An interesting take on the SOTU.
On Slate.com: “The Cut-and-Paste State of the Union” by Fred Kaplan.
The Cut-and-Paste State of the Union
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The Painters
I’m living in a Seinfeld episode.
About a year ago, after the roof at my condo-based office was repaired by the Association-designated repair people, my ceiling started to leak. The water from heavy rainfall had seeped into the roof, found its way between sheets of sheetrock in the ceiling, and soaked through the popcorn ceiling paint job. The water began hitting the floor about 10 inches behind my chair.
By the time the dripping stopped (about a week later), the ceiling was drooping and the paint was stained.
I was not a happy camper.
To make a very long and unhappy story short, the painters arrived today to paint the ceiling in two rooms of the condo: my husband’s office in the master bedroom and my office in the living room. And from the moment they arrived, I’ve been stuck in an episode of Seinfeld.
You know what I mean. Being in a situation so weird that you can’t believe its real. And it just doesn’t seem to end.
They’re a husband and wife team. An older couple. I can’t remember his name, but her name is Marie. All day long, I hear him calling to Marie, yelling at Marie, being nasty to Marie. Marie, Marie, Marie. When your name is Maria and half the people you just met call you Marie, it can be a very annoying distraction while you’re trying to work.
To her credit, Marie gives some of it back. But just some. I would have rammed my Keds down his throat by now. Both of them.
They can’t agree on anything. They accuse each other of doing various stupid things. They narrate what they’re doing. Maybe they think the place is bugged by the Association and if they don’t keep talking, they’ll be accused of going to sleep on the job.
The place reeks of paint, but Marie told me it’s “odorless.”
They’re done with Mike’s office and now they’re working on the “dining room” area. (They have to paint the whole ceiling in both rooms so the paint matches.) There’s plastic behind me, hanging from the ceiling. And they’re inside their little plastic tent, narrating the job, sniping at each other.
Tomorrow, they’ll do the rest of my office. I don’t know how I’m going to survive here. I certainly won’t be able to get any work done. Maybe I’ll lock myself up in Mike’s office with my PowerBook.
With the door closed.
Two Blondes…
Dare I publish another joke?
I got this joke in a spam marketing e-mail message today. I thought it was funny.
Two blondes were flying to Miami from Cleveland. Fifteen minutes into the flight, the captain announced “One of the engines has failed and the flight will be an hour longer. But don’t worry we have three engines left”.
Thirty minutes later, the captain announced “One more engine has failed and the flight will be two hours longer. But don’t worry we have two engines left”.
An hour later the captain announced “One more engine has failed and the flight will be three hours longer. But don’t worry we have one engine left”.
One blonde looked at the other the other blonde and said “If we lose one more engine, we’ll be up here all day.”
I guess now I’ll get all kinds of nasty comments from blondes who can’t take jokes.
My New Calendar
What happens when you wait too long to buy a new wall calendar.
Every year, for the past four years, I’ve had a helicopter wall calendar. Not a military helicopter calendar. One that was mostly civilian helicopters with a few military models thrown in just to remind us that military guys do get to fly the best toys.
Back in October 2005, I ordered a 2006 helicopter calendar from Amazon.com. According to Amazon, the calendar was in stock, but it would not be shipped until December 26, 2005. That’s two months after I ordered it. What’s up with that? I asked them and they shipped everything except the calendar right away.
January came and I still didn’t have my calendar. Amazon didn’t have a clue when they’d ship. So I found the same calendar somewhere else online and ordered it. I cancelled my Amazon.com order. Of course, the second place I ordered from reported a week later that the publisher was out of stock.
So now it was mid-January and I had a blank spot on the wall where my calendar should be.
Yesterday, I flew up to Prescott with my friend Janet to do some errands. We went over to the mall, where there’s a Barnes and Noble. I figured I’d buy a calendar there.
Good news and bad news.
The good news is, they had calendars in stock.
The bad news is, there weren’t many to choose from.
The good news is, they were only $1 each.
The bad news is, the best one I could find was called “Fabulous Frogs” by David McEnery. The calendar consists of 12 different black and white images of real live frogs posed with various toys. (I really can’t make this stuff up.)
The good news is, July’s frog is in a helicopter.
So now you know what I’m looking at when I glance at a wall calendar for the date.
Next year, I’ll order my calendar in September.
NateMail
A good e-mail form processing tool.
While I’m praising software developers, I really ought to take a moment to mention Nate Baldwin, author of NateMail. NateMail is an excellent PHP script for handling e-mail forms.
Here’s the problem. E-mail harvesting robots are programs used by spammers to gather e-mail addresses posted on the Web. They go through Web sites and pull in anything that looks like an e-mail address — for example name@domain.com. (That’ll cause some spam bouncing.) That address gets added to their spam lists and the addressee gets spam.
It doesn’t matter if the address is visible to a Web site visitor as text on a Web page or encoded as a mailto link in the source code of the page. The robot will find it and grab it.
This poses a challenge for Web site developers who want to include a contact method on their sites. If you enter your e-mail address or provide a link to it, it’ll be gathered and spammed.
Enter NateMail (and other programs like it). They work with e-mail forms like the one you’ll find on my Contact Me page and the Contact Us page on wickenburg-az.com. My e-mail address does not appear anywhere on the form, either visible to the site visitor or in the page’s source code. Instead, the form calls NateMail, which has the e-mail address embedded in it. Because NateMail is located where the robots can’t find it (outside the Web directory), my e-mail address remains invisible to the robots. This prevents my e-mail address from being harvested for spam, thus greatly reducing the amount of spam I get.
NateMail is easy to configure and use. Of course, it does require PHP to work, so if you don’t have a PHP compatible server, it’s of no use to you.
One of the neat features of NateMail is that it supports multiple e-mail addresses. So a form can include a menu of addresses and NateMail will send the form to the addressee that’s selected by the sender. You can see this on wickenburg-az.com, where I used it to allow mail to be sent directly to the site’s regular contributors.
NateMail is free, although donations are always accepted. I liked NateMail so much that I bought Nate’s other program, ProcessForm, for $15. It does what NateMail does and more, including accepting file attachments. When I have time, I’ll set it up on wickenburg-az.com so visitors can e-mail photos for publication on the site.