #1 for “i love mark steel” and “i hate mark steel.”
     Now I feel balance!
     That’s SEO.  Thpft!

     Last week, I inherited a website maintenance customer from a partner company.  After getting everything working on Wednesday afternoon, I sat back and waiting until the next time they’d call.

     On Thursday, I was forwarded an e-mail saying there was an additional issue with their site.  I looked at the file dates, and of course, one of the files in their e-Commerce software had been modified at 9:03AM on 19-Apr-2007.  I rebuilt the file, inserted the requisite variables, and called the customer.
     “No, I haven’t been in it,” he said.  “I just got this stuff yesterday.”
     Clearly, someone had.  The site worked perfectly fine when I left it on Wednesday.  Regardless, I took his explanation, and asked that he setup an account with us.
     “No, all this stuff should be part of the Setup,” he monotoned.  “My wife does all of the billing, anyway.”  Eventually, he promised to have her called me on Friday, 20-Apr-2007.

     Friday came and went without a phone call.

     Monday came, and there were new issues.  At 3:30PM, interns at the company called me to tell me that they were unable to login to the website’s backend yet again.
     Investigation showed that files had been changed at 2:30PM, an hour before they called.  I told them I would call them back, made the required changes, and got it all up and running again.

     The first intern I talked to didn’t know anything about setting up an account with us, but would pass me onto the person who did that.
     Of course, the second intern didn’t know anything about setting up an account with us, but would pass me onto the owner.  “Oh, she’s not in, but I’ll have her call you back tomorrow!”

     Today … I never received a call from them.  I called the company again, attempted to speak to the owner, and was told, “Oh, I’m sorry she didn’t call you back.  But she doesn’t know you, and isn’t comfortable setting up an account when she doesn’t know what it’s for.”
     “It’s for fixing your website,” I explained.  “I’ve been trying to get hold of her since last week.”
     “No, really?  You didn’t talk to anyone here,” she said in a sarcastic tone.
     “No, I spoke with your sysadmin, her husband, last Thursday,” I explained.  “We need to get this situation resolved.  I need to speak with her, and get this straightened out.”
     “Well, what is it that you do?” she asked.
     “Well, you call us for help, we fix it.  Like when you called me yesterday,” I explained.
     “Well, she doesn’t know you, and, uhh, we might not use you anyway.”
     “That’s a bit rough,” I said firmly.  “You’re leaving me in a position where my only recourse is to revert the fixes I’ve made and leave you with it.  I don’t want to have to do that…”
     “Well, okay, I’ll call her right now,” she agreed.

     An hour later, I get a call from my partner company.
     “Mark, she’s going off that you’re making terrorist threats against her website!”
     “Man, I’m still trying to get hold of her.  Her intern said she wouldn’t call me because they don’t know me.”
     “That’s ridiculous … I sent them the e-mail last week!” he exclaimed.
     “Yeah, and it’s their sysadmin’s position that if they break anything on the site right now, that they’ve already paid for it with setup,” I explained.  “But he’s going to have his wife call me, only, she won’t talk to me, because she doesn’t know me.”
     “Well, she said she’s not going to do business with any company that starts making terroristic threats against her website.”
     “Maybe you should give her the number for Homeland Security,” I told him.

     We had a bit of a laugh at the nonsense of the situation.

     Nobody can fault me on my Customer Service skills.  For that matter, no one can say I’ve ever been unfair when issues like these have arisen.

     This is simply a client who’s attempting to get out of paying their bill.  A previous maintenance company allowed them to pay with barter dollars, so I’m guessing they’re a bit miffed at having to come up with cash or a credit card to for the service.

     Some customers nobody needs.

     But in the meantime — I’m a website terrorist!  *thumbs up*

     Should I start wearing a turban?

In this discussion of family, I will tell about a part of mine. Not to tell about my family as much as to tell a story of what this new technology is doing to parts of America.

My sister got a call from my aunt at the law office she works for. My aunt and uncle are in a very rural farm area of Tennessee and he is the pastor of a small Baptist church. If I told you the sort of stuff that goes on in his church you’d think I was making it up. Not snake handling crazy, but, yeah, you’d be freaked out if you went there. This is the uncle who, during a wedding he was officiating, stopped to make an altar call in case anyone wanted to accept Jesus as their Savior first. So, anyway, my aunt calls my sister in a terrible panic. My uncle was in mortal fear that he was going to lose his church. So much so, that he had written a suicide note. She wanted a lawyer to do something.

