Tag Archives: Work

A spammer’s story…

Most of the spam aimed at my inbox gets stopped long before it reaches my computer, thanks to my ISP’s spam filter. And what does get to me generally is shunted straight into a “Junk Mail” folder. But today a new spam message managed to confound all of the road blocks in its way, and arrived within my field of vision. Just out of curiosity, I clicked on it.

Of course, it’s trying to sell pills… Viagra, Cialis, Ambien, Valium, Xanax, etc. As is the trend these days, the actual spam portion of the message is contained within a wavy, tilted image. But what I found interesting was the lengthy, nonsensical prose that followed. Clearly this was the key to escaping detection and elimination en route to my computer, but it’s so bizarre as to be amusing, much like the “spam sender pseudonyms” that used to work back in 2004. And since I know you’re dying to read it yourself, here it is…

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Unfortunately the story just abruptly ends there. I need closure!!!

Microsoft, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways…

Most people who know me well understand that I am an acknowledged Apple fanboy. But I don’t simply hate Microsoft because I love Apple. There may be more truth to the fact that I love Apple because I hate Microsoft.*

At any rate, it’s clear that I hate Microsoft, and for reasons that are much more concrete, tangible, and, in the context of this article, quantifiable.

As you may know (if you know me, and probably wouldn’t if you don’t, but you do now… get it?), I make my living building websites, which means that I am forced to deal with both Windows and Internet Explorer, like it or not. (Not.) I do my work on Macs, and my day-to-day web browser is Firefox. But everything I do needs to be tested in the Microsoft world, since that’s the context in which 95% of my audience will be viewing my work.

At least once every month or two, I am forced to bring my work to a grinding halt while I attempt to diagnose some obscure Internet Explorer problem I’ve just run into. It is usually some trivial function that I take for granted, but for some mysterious reason simply does not work in Internet Explorer under a particular set of conditions. So I spend a day or so fruitlessly searching Google to find others who’ve experienced the same problem. Eventually I resign myself to the fact that there is no logical explanation for the problem and I will never discover a real solution to it. So, the only alternative is to concoct a hokey workaround that Internet Explorer can accept. These weak victories are always bittersweet: at least I’ve found a way to move on and get back to the real tasks at hand, but my work is forever tainted by Microsoft lameness, without even giving me the satisfaction of a glimmer of understanding as to why I’ve just undergone a day of torture.

Finally, I’ve had enough. I know that as long as I work in this field, I will always have to deal with this problem, but I’m no longer going to silently submit to the whims of mediocre software. I will catalog my woes here for the world to see, so when I finally jump off a bridge with a thousand Windows Vista CD-ROMs tied around my waist, people won’t wonder why.

* For the record, I don’t unequivocally hate everything Microsoft does. I own, and enjoy immensely, an XBOX game console.

The mysterious window.print() problem

It seems an easy task: print the damn window. But no, nothing is ever as easy as it seems with Microsoft. In this particular case, I have a pop-up window which contains a frameset. The frameset consists of a left frame with a tree of page links, and a right frame containing the body of the page linked from the left frame. Within the body of the page in the right frame there are links to allow you to print the frame. So far, so good. But there’s also a special link that opens a new page that contains the full content of all of the pages, so you can basically print the whole lot at once instead of one page at a time.

As expected, all of this works just fine in other browsers, but not in Internet Explorer. It handles the regular single-page window.print() just fine, but when you go to the full page, nothing. No printing, no JavaScript errors, nothing. It’s like it’s just a dead link. With the exact same code as what works on the other pages. And, if you open the page from the frame in a new window by itself, it prints just fine. So, we have some pages printing just fine in the frame, and another page that prints just fine when it’s by itself, but it won’t print if it’s in the same frame that the other pages print fine in, using the same code. You can see why this is driving me insane, can’t you?

Nothing I find anywhere online suggests that this problem exists. So eventually I resort to the only option that’s available… open the troublesome page in its own pop-up (yes, a pop-up opening a pop-up… always a great idea), where window.print() works just fine.

Thanks again, Microsoft!

Ambigrams!

I’ve finally succumbed to the inevitability of reading the work of Dan Brown, not with the obvious The DaVinci Code but with an earlier work, Angels and Demons.

