Exstatica

company A just enforced signatures to be standard. While I agree there should be some standardization across the company, the way they are requiring them to be formated is complete insanity.

For example, this is the signature they are requiring.

FirstName LastName | Position
Company X, Inc.
123 Place St, Suite 1,  City, ST, 12345
Office: 310-555-1212 | Toll Free: 800-555-1212
Direct: 310-555-1222 | Fax: 310-555-1234

Email: n...@company.net    Web: http://www.company.net

Business Grade Voice & Data Solutions
VoIP | Broadband | Co-location | Professional Services

- Notice: Please use “Reply to All” when responding to this email.
- For general support please call 800-555-1234or email supp...@company.net.
- For billing, sales or the general office please call 310-555-1234.

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This e-mail transmission, and any documents, files or previous e-mail messages attached to it may contain confidential information that is legally privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, or a person responsible for delivering it to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any disclosure, copying, distribution or use of any of the information contained in or attached to this transmission is STRICTLY PROHIBITED. If you have received this transmission in error, please immediately notify the sender. Please destroy the original transmission and its attachments without reading or saving in any manner. Thank you.

Alright, so lets make an signature that takes up an entire page. Here is an alternative

FirstName LastName | Sr. Network Engineer
Company Inc.
123 Place St, Suite 1,  City, ST, 12345
Main: 310-555-1212, x123| Fax: 310-555-1222
n...@company.net | http://www.company.net

Notice: Use “Reply To All” when responding.
For general support please call 800-555-1212 or email supp...@company.net. For billing, sales or the general office please call 310-555-1212.

I would make the company name a little bigger, but disclaimers don’t really do anything, granted they might have some purpose in court but for the most part they are going to be looking at the content of the email. If it is the intended recpient taking you to court the content has no value, if its someone else, someone that the email wasn’t intended for then it might serve a purpose. However employees shouldn’t be sending email that could put the company at risk to people in the first place. We provide support and sales stuff. I’m not sending medical records, the whitehouse blueprints.

Also in the first example the numbers are duplicated, why would we put such information twice in an email? why do we need to put all this office stuff and then in a notice put it again? I can’t really imagine why.

Anyway thats my rant for the day.

Who doesn’t like presents? OK maybe you don’t, but I’m all about getting random stuff shipped. I’ve tried taking this idea to Think Geek a few years ago, but it apparently fell on def ears. Here is the idea. Hopefully Woot will go for it.

1. User specifies a per month cost. (Say 20 per month).
2. User specifies a frequency (lets say once or twice a month).
3. Woot uses a Magical Random Surprise Detection Algorithm or Mrsda as I like to call it, to send me a package, it can use all or some of the monthly allotment, anything not used rolls over. In a month I may only get 1 item that cost 3 dollars, the next month however I might get something for 35. Users of course could choose to turn this on and off.
4. Woot ships me the package via fedex or unicorns, I prefer unicorns, on a random day of the month
5. Bam surprise!
6. ???
7. Profit

Now of course you should be able to choose some options, like I would enable it for both woot.com and shirts.woot.com and maybe even wine.woot.com (man I really want that Bonsai Tree). You would also be able to select types of things, like nothing USB, or Only computer crap, or only kitchen things. That way the surprise is tailored kind of to you. Plus if it it was built around the Pandora method then you could go online and rate your surprise, but maybe on a scale of one to 10 instead of thumbs up and thumbs down. Even if I hated the gift I could give it to someone else and make it their problem.

So Woot, how about it? I’m sure your amazing groups of item description writers could help with the Mrsda system and then I could start getting presents in the mail. Like Tiger Woods would say… Just Do her it!

Its interesting with the current Facebook outage, and the last year or so of various cloud services failing that we learn how much we rely on the internet. Just 5 years ago we didn’t have such a vested interest in communicating online. The shift of information has changed.

Think about just 5 years ago. Facebook was still closed to college students only, it had only been around since feb 2004. No Twitter, No Youtube. Social media as we new it didn’t exist. We relied heavily on email, and instant messaging.  Broadband was still expensive and slow. You were lucky to get 1.5/128 broadband. Things like Google Maps wasn’t even around in 2004. I’m sure 99% of us used Mapquest since it was the only real online map site.

With a sense of disconnect we continue hitting refresh in the hope that we will get a glimpse or a update from someone somewhere telling us that things will be ok, or what shoes you are wearing. Information that seems so silly yet so vital to our daily lives.

We then turn to other online media sites and flood them trying to get the word out to increase the buzz yet we all already know its down just from a twitter search. Which in itself creates a catch 22. If no one reports it, no one knows about it, if tens of thousands of people twitter it then it becomes an epidemic, and more wildly known. Even if the outage only last for a few minutes. The 5 minutes of downtime will circle the blog-o-sphere casting a much needed doubt in the reliability of the information we rely on.