What that something is, we are still not sure.

The crisis is something like this. One of the guys who plays in the church band, has a rock and roll band on the side. Nothing like Super Satanic Metal Death stuff, just a decent rock band. And they have a MySpace page. And people are posting comments on this page and using foul language, and saying crude things like “You guys &^%#& rock!” This is happening out there on the Internets.

So, my uncle is in desperation and some sort of legal action must be taken and no one knows what to do and he may just have to kill himself about it. It’s just that desperate a situation.

Really.

We get these surveys and we all put in canned one liner answers. And honestly, how many times do you have to answer the same question about what color your underwear are or how many times in the last 3 weeks someone else has slept in your bed?

No, I’m not on a high horse. I am one of the most guilty individuals that I know. If I am bored at work or have nothing to do and there is a survey sitting there in the bulletins, it’s like a train wreck. I have to look. And then, before I know it, I am committing a crime against all that is right in the world and tap, tap, tapping my keyboard, filling in the answers.

Today, on my way back to my office I happened to catch National Public Radio’s Evening Edition. The story was about a new web reference source in response to Wikipedia. Evidently there are a group of individuals who believe Wikipedia to be too liberal. I am not saying that this group of individuals is wrong, but they came to this conclusion based on the statistics of a poll by Wikipedia editors.

There are several bits of flawed logic with this idea. The assumption that the editors of Wikipedia aren’t human because as a straight set of data this poll would leave no room for human error or a lack of honesty. These facts are statistics. Statistics by nature can be used to sway one way or another. If not lawyers wouldn’t be so profitable. However, the major problem with consevapedia.com, is the misuse of the word conservative.

The main example can be shown by comparing the definitions of the word kangaroo on both sites: Wikipedia and Conservapedia. Okay, I am fine with either of them until I get to the Origins section of the Conservapedia definition. The first thing listed is a creationist theory explanation. That in itself was fishy enough for me to check the dictionary for the definition.

The Oxford dictionary (I would have used Merriam-Webster, but the link wouldn’t pull up) states that a conservative is “(in a political context) favoring free enterprise, private ownership, and socially conservative ideas.” If this is the case then where does interjecting religious beliefs into the origin of a species come into play? A true conservative world should not include religion. Religion is much more defined either one way or another.

Conservapedia.com even goes on to say “A conservative is one who adheres to principles of limited government, personal responsibility and moral virtue.” Where does this give them the right to inteject a secular religious viewpoint, much less stake a claim of moral virtue? If they are truly conservative should they not list the scientific information first?

With that in mind I would like to propose a new web address for this website: severelyscrewypedia.com

When will it start? Every single person who reads this has been attacked repeatedly. And if the attack were successful, our computer might be dead or our back accounts drained or our identities stolen. Sounds freakin serious to me.

I have a very good sys admin who keeps 99.9999+% of the spam and phishing scams from ever hitting my inbox. But some still comes through. And over 99% of the email traffic on the internet is spam. The work of compromised, infected computers. National Security? Hello.

My sys admin knows who they are. He blocks them and send the spam to the bit bucket. Why does he have to?

Wanna stop elderly folks and computer newbies from sending thousands of dollars to Nigeria? Stop with the free distribution of spam! It’s that easy.

We need to stop it all at the Internet backbone. If the engineers and computer scientists in charge of maintaining the Internet decide to implement it, they could stop 80-90+% of the spam immediately. Thus freeing up bandwidth for more porn commerce.

Every day it only gets worse as a new computer has a broadband connection to the Internet every half second and three days later 1 out of 100 of those is sending out 100,000 spam emails an hour. It will cripple the Internet. And no one is even thinking about it. No one but the sys admins fighting the war on their servers and the people like us fighting off one attack after another.

Not to mention the millions of dollars that is lost daily to the crap coming into our Tubes…

     That still makes me cringe every time I see it typed.

     And it never fails. You go into an IRC channel, an AOL chat room, telnet to your favourite talker or MUD, or even Usenet and someone who doesn’t know you will most always ask …

how old are you.

m or fem?