While it’s clearly a mass-market thriller, it’s actually pretty clever and wholly engaging. One of my favorite aspects of the book is the “ambigram” designs: words with carefully stylized letters such that they read identically when turned 180 degrees.

Confused? Check this out:
http://www.johnlangdon.net/angelsanddemons.html

John Langdon was the designer of the ambigrams for the book (all of which appear at the above URL). Langdon is also the last name of the book’s protagonist, presumably done in his honor. This guy’s talent is phenomenal. I’ve seen a few other ambigram artists’ work, and none is as legible, or as beautiful, as Langdon’s. Of course, now I want to do my own ambigrams.

So far I’ve learned one thing: It’s not easy. I actually do have a workable ambigram of ROOM 34 going, but it’s ugly. And barely legible. If I improve it enough that I’m not embarrassed by it, I’ll post it here.

The Poster

A Short Story

A few weeks ago I quit, threw in the towel, took this job and shoved it. I gave up my long-term day job and embarked on an adventurous new career in… art appraisal.

OK, sure, I know little about art, and absolutely nothing about its value, but these days ignorance is a virtue. So it was with the swagger of clueless self-assuredness that I hung out my shingle, so to speak:

LIONEL SMITH ART APPRAISALS

Business was slow for a week or two. OK, it was beyond slow. But at least I was my own boss, and now I had no one but myself to blame for my boredom and frustration.

And then, the package arrived.

Yes, the package. It was a cardboard poster tube, with a 21216 postmark. My ZIP code. Someone saw fit to pay the US Postal Service $3.85 to take two days to deliver a package to me that they themselves could have walked over here with in 20 minutes. I knew I was dealing with a shrewd character.

Not to mention the fact that they’d apparently rolled up a piece of artwork to ship in a poster tube.

I opened the end of the tube with the mild, lazy curiosity of a person who’s been counting the ceiling tiles for so long that nothing short of the aurora borealis localized entirely within the room would arouse true interest. (At least I could always rely on an oblique Simpsons reference to brighten the day.)

With my expectations already sufficiently lowered, I took little care in shaking the contents out of the tube, which slid quickly onto the floor, denting in one rolled-up edge, flopping down on the linoleum, and rolling a few feet before unraveling like a clock spring.

I gazed blankly at the object on the floor. It was, not surprisingly, a poster. It met all of the criteria that, in my mind, coalesce into the concept, “poster.” About two feet by three feet, glossy white paper, blank on one side, printed on the other. Yup, a poster.

Static cling momentarily bonded a letter to its surface. I picked it up and began reading:

Dear Sir:

Enclosed please find an artwork which I would like to have appraised. You may reach me at:

Mary Landers
1328 Marsh St.
Baltimore, MD 21216

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Mary Landers

The name was perfect. Assuming she was a local, her parents either had a cruel sense of humor or were as clueless as she was. I wondered if she had a southern belle cousin named Mrs. Ippi. Those were the kinds of thoughts that ran threw my head these days. Why did I ever quit that day job?

Here it was, my first serious (if you could really call it that) appraisal. Piece of cake! I thought to myself.

Worthless.

Having given the poster my 2-second evaluation, I decided to take a closer look merely to pass the time.

It was a poster, and a truly wretched one at that. It appeared to be a collage of photographs of military tombstones from America’s various wars: the French-and-Indian War, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War. Now I was about as much of an expert on military history as I was on art. Fortunately for me, there is a longstanding tradition of noting the war in which soldiers have died upon their tombstones.

Then there was a tombstone with a death date of 2026, which appeared to have been colored over with a green highlighter. Pure rubbish! I thought to myself. In addition to the highlighter, I noticed someone had scrawled the name “Ralph” with a Sharpie in the lower left corner of the poster, and in the lower right corner, there was a large white sticker with a UPC bar code, and the words “PRINTS PLUS — $6.99.”

Perfect, I thought to myself. But I wouldn’t give you a nickel for it.

I decided to have a little fun at Ms. Landers’ expense, since I could always head down to Prints Plus and pick her up another copy of this godawful thing; I couldn’t imagine a high demand on this particular poster.

