NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NO NO NO NO NONONONONONONONO!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! *sob* NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Oh, JESUS CHRIST NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NO NO NO NO!!! WHY??? WHY????????? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO NOOOOOOOOOOO NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO !!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! FUCK YOU HOLLYWOOD!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! *slams head on desk* NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! *rends clothes* NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

So what good is a blog if you can’t post fixes you’ve found to stupid problems so that other people can find your answer in Google? This post contains a solution to the problem of Outlook discarding formatting in signatures. However, it is not step-by-step, and requires you to know a little something about HTML editing and how to change formatting options in Outlook. If you aren’t confident in either of these then quit poking around Outlook and breaking things. Also, find someone who knows and can help.

Our company uses Outlook as it’s email program of choice. Debate the merits of that all you want. Anyway, Outlook gives you the opportunity to create a nice, colorful signature for your emails, which employees are encouraged to do with judiciousness. Since my title has recently gone from “Mid-level Peon Stuffed in a Dark Corner” to “Mid-leve Peon Stuff in a Small, Brightly Lit Cubicle Dealing with Customers”, I’ve had to update my signature.

Granted, I come from the age of bottom-posting and plain text. All of this colorful top-posting nonsense is annoying to me. But I was willing to play the game and do some research on proper email signature etiquette (someone want to explain how “–” became the “accepted” signature delineator and why the hell there is actually an “accepted signature delineator” in the first place?) and I read up on what your email signature says about you (the temptation to display my position in the company with a signature of Kibological proportions was almost too great to overcome).

In the end, I came up with something staid and functional, making use of both our company colors and my love of the Tahoma font:

Simple design, right? You’d think that a system as well-developed as Outlook would have no problems recognizing it. You’d also be wrong.

I set up my emails to always use my fonts, create all replies and new mails as HTML, etc. When I replied to an email, my signature looked faboo. But when I created a new email, all of my fonts were changed to 9.5 pt Times New Roman. That’s right, Outlook tossed out my font formatting in my signature on new messages. I spent an hour looking around the Googles for a reason why and (this of course goes back to my previous post about internet fuckwads) all I found were people with the same problem getting responses like “DID YOU FOLLOW ALL THE STEPS IN THE FAQ? HUH!? HUH!? DID YOU STUPID?! IF YOU DIDN’T FOLLOW ALL OF THE STEPS DON’T ASK FOR HELP IN THIS FORUM! THIS HELP FORUM WILL NOT HELP YOU UNLESS YOUR PROBLEM EXISTS AFTER YOU’VE FOLLOWED EVERY SINGLE STEP IN THE FAQ! GET LOST N00B!” So here’s a few key words for people in this situation Googling for help:

OUTLOOK EMAIL SIGNATURE FORMAT CHANGES OVERRIDES FONTS DISCARDED REPLY NEW MESSAGE OUTLOOK NOT SO GOOD

There. So, after an hour of dealing with the internet equivalent of 10 year-olds hopped up on birthday cake demanding I know the secret password, which only they know, before they’ll let me into the treehouse, I decided to try to figure things out on my own. I reasoned, foolishly perhaps, that since these are HTML signatures, there’s an HTML file hidden somewhere, right? Turns out there is. In the “Documents and Settings\[user]\Application Data\Microsoft” folder, there’s a directory called “Signatures” which holds text, RTF, and HTML versions of your signatures. Score, right?

Wrong. If you’ve ever had to deal with website code created by Microsoft’s Frontpage, or HTML code generated by some absolute tool of a customer who tried to make webpages in Word and saved as “HTML Webpage” for you, you know how totally wrong Microsoft can get HTML. Fortunately, the answer to this Outlook problem doesn’t rely on wading through all of Microsoft’s shitty code. It’s actually in the (relatively) easy to find font definitions. The problem comes from how Outlook handles new messages as opposed to replies. Replies default to whatever format the original message was in (rtf, HTML, txt, etc), unless you tell it to override that by selecting “Always Use My Fonts” in the formatting tab.