We complain when there is an outage but build cloud based services because some niche needs to be filled on the internet for us to store our content. yet is still prone to failures as is with anything.  Whats the next move? Cloud based computing, lets remove local storage and put it on the cloud and build a computer around it. Don’t get me wrong, I think Chrome OS is great, and for someone who just needs to browse the web, check email, and look at pictures. My parents who are getting better at using the internet as long as I tell them what browsers to use, what services to use, and most of all a virus/spyware program that emails me. Plus I tell them they are not allowed to install anything unless they call me. Usually I have a better idea of what they are looking for than some program they don’t need.

What do I tell them if they are using Google Docs, and Gmail, and Wave and Google breakfast maker and the cloud goes down?

What if its like my father who would use it for work and handle customer tracking. What does he tell his clients when something goes down? What if a service goes out of business. I wonder if someone has built a graph of startups with cloud/remote storage and failures vs success. I don’t Google would fail, because they have some of the most amazing technology, and Microsoft is releasing Office Live which is a cloud based document center. Everything is just moving to the web. I don’t even think I could function without a computer for more than 2 weeks. Not only would my Email get backed up, my work would explode, I wouldn’t even know how to pay bills via snail mail let alone check my account balance without going to an atm. Even then I’d have no idea how to figure out how to get a balance. I mean I’m sure I could figure it out, but the browser and online banking is just so much easier.

I dunno, honestly its going to be very interesting to see where online media and social network takes us next. If the U.S. was the broadband leader and we all had 100mbit wireless internet I think the web would jump a few version numbers from 2.0 to 16.9 in a matter of months. Everyone wants instant content, and they want it now.

Search engines alone are getting crazy accurate. The next logical step for them is to plus directly into our brains and make our memory searchable. How awesome would that be? Google Brain Search.

Yes, If I could have a internet connection planted into my brain with audio and video playback, and just think what I want. I would rob you, get it implanted, go on every knowledge game show and then pay you back with my winnings. Hey I’m just saying…

Ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention. I’ve just been handed an urgent and horrifying news story. I need all of you, to stop what you’re doing and listen. Waffle Shortage!

– The waffle situation is critical

– The waffle situation is critical

This news comes at such desperate times when an a mass of children form to create what I like to call the Colostomy Effect. After further research I’ve been able to report the more detailed reason behind this shocking news.

Kellogg Company recently experienced supply constraints caused by flood damage at our bakery in Atlanta. In addition, we’ve been making significant equipment enhancements and repairs in our largest waffle bakery. Unfortunately, this is taking longer than anticipated.

The Eggo™ team is working around the clock to bring everyone’s favorite waffles back to store shelves as quickly as possible. We hope to regain full distribution of Eggo products by the middle of 2010. This is a top priority for Kellogg Company.

Click here to receive periodic updates from the Eggo® brand about your favorite products, including news about when they will be back on shelf, or for more information, call 866-971-3320. Thank you for your patience during this time, and we apologize for any inconvenience.

I hope that this team of waffle engineers is getting the government support they need to correct this national waffle emergency. I’ll keep you all updated as new information comes in.

I’ve been kinda sorta playing wow for almost 4 years now. I’ve worked my way up and up into the hardcore raiding and then well burnt out. I have only one 80, its my Druid. I haven’t really played another character much, just my druid. I went Resto, and became the best healer in my guild. I enjoy healing, I’m good at it, and I’m fast. But raiding 4-5 nights a week is overkill. I have a real life, it keeps me way to busy and I just can’t find the time to play anymore.

Sister and myself used to be in the same guild, we raided together, we pretty much always played together. I got burn’t out before her, but she was not far behind. She recently began playing again on an alt. She rolled a Druid on another server to kind of enjoy the fun parts of playing wow. She is around 25. I have a 31 priest on a server that I never play so I moved that character over so we could all just screw around again.

Not 24 hours later did I move my 80 . You see as my low 31′ness, I helped a guild sign a charter (if you have no idea what I’m talking about you can just ignore this whole post) Became a “founding” member of a guild and noticed that everyone in this guild was transferring from other servers, it was kind of a fresh start for everyone. So why not me? Its a local server, great raid times, and I don’t have to be all hardcore raid. Since I have great gear, and I can heal like Sushi heals my soul. Why not.

So we’ll see how it plays out. I’m kind of excited, but I’m a little weary as I have a pretty busy life as it is. Between work, and general life. I don’t want to be sucked all the way back into this fictitious world. Although PVP is always a great way to get some stress out, I mean who doesn’t feel good to just go and kill something with some friends? I know I do.