It occurred to me that my perspective on the poster was incorrect, what with it lying on the floor as it was. So I must mount it on the wall for proper viewing. But with what? I surveyed the few scattered items I had bothered to unpack from the moving boxes in the four weeks I had been renting the office. Duct tape, thumbtacks, a box of Chiclets.

Why not try them all? I thought.

First, the duct tape. Not overly concerned that I would need it to secure plastic sheeting to seal off the door to my office anytime soon, I made no miserly effort to conserve the gray sticky stuff, and applied it liberally to the poster. I rolled up pieces and stuck them on the back. I tore off long strips and pressed them lengthwise against the edges of the glossy paper. I even cut out small pieces and selectively covered bits of the text on the tombstones in the photos, for added amusement.

Then the thumb tacks. One in each corner would probably suffice to keep the poster hanging securely, but why stop there? I turned the poster into a veritable thumbtack dartboard. And to top it all off, I sloppily chewed a mouthful of Chiclets and tested their adhesive properties.

Thoroughly convinced I had created a masterpiece to strike fear into one Ms. Mary Landers of 1328 Marsh St., I ripped the poster from the wall (leaving a few forlorned corners gripping the sheetrock in confusion), rolled it carelessly, snapped a wide rubber band around its center, jammed it back into the tube, and set out into the brisk morning air for a walk down to Marsh St. to hand deliver both the poster and my crude appraisal.

Knock knock.

“Who’s there?”

“It’s Lionel Smith with your art appraisal.”

The door slowly opened, and a short, kindly woman appeared. “Hello, Mr. Smith. I’m Mary Landers. Thank you for looking at the piece.”

The “piece?” I thought. That’s one word for it. But I’d add a couple more at the end.

Ms. Landers escorted me into the living room and offered me a cup of tea. How quaint.

“No, thank you.”

“Well, then, may I ask you for your assessment of the work?”

The “work!” It just keeps getting better.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Landers,” I said with mock remorse as I pried the sticky contents out of the tube, “but the news is not good.”

At the sight of the mangled poster, Mary Landers’ heart visibly sank in her chest. A paleness came over her face, and she looked about to faint.

“Oh… my…” she grasped for words. “What have you done? You do realize this is a one-of-a-kind work by my brother, the famous lithograph artist Ralph Landers!”

I gazed blankly at the woman standing in front of me.

“The Ralph Landers!” she exclaimed, throwing a copy of the New Yorker in my direction. I picked up the magazine and flipped to a bookmarked page. There I saw a lengthy, glowing review of the MOMA exhibit of the famed lithograph works of Ralph Landers.

Abruptly a tall man entered the room. He gasped when he saw the decimated artwork. “You know nothing of my work!” he exclaimed. The image of Marshall McLuhan passed briefly through my head. “Get out!”

And with that I was on my ass on the sidewalk.

A few more thumb-twiddling, ceiling-tile-counting weeks passed. I decided that perhaps I would be more successful as an art appraiser if I actually learned something about art, so I headed to D.C. and the National Gallery. I was greeted at the entrance by giant, 40-foot-tall banners bearing a single, larger-than-life word:

LANDERS

Great.

I entered the museum, and noticed a long queue assembling to enter the Landers exhibit. My natural curiosity got the best of me, and I joined the line. Sure enough, when I entered the exhibit hall, I discovered none other than the works of famed lithographer Ralph Landers.

One work, in particular, seemed to garner an inordinate amount of attention. I approached the huddled mass and squirmed my way to the front. There, behind a velvet rope, hung the very poster I myself had profaned with my duct tape, thumbtacks, Chiclets, and saliva.

“Brilliant.”

“Genius.”

“A profound statement on the price of war, the commodification of art, and modern society’s abandonment of things of value.”

The man standing next to me asked, “What do you think?”

I gazed blankly at the object hanging on the wall. I hoped desperately to exude an air of deep contemplation.

“Priceless.”

After the crowd dispersed, I pulled a Sharpie out of my pocket. (Yes, I carry a Sharpie at all times. Don’t you?) I leaned gingerly over the velvet rope, pulled the cap from the pen, and scrawled “Lionel” across a strip of duct tape.