Exstatica » Work

The insanity of email signatures

Exstatica — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:49:46 +0000

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.

Asterisk and Fax Detect

Exstatica — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 23:29:21 +0000

So after months and months of fighting faxing in asterisk, i was able to come up with a solution. All over the internet is a lot of references of app_nv_fax detect. good luck finding it. Especially good luck with getting it to work on asterisk 1.6.

So here is my contribution to the world. I was able get it functioning, and here is the code, and what you need. This was testing on 1.6.1.6. It should work on 1.6.1 and higher.

Download the asterisk source, and then download these 2 files app_nv_backgrounddetect.c and app_nv_faxdetect.c and put them into your asterisk.x/apps/ directory

then run ./configure, make, and make install they should get installed into your install directory or if you didn’t choose one they are in /usr/lib/asterisk/modules/

since I only use backgrounddetect this is what my extentions.conf file looks like

exten => _X!,1,Answer()

exten => _X!,2,AGI(/usr/local/iGMS/bin/GetGreeting.agi)

exten => _X!,3,NVBackgroundDetect(${greeting},t)

exten => _X!,4,AGI(/usr/local/iGMS/bin/iGMSCapture.agi)

exten => _X!,5,Hangup

exten => _X!,1,Answer()
exten => _X!,2,AGI(GetGreeting.agi)
exten => _X!,3,NVBackgroundDetect(${greeting},t)
exten => _X!,4,AGI(Capture.agi)
exten => _X!,5,Hangup

in my example I turned off voice detection because I didn’t want it. Then I have two more exten’s setup based on if it detected a fax, or if a dtmf digit was pressed.

Main Menu

;Menu

exten => *,1,AGI(Menu.agi)

exten => *,2,Hangup

Faxing:

;Fax

exten => fax,1,ReceiveFAX(${Faxfile})

exten => fax,2,AGI(/Fax.agi)

exten => fax,3,Hangup

The way my setup works is I lookup the DID and find out what greeting I’m suppose to use, and then i set the variable using Asterisk::AGI

So far my failure rate is about 1 in 500. Which for sip, and g711u is good enough for me. The largest fax I’ve recieved was 30 pages. If you have to get a fax larger than 30 pages use email. I’m sure it will take more, but the fax machine couldn’t fit any more pages in the read tray

Cupcakes, pudding, and well sugar duh.

Exstatica — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:06:22 +0000

*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. Hands In The Air 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.

The New blog

Exstatica — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:31:39 +0000

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.