New messages, however, put HTML signatures in tables by default, and that’s where the problem comes in. Under the font definitions in the HTML signature filed, hidden between confusing comments and XML tags, Microsoft has thoughtfully hidden a “table.MsoNormalTable” font definition that declares “font-family:’Times New Roman’;” which means that, no matter what you’ve set your font to, Outlook will always use Times New Roman on your new email signatures because they’re inside of a table. Good jorb on that one, Microsoft.

So there’s your solution. Find that table definition and change that “Times New Roman” in the font family to whatever your font of choice is. Unfortunately, if you use multiple fonts, you’ve got to actually change all of the HTML code in the signature to get what you want and that, sadly, is more work than I’m willing to post about.

So, I suppose I should clarify my post yesterday about Yahoo and why I even care. ‘Net properties are, for the most part, owned and run by one of three corporations: Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo. As a consumer, my opinions of those three are as follows, and these are strictly my views as an average person:

Microsoft is a big, mean, evil, money grubbing corporation. Their products are less about providing a solid consumer experience and more about tightening their stranglehold on the tech sector. Their web pages are bland and uninteresting and are about as useful, to me the consumer, as the dictionary on my bookshelf. Sure, I may look at it once in a while, but less and less frequently. Why should I when I have much more useful and entertaining tools like Wikipedia at my disposal? I never use any of their sites because they really don’t feel like they were ever intended to be used by people.

Google is the epitomy of the faceless corporation. They don’t issue statements. They don’t have a “friendly” main page. There aren’t any “web celebrity” bloggers I can think of who work for Google. They’re just there. And every once in a while they come out from behind their white-washed fortress to buy up some property for a ghastly amount of money, like a trap door spider. I don’t trust Google because, publicity-wise, they’re a complete non-entity. I’ve lived under the rule of Corporate America long enough to develop a healthy distrust of secretive companies.

Yahoo is, well, boring. Look at Y!Music, Y!Widgets, and Y!Green. What’s missing? Personality. Everything about every Yahoo site is perfectly functional and completely plain. You remember that brown-haired girl your mom once forced you to introduce yourself to at church? The one with no obvious physical deformities or asshole friends or bad habits but who rarely smiled and answered all of your questions with one or two words? That’s Yahoo.

And that’s why I care. I don’t like the possibility of having to choose between The Publicly Evil Microsoft and the Private Possibly a Serial Killer Living Next Door Google. And that’s my opinion, as a consumer, of those two.

Yahoo has a chance to grow up into a real knockout, as soon as she stops wearing figure-hiding clothes and learns to smile. Or, Yahoo could grow up to be a man-hating militant lesbian, in which case I’d have three bad options to choose from. And let’s be honest, Yahoo’s got a lot of things going for her, like YUI and the OpenID idea. Yahoo’s also got a lot of public sentiment in their favor: they have some high-profile folks who are more than willing to talk about what the company is up to without coming across as conceited dicks, most public stories about Yahoo as a company mention how well they treat their employees and/or talk about their latest mass party event, and they’re one of a handful of big companies that not only understand that geeks need to take things apart and put them back together in different configurations, they support it.

But the sites branded with the Y!Style are really lacking in that undefinable “interest” factor. I wish I could narrow it down more than that. Visiting a Yahoo site is overwhelming because you’re constantly being reminded of the thousands of other Yahoo sites. It’s feature overload, I guess. If the tools I want to use were more specialized and separate from the Yahoo family, I would use them more often -

- especially if Yahoo could learn to foster a bit more “community-ness” to their sites. Yahoo’s “communities” have always suffered one of two major setbacks: either they’ve never been developed into fully useful communities (like Y!Groups - great idea but lacking in many areas) or they’ve failed to attract anyone except retards and lunatics (Y!Answers).

