A Sign From Above

Tonight coming home from work I learned that there was a backup on US-50 East between I-97 and the Severn River Bridge in Annapolis.

I knew this, because I was given a Sign. This sign, as a matter of fact, which today had an actual message.
The sign in question is about 15 miles from the start of the backup. Not to worry, I had plenty of time to read it because I was in a five-mile backup caused by people slowing down to read the sign.

Obscene comments about Maryland drivers omitted.

The X Files

An irritant of the Office 2007 era is that some people insist on sending you files in that $&#**$% program's default format: .docx, .xlsx, or .pptx. And these same people won't comply with your request to save the frakkin' thing in a reasonable format. (Like PDF. Nice, small, and I can't edit them to make you look completely ridiculous and send the result to all our friends. But that's a subject for another post.)

I've really been tempted to send my responses in Swahili. Transliterated into Urdu. Unfortunately, I don't speak Swahili, and my Acme translator's instruction book is in Hindi. So that's out.

Short of ending friendships and associations forever, it's now possible to read these files with version 2.3 or better of OpenOffice.org. You can't write in those formats, unless you want to do some minor hacking, but you can read them and convert them to a reasonable format.

Say as OpenDocument (.odt). Then send it back to them and when they complain, point out that it's an open standard, and Microsoft should be able to read it. (Not my idea.)

Telemarketers, Be Gone!

You forget about these things. Changing one of our telephone numbers from a land-line to Verzion FIOS involved dropping the old number and getting a new one. One minor annoyance is that Verizon (copper) and Verizon FIOS don't seem to talk much, so Verizon (copper) never seems to put a change-of-number message on our old number. We've called, emailed, etc., it's been two weeks, and still nothing.

That, however, is not the major problem. The major problem is that we'd forgotten the persistence of telemarketers. Hence we didn't sign the new number up on the National Do Not Call Registry.

Oops.

It took telemarketers about 10 days to figure this out. Since Saturday, we've had a bunch of telemarketing calls. Of course, once I realized the mistake I immediately registered the number, but since it hasn't filtered through the system yet, we still get a few calls, including the annoying machine call that was half cut off by our answering machine's greeting.

It makes you appreciate the fact that the Do-Not-Call list is a Federal program that actually works. OK, a few calls get through, but the volume of calls we got on the old number was next-to-nothing, and now we're getting them daily.

Now if there was just an enforceable do-not-spam law.

Note: Why, in the name of all that's holy, would any marketing firm suppose that anyone would respond well to a call placed at 9 am anytime between Christmas and New Year's Day? It's almost anti-marketing. Hint: I'm sure not going to buy anything from DISH network any time soon.

Dang, Missed It Again

Maybe next year:

A belated Happy Roswell Day to you all.

I Feel Slighted

Been hitting the "Next Blog" button at the top of this blog a lot today. Surprisingly, a lot of blogs have multiple comments for every post. Even blogs that have only been up a few hours. Yet here we sit, gathering an average of 15+ hits per day, and we get no comments.

And then I see that most of these comments are of the form:

Gee, your blog is great! Visit mine! I'm selling fraking great stuff!

Yes, boys and grils, the blogsphere has been infested with spammers. Just like email! And if you go to one of these adblogs, you find that they don't allow anonymous posting, so if you comment to tell them what a frackin' piece of drek they are, they can harvest your email address, probably to send you more spam.

Fortunately, Blogger has installed a word verification option to limit these kinds of comments to people who actually take a few seconds to think before they post. That's a Good Thing, and I hope it works.

But I still want to know, how come I don't get these comments?. Like I said, I get 15+ hits per day, many obviously from "Next Blog" users, and I get zero comments. Well, except from Abby, who obviously reads what I'm saying and makes intelligent comments. But I get no spam posts! I should launch an affirmative action campaign so that I get more spam.

So come on, lowlifes! Spam me. Tell me how great your Blog, selling various varieties of excrement, is. Let me have it.

And leave your blog address, so I can return the favor.

Sehen Sie in der Hölle.