Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

nice old writeup from Tristan Miller (someone whom I first met on UseNet) explains why it is a poor idea to send Word files. I explored his site at deeper levels in the past as his opinions broadly intersected with mine. I also happened to find this funny ‘scientific paper’ with an hilarious followup.

Returning to the subject at hand, the true nuisance is mail that contains Word attachments. It is a plague that appears to be reaching its end. Funnier (or coversely — more annoying) experiences include the embedment of nothing but plain text (or even a single image) in a Word files which is attached to a blank-body message. Some people just never learn. Here are some effective E-mail signatures that I have come across in the L_yX mailing list.

I do not have a copy of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.
I have no plans to buy one.
Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint use proprietary data formats,
encouraging consumerism by forcing us to purchase new licenses
every time they “upgrade” their secret formats.
Send plain text, rich text format, html, or pdf instead.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

Or a shorter version thereof (one which honours the 4-line signature limit)

Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are unreliable, unmaintainable, and unsafe.
Send plain text, rtf, pdf, or W3C html instead.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

There is now the ODF argument as well. ODF has recently become an ISO-approved standard.

ORE nations than ever before are showing interest in a purely electronic system for managing people’s records, funds, and vehicles. Take, for example, this older story on the use of biometrics. Cities and individual shops can already make authentication immediate when payment are being made. More latterly, a city in France began testing the idea of cities where cash is a antiquated notion of the past.

The tourist city of Caen in Normandy is hosting a major European trial of the use of NFC (near field communication) – a mobile technology that can be used for anything from paying for groceries to finding out about your home town.

HE Epoch Times reports that the world’s tallest woman comes from Asia. The photos are truly astounding and one of them (the one I saw first) had me question the genuineness.

Thirty-four-year-old Yao Defen is known as Asia’s tallest woman. At 7 feet 7 inches, 396 pounds, and a shoe size (EUR) of 78, Yao attracts a lot of attention. This “woman giant” makes her living as a circus performer. Her boss forces her to perform despite her physical ailments, and he even mistreated and bullied her when she requested to go to the hospital for a physical examination.

Related item: Big fish

Photo which goes back to circa 1984

N hindsight, I believe that resigning from my job was an excellent choice, from a career ‘s perspective. I think I made the right choice by reducing a workload which provided income. For those readers who are lost, my last day at work was yesterday.

My life remains divided between voluntary contributions to Open Source and some jobs and duties, which help make ends meet. I recently mentioned my departure in terms of hardware depletion, which is of course irrelevant in any respect. What I care far more about is that gap and distance that will prevent me from seeing old colleagues and friends. This proves, as a matter of fact, that social aspects in a workplace can help in attracting and keeping valuable and talented staff. Luring people in is another matter altogether. It is no longer surprising to me that certain people work for one single company throughout their entire life.

I have held this particular job for 3.5 years. No doubt it will be remembered as quite a nice occupation. My other job I have held since 2001 and I will probably finish my contract this September, which will leave me far more independent. I guess it is simply a matter of moving on, probably to bigger and better things. Maybe even freelancing!

During my service at Manchester Computing I got to know many people, which made it hard for me to ever decide to leave. I once thought I would leave after a year, but here I am several years later, saying farewall rather late. This was probably long overdue, yet I remain rather saddened. Behind me I leave a place that had served me well in many ways.

Looking back at the E-mail archives from work, it is evident that I helped many people. Above all, I helped keep a variety of things running. It is a very important matter to me, as I once wrote about in “my creed of life” or “why I do what I do”. Many of the people involved were academic staff, who are nothing to sneeze at. My memories and experiences (more latterly at the Visualsation Center) will be tattooed in my memory forever, I am sure. If not, perhaps the blog will have me remained one day. Being an on-line diary, it is a avaliable tool for reminiscing.

To mark the occasions, I had a blast last night. A bunch of us went out to Rockworld and got wasted. Fortunately, no hangovers like the last time! For the first time, however, I spotted a case of complete memory loss. I cannot recall how I got from napping position on my dining table onto the bed. I guess the combination of heavy drinking and sleep made this reminiscent of insomnia.

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

ILL Gates has found himself subjected to heavy criticism after he had mocked an initiative to give laptops to children in third-world countries. These Linux-powered laptops were mentioned several time before in this blog. They could potentially reach half a billion children within a few years and achieve connectivity in a peer-to-peer fashion, which makes them very affordable.

To make matters worse, while mocking the low-cost laptop, Gates pulled out his own little gadget and raved about Microsoft’s Origami, as if a circa $1000 computer could ever reach every children in Africa.

S previously mentioned, the American government seeks to invade the privacy of Internet citizens worldwide. The purpose of the subpoenas in question seems genuine, but effectivity is futile. Moreover, this boggles the mind as it serves as a precedent to privacy invasion. The only search engines to have opposed this was Google and they are facing the court nowadays, due to their resistance to violate trust with their customers.

Google was fighting a subpoena from the US Department of Justice as part of its defence of an anti child-pornography act subsequently deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The probe had originally asked for a month’s worth of search queries in anonymized form, and the URL of every website that robots from MSN Search, Yahoo!, AOL and Google trawled.

The word through the grapawine is that Google’s stance has weakened and some limited data may find its way ‘outside’.

Here comes yet another article on the significant new detriment (see more example below), but in an entirely new context.

This latest one comes CNET

In today’s gadget-jammed, sensory-overloaded culture, drawing and keeping a consumer’s attention is more important than ever to businesses.

[...]

Related items:

• Treating Online Addicts
• The Electronic Information Overload
• Blog Depression
• Internet Addiction