So, the summarize, I’m not wishing ill on Yahoo at all, and my previous post wasn’t intended to imply that. Yahoo’s got a lot to offer, but I’d probably take them up on a lot more of their offers if the sites I want to visit had just a little less Y!Saturation.

The Powers That Be have spoken - this is not a democracy. No, you can’t march in the streets to get things changed. No, your petitions will not force the changes you think need to be implemented. No, they really don’t care. This is a dictatorship, they call the shots because they are in control, and you know what? That’s exactly the way it should be.

Bravo to Flickr/Yahoo for taking a stand, albeit in a tongue-in-cheek way, and telling the anti-video petitioners that no, Flickr is not an open forum designed by the users and that no, your whiney protests will not force them to change their business. Because that’s what it is, a business. It’s not a government. It’s not a coop. It’s not an LLC where everyone owns a stake. It’s Yahoo’s business. And you know what, of all the things Yahoo owns, Flickr is probably my favorite project because they don’t cave to Y!Users and they haven’t branded the site with Y! logos.

But that’s also why I think Flickr Videos is a really stupid idea. See, I like Flickr. Flickr works. Flickr has one purpose and that’s to allow me to share my photos in a simple, easy-to use fashion and Flickr succeeds at that damn well.

Which only serves to highlight my growing problem with most Y!Products. Years ago, when Yahoo was buying everything up, it looked like that was going to be the future. Every site you went to would be a product of Google. Or Microsoft. Or, yes, Yahoo.

But, in time, that model proved fatal because it lacks the familiarity users want, and independent organizations created specialized sites that did one thing and did it well. eBay is eBay because it’s not part of another system, you go to eBay and you get auctions. That’s it. Even their PayPal division, which is so integral to eBay, has its identity kept complete and seperate. MySpace is MySpace. When you say “MySpace” there’s only one site you’re talking about. It may be owned by Murdoch, but it’s not branded as part of his empire.

Digg. Fark. Dictionary.com. Slashdot. The Onion. Blogger. The list goes on of sites that focused on one thing and, when the opportunity arose to branch out, and all of the sites I just listed have branched out, they’ve kept their core, branded product seperated from the new, untested products rather than combine the two and risk dilluting both.

Yahoo has bought up several of the projects I used, and used a lot, and turned them into Yahoo sites. It’s not only taken all of the individuality out of those sites, but Yahoo’s feature creep has made them no longer as easy and fun to use. Sure, it sounds like a nice idea, having everything you use at one convenient portal, but it’s not. It’s not easy, it’s not enjoyable.

When you start adding untried features that are only tangentially related to your core product, both products suffer an immediate lack of focus, and you complicate an already streamlined system that your users have become adapted to. If the untried product works, great, but you risk losing both. Why would you risk a product that’s already found it’s niche and audience when you could just as easily launch the new service on its own and cross-promote?

In the ’80s, every third commercial you saw ended with the tagline “We’re Beatrice!”, showing that said company was part of the Beatrice Foods conglomeration. But that was the only reference to Beatrice in that product line’s advertising. You know what? That went a long way toward making people forget they were a giant faceless corporation. And, let’s face it, giant faceless corporations, no matter how many free donuts they give away or how often they promise to do no evil, are still giant, faceless corporations.

Yahoo has the opportunity to be first out of the gate by adopting this “hidden empire” model, but I wonder if they can change their thinking about their properties to do it. They also have a much better public image than Google or Microsoft, both of which have moved far into the “faceless corporation” realm. Yahoo still has a “little engine that could” image that they really should use to their advantage.

Flickr works. It should be their example of what to do right by users. If they can start shaping their other properties as independent entities and have the Yahoo name become their umbrella, I think they can do serious damage to Google and Microsoft in terms of user base.

When he was a younger lad, my brother was more rambunctious than he is these days. And so, it came as no surprise to anyone in the family that a game of tackle football left him urinating blood on the way to the emergency room.