     Your initial thought usually gives regard to the lack of capitalisation or punctuation, perhaps even a lack of decent grammar. But then you get over it, often thinking, well, Hell, at least I wasn’t innocently exploring AOL and getting an instant message from BigDick90210…

HOW BIG ARE YOUR TITS.

     Messages of that sort that can be terribly confusing to anyone who is, very obviously, not physically equipped to even answer of a question (or statement, as it may be) of that sort. Unless you enjoy that sort of thing, these people aren’t worth talking to. But… these questions… they’re not that offensive or anything, really… just…

how old are you.

m or fem?

     You start to answer, but then you think about it for a moment, and realise, hey, that’s kind of rude, isn’t it?

     Isn’t it?

     Maybe it’s the way I was brought up. You could talk to strangers a bit when I was a kid; everything wasn’t so dangerous that you were afraid to let children out of your sight. But then, if I had walked up to someone I didn’t know and asked either of those questions, my parents would have given me a good, hard wallop.
     ”You don’t ask people how old they are!” my mother told me. “That’s just plain rude!”

     I can’t say that I don’t disagree.

     Still, sometimes I sit there, wonder about it for a moment, and think, “Well, okay, this is a bit silly of me, really. I mean, hey, we’re all chatting here in this space, sometimes for a few days, weeks, whatever … this is somebody I’ll get to know, perhaps. They’re just trying to see what commonalities we have…”
     And then, I usually end up telling them. I just find it odd, I guess, because I rarely, if ever, ask those sorts of questions myself (and never out of context, mind you). Usually, if you pay attention, and you’re a reasonable judge of character, you can get a pretty good sense of who a person is just by idle chat: the things they say, the way they compose themselves during a “conversation” or what have you.
     You assure yourself that it’s only an Internet-related phenomenon. It’s not like they’re walking up to you in public and saying “How old are you?” or “Are you male or female?” In public, they can of things easily (unless it’s someplace like 42nd Street or K Road). They’re being inquisitive online because they can’t see you. The net is free of those kinds of prejudices, for the most part. Of course, there are those who want there to be prejudices like Age and Sex and Where You Live to be thrown in there, but for the most part, the people you meet online are nice enough lots.

     Most times, if the group you’re talking to is within a given area of the world, there might be some sort of get-together where everyone can meet each other, see who they’ve been talking to for all those weeks, months, sometimes even years. Quite a few of them will be inquisitive about what you might look like, considering they’ve imagined, from time to time. Usually, it’s at a local club or coffee house, and everyone sits around, talks, has a few drinks… Nothing major, and it’s usually quite different from the chat rooms. Some people get disappointed initially because someone didn’t look like someone else thought they would or something of that nature, but for the most part, those types of gatherings can be fun, right?
     And it’s usually a bit odd meeting them face-to-face for the first time. But if you’re comfortable with who you are, and you’ve been chatting for some time, it’s no big deal, right? All those questions in the beginning about how old you are, what sex you are, they don’t have any bearing on real life, do they?
     You walk into the assigned meeting place, to the assigned set of tables and look around, realising that these are average Joes, not unlike yourself. There was nothing to worry about, nothing to feel odd about at all. You may even chuckle to yourself a bit about feeling pressured.
     And invariably, someone will turn around and loudly ask…

who are you?

how old are you?

     But back to the problem at hand… The question… How to answer… “Ah, yes. I know,” you think to yourself, grinning slightly.

i’m 83 years old bucktoothed bowlegged and a horrid alcoholic with chronic halitosis. i live in a trailer in BFE and i live to swill beer, watch a broken television set, work on my big red truck with the gunrack in the back and beat my wife. my name’s mark, and it’s nice to meet you.

     ”Ahh, yes,” you think. “I’ve outsmarted them now. Now maybe they’ll realise that was an off question and we can start again.”
     It’s only then that you realise the gross error you’ve made. They respond.

hey man it’s nice to meat you i’m kelly and i like to work on pabst blue ribon what do you drink
  .
  .
  .
do you like sex

     ”Dammit!” It’s only then that you realise what you’ve gotten yourself into. You finally notice that the first three thousand IRC channels are #!!!!!!!!HORNY_SLUTS, #!!!!!!!!!SISTER_SEX_PICS, #!!!!!!!!!fuck_my_wife and the like…

     ”Gods,” you mutter to yourself with despair. “Perhaps there really aren’t any social skills left amongst the Internet geeks…”