Screenshot of my UI

WoW UI

Ok so Look at this picture to the left. This was a post titled…

If My Brain Ran Windows, This Would Be How My Task Manager Looks

So this is a great image, however the order is all messed up for me. Food and Drinks are usually important, sex is great. If I had to reorder this it would be as follows

Drink
Play
Sex
Food
Work

So ok, Well there is an issue here, sadly work tends to be first. I love playtime. It doesn’t have to be sexual, just has to be fun, random, and probably a little crazy. Only because if you can’t enjoy life, than what is the point. While I can be the responsible adult that I forced myself to become due to the way I grew up. I am still a kid at heart, and while some people don’t get my sense of humor, I frankly don’t care. If you don’t like me… well I hate you too.

*edit* Sidenote, I listen to my entire music collection on shuffle. Let me tell you Its like taking 5 Ipods from the following sources. 11/y girl, 19/y rapper, 23/y college student,  35/y woman who found out she can’t have kids so she’s turned to running, and punishing everyone for their mistakes, and a 65/y going through a midlife crisis because his doctor told him if he had sex one more time he’d probably keel over. If you can’t die happy, whats the point of living. So click play and listen to this completly random selection of “Girl Talk” while you continue to read through my completely absurd yet mildly entertaining post.

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Sounds like I’m just giant fat dude that sits in front of the computer and eats cupcakes and pudding all day. Although it might sounds awesome, and the perfect way to spend my day, I enjoy work too much. This is the second day in a row that I attempted to eat really healthy, salad and fruit, sadly I ended up with pudding (not all that bad) and the ever so elusive cupcake.  Usually after I eat a small truck I slip into something a little more comfortable, like a coma, or that now clean white board on the other side of my monitor. If it was any darker in my cave I’d have put myself down for a nap. I think cupcakes are the root of all evil, a delicious, tasty, chocolate, stomach ache, evil.  I also feel that while these pudding cups taste like awesome, they are also contributing to the hell that cupcakes bring. Now I know what your thinking. Mixing chocolate pudding and cupcakes = evil. You might just not realize the gravity ( I chose gravity to Illustrate the weight of this post) of what I’m about to say. So let me break it down for you before I deliver such life changing news. First we need to discuss the importance of each item, and how they are associated to my life.

Cupcakes/Pudding : Good/Evil

Now you’ll notice that good takes up a huge portion of my pie chart. Speaking of pie. I do love me some good pie. Now If you were to combine Cupcakes, Pudding, and Evil you would reach a mass much larger than good.  This in itself is inherently evil or as its easier to say not good. Even Cupcakes alone are plenty of evil they continually battle muffins as this image will illustrate (I’m getting good at spelling that word)  The evil cupcake eye, and the death of the muffin. Although in this situation I would have to disagree with the cupcake as I do find muffins delicious too, only blueberry really. They also taste like awesome. In fact I think I might have to downgrade the level of awesomeness of Pudding, and insert blueberries into the good side. So to reflect this new change I must update the graph. In fact if you had a rock paper scissors game it would go like this. Blueberries, Cupcake, Pudding. Pudding would trump Cupcake, and everything else would loose to blueberry, and if you had two blueberries fighting it out, I think the end result would be a hug.

Blueberries vs Evil

Evil would not stand a chance, and blueberries would conquer all. I can’t believe its only tuesday, Last week flew by and this week not so much, its actually pretty sad. Oh so the whole point of me writing this post was that a co-worker had sent an email in response to Cupcakes being in the kitchen. To which I found to be accurate and very true. Sadly no sort of technical dictionary or glossary had defined such golden knowledge. Said response was…

Clinical trials have proven that high levels of blood glucose, or blood sugar, can cause high performance levels in the engineering staff of Velocity Networks. So a major goal of treatment for these engineers is to keep blood sugar levels in a off the record range…  Subsequently allowing staff to accomplish virtually the impossible with the swiftest of ease…

Another co-worker of mine stated that we have to consume so much sugar to counteract the lack of sleep. I’d have to agree. If Sleep was an option, I might be able to cut sugar out of my diet err I mean eat less sugar and stick better with fruit.

Alright, so i decided that I’d do this whole blog thing and not use aboutmylife. Its still in development, and my blog will probably be eventually moved back over there. but its still got a lot of work to make it a competing product. So it will be back soon I promise.

Besides that I’ve been pretty busy with a ton of work, and its been eating my life up.

Yes I hate SalesLogix, I wish they could make a software package that doesn’t crash.

Gonna go get some lunch now, i’ll finish customizing this a lot later.