The ER staff, however, weren’t as concerned. “He’s ruptured a kidney”, they said, “it’ll have to come out.”

“The right one?” our mother asked.

“No.”

“The left one, then.”

“No, the other one.”

Turns out, he had three kidneys, and he broke the extra one.

Imagine my surprise then when I discovered today that genetic anomalies run in the family.

Seems I have an extra butt.

Wednesday, my back started hurting. Hurting bad. By Wednesday afternoon I could hardly stand upright, and went home from work early. The pain continued through yesterday, and I was finally able to get in to see the chiropractor today. After a few x-rays, it was discovered that my sacrum has a congenital twin growing out of the top of it, another sacrum except in miniature. If you draw a line between the tops of your hip bones, your 5th lumbar should run right through the center of that line - mine’s about a half inch above it.

So what does this mean, aside from lowering my genetic viability in the eyes of Valette’s lizard brain? It means that, in Hank Hill fashion, my butt will disappear over time as my spine curves under.

It also means that, when my weight fluctuates, my back will be the first to know. I’ve abandoned all sodas and processed sugar drinks and have been living on carbonated water for the last month. I’m down almost 10 pounds since I made that switch. Apparently, the extra weight was putting strain on my tailbone and shedding a few pounds gave it just enough room to start to go back into place, which is why it started hurting so bad.

And, yes, it’ll probably mean painful and dangerous spinal surgery later in life.

But in the mean time, it means I get to tell people I have two butts.

When the admin login cookie for Wordpress expires, it’s been too long between blog posts.

I used to think of the internet as a place filled with “my kind” of people. Whether they were lunatics or not, most of the people I knew on the internet were intelligent, held similar philosophies, and were fans of the same type of geek cruft that I am. Whether it be usenet or forums or even just chat rooms, I found a large population of folks that I could understand if not get along with.

But increasingly, I find myself frustrated with the internet’s growing population of living examples of John Gabriels Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Stupid, aggressive, or aberrant behavior is not only tolerated on the internet, it’s expected and, most times, celebrated. And, while I’m certainly not averse to fun at someone else’ expense, I find being stupid because it’s easier than not being stupid or being an asshole simply because you can to be not only tiresome but also worthy of a kick in the junk if I ever met you in person.

I recently joined GoodReads to have something to include in my sidebar (and because I like its ability to group books together, something LibraryThing doesn’t have), and I’ve started adding books as I read them, rather than review my whole library. GoodReads has a checkbox stating that you are willing to trade your copy of the book for something else, and I marked it on my review of The Book of Lost Things. Today I got a comment from someone asking if I would trade my copy of the book to her so she could read it. Imagine my surprise then when I went to her profile and found that not only had she already rated this book she didn’t have and hadn’t read, she rated it five stars. Thanks for fucking up the whole rating system just so you could show up on more users’ matches.

Years ago, I abandoned a Usenet group called Rec.Humor.Oracle.D. It wasn’t an easy decision for me because RHOD was filled with exactly the type of people I’ve already described - intelligent, witty, and having many common fandoms. But one RHOD user took it upon himself to troll the group with vicious personal attacks and, once unmasked, rather that be berated for his behavior, many members of the group instead praised him for “making it interesting again” in the group.

And it’s not just RHOD - another group I read, filled with funny, kind-hearted souls, broke into thunderous virtual applause for a group member who decided to make her niece’s life hell because she was marrying someone the aunt didn’t approve of. Go to Yahoo Answers and, 8 times out of 10, instead of answers to questions you’ll find either proselytizing or nasty criticisms of the questioner. Visit any tech help forum and ask for help and within the first three posts you’ll have at least one “RTFM N00B!!“-type comment. Even Fark, which used to be a place for consistently entertaining reads, has gathered, in the last year and a half or so, quite a large population of “I’m an asshole, get used to it or leave” self-diagnosed Asperger’s type of people.

Back in my Usenet days, I dropped into a fan group for the Straight Dope where I was almost immediately set upon by the local trolls and assholes. When I shrugged and left the group, one of the members took it upon herself to email me privately and suggest I “develop a thicker skin”. When I replied, I told her that it had nothing to do with my skin density, that I’d spent enough time on Usenet to not be affected. But finding a place where the people are not only stupid and uninteresting but also insulting and then staying there makes as much sense as drinking fish oil just to make yourself get used to the flavor.

Sadly, the number of online communities where people haven’t already been conditioned to accept anti-social behavior grows increasingly small. I’ve realized that, if I’m to refresh my online habits, I need to find a community I can feel at home in. Unfortunately, until I finish WritersGames.com and have a community were I can control the environment, I don’t think I’m going to find a place without fuckwads. Until then, I find myself losing interest in the internet.

This is Snowball

I expected the hamster to be out of the cage within minutes. I didn’t expect it to happen several hours later while we weren’t home. After scooping her out from behind the bookshelf and putting her back in the cage, we sat and watched for her to go to her escape point again. Which she did not do. For many hours. And then she went to sleep. So we never did find out how she got out.

In the meantime, we’ve swapped out the massive hamster city for a slightly less massive wire cage topper. As soon as I get the tubes hooked up again I’ll post more pictures of it.

And when we get a more lively rodent, we’ll find out where the hole in the Hamster Hi-Rise is.

I may not have finished the WritersGames.com beta in time, but I did complete another project I’ve been working on that, unfortunately, wasn’t on my checklist. I scratch built a tank-topper for the largest hamster tube city I’ve ever personally witnessed.

You might think I’m crazy, but I’ve always wanted a massive collection of hamster tubes running in all directions. This is the closest Valette will let me come to that dream. You can see the entire project in my Flickr by clicking on the picture.

Ok, here’s the situation: I wrote a local intranet system for our company to automate a lot of the record keeping and paperwork that gets shuffled around. The system had three major requirements -

1. It had to run on our existing IIS server with minimal software installs for security reasons and as light a memory footprint as possible. The solution was barebones PHP 5 installation with memory limits on and some creative use of the unset() function.

2. Paperwork had to be printable from MS-Word. Since point #1 eliminated Pear or other libraries, I had to use RTF for all documents (Really, I am the RTF ninja now. I’m seriously considering writing a guide on it because I wasn’t able to find one when I needed it. Maybe if I get enough Google hits on this post I will).

3. It had to be 100% cross-browser compliant.

Now, it’s the last point that’s caused me the most headache.
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Way back in the days of Internet yore, Dave Barry tried to send an email of a rather quixotically personal nature and, instead of sending it to the email address intended, he sent it to the entire internet. I couldn’t help but think about that story tonight.

You know how you can use Google to find MP3 files and such with a few key words added to your search? Well, I got bored over the weekend and hacked up a little PHP script to automate those searches for me. Valette got home tonight and I was showing her how much fun it is to poke around in people’s private photos, etc., via Google, and we stumbled upon a guy who had his resume and a bunch of cover letters available in a publicly-accessible directory.

And then we found his electric bill listing his residential address and billing account number. Then we found his loan information. And then we found a file marked, plainly enough, “Personal Information.txt” (and no, I’m not providing a link). That file was pretty much what you’re expecting it to be, everything FOX News would need to do an hour-long scare-piece on identity theft. We’re talking his wife’s maiden name, their kids names, their bank accounts, all of the registration keys, user names, and log-ins to all of their software, social security numbers for the entire family, etc. In a file titled “Personal Information.txt” in an open directory.

The worst part about it is that the cover letters were sent out to technical, network-specialist kind of positions. Valette and I were just in shock that someone would put that kind of information on the internet after years and years of boogeyman stories about identity theft; and we’re gobsmacked that someone claiming technical expertise would do so.

So I emailed them and included a snippet of the file. Hopefully it’s not too late for them to take a little friendly advice about securing their data.