At my work, like at just about everyones work, we have email. I make it a special point to NEVER mix my work email with my personal email. If you are reading this, and you are receiving personal email to your work account, I would strongly advise you to stop for many reasons, none of which are the basis for this entry.
From time to time, an email will be sent to the entire office. Usually this is some piece of information that is important to your daily work. It might be some announcement about a staff meeting, it might be something to do with an HR process. Who knows.
But at my office (of about 70 people), there seems to be a problem with people over-using our favorite Outlook button: Reply to All. So, in a effort to deter its obnoxious use, the following email was sent to the entire office:
Hello Team,
A number of people are expressing concern over our email processes.
Please be aware that you should only use Reply to All if you really need your message to be seen by each person who received the original message. This should be a rare occurance with Team emails.
If you want to include people on the inter-office hilarity please select a couple of friends to include.
Lets remember that not all of the people on the team email know who you are, and may not be in this office, or even this country!
Thank you,
Some HR person
Now, I really didn’t think much of this email. I rarely reply to all. I am somewhat of an elitest when it comes to email etiquette. I thought it was polite enough. And seriously, I hate it when an email goes out and 10 lame jokes come back due to the use of the Reply to All. I don’t know what industry you are in, but I work with some pretty “creative” people in advertising, and some of these emails are not PG-13. Not even R, in fact, NC-17 isn’t strong enough.
Well, then things at the office got really fun. There was an outrage. People couldn’t handle being told to use judgement when using Reply to All, they wanted official office policy. Because, after all, who’s to say what’s “inter-office hilarity” and what’s best left to the darkest corner of your mind? Reply to All abuse was at an all time high when suddenly, we were shown why policy sort of sounds and looks like another word we know: police.
You might have noticed that your Reply to All has been disabled for the past two days. I didn’t ever plan on keeping this button disabled - I just needed to see if I could disable it reliably in the first place, and to reinforce Some HR Person’s email from earlier in the week with a little ‘corrective’ feedback:
Yes, email etiquette is important!
Please remember that we’re growing fast, and
teamsomecompany.com now includes 70 people, not 20.
Be judicious in your email replies, and please make sure that your email is only being sent to people who will appreciate it or who are relevant to the conversation. Remember, we all get way TOO much email on a daily basis, so let’s keep it under control.
So, to have your Reply to All button turned back on, please do this fun little (10-second!) exercise: http://www.somecompany.com/reply_all.php
Thanks team!
IT Hotshot
Oh man, I was beside myself. It had come to this! I couldn’t resist, I had to check that link. I didn’t care if I would ever be able to use Reply to All again. The contents of the page are below:
Hello Team,
A number of people are expressing concern over our email processes.
Please be aware that you should only use ‘Reply to All’ if you really need your message to be seen by each person who received the original message. This should be a rare occurance with Team emails.
If you want to include people on the inter-office hilarity please select a couple of friends to include.
Let’s remember that not all of the people on the team email know who you are, and may not be in this office, or even this country!
Please put your name in the box and then click the button.
This way, HR Person can haunt you forever if he/she needs to. Mwahahahaha!
*I agree to use my ‘Reply to All’ button responsibly*
(this was a button to submit the form)
Well, I thought I had seen it all since I joined the workforce. But this is a new lowpoint. I didn’t fill out the form, so I might not be able to use Reply to All, but I will never know, because, like I said, I never use it.
Awhile ago, I picked up the Nikon D70S. I am supremely happy with the camera so far, it’s been awesome. However, every once in awhile, the camera just won’t focus. Everything seems okay, and there’s lots of battery power. I couldn’t figure out why for awhile, as it was almost impossible to reproduce. I spend a good chunk of time searching some camera sites, looking to see if anyone else has noticed this. The closest I’ve come is that people notice that there’s some play with the lens mount, and that seems to be designed on purpose, to accomodate temperature changes.
I’ve noticed over the last few weeks that when that happens, I can just twist the lens a bit and it works fine again. It seems that the contacts aren’t perfectly lined up, and if it moves a bit off to one side, it won’t focus, like it’s not getting power.
I took the camera to The Camera Store to check it out - ’cause that’s where I bought it. I think the guys there know their stuff, too. Instead of just telling me it was fine, the sales guy pulled out another D70S to show me how it worked. Turns out it had just as much play with the lens, although he admited that he’s never seen this behaviour in the camera before. So, this doesn’t really bother me anymore, especially as it’s happening less and less frequently. I suppose if it continues over the next few months, I’ll take it in again and get them to fix it. In the short term, I’ll see how it plays out.
As time wears on, the camera seems to exhibit the problem less and less. I don’t know if the problem would present itself to any of you with the D50’s out there, because the D70S’s lens is quite different. If you do see something similar, I hope this helps.
Jeff I think “web2.0″ will fail Jeff and here is why Jeff digg has shown us one thing Jeff the collective intelligence of the “community” (as a whole) is so low, that any sort of comunity based colaboration web2.0 whiz-bang thing is bound to fail Jeff or, if not fail, be so completley devoid of purpose that it’s useless Jeff “purpose”, but I mean “meaningful content” Brent its true Brent the “community intellegence” is inversely proportional to its size Brent so, i do think social sites are useful, when its a niche crowd Jeff yeah, I can second that Brent but the downside of digg is news becomes “popular” by being dugg its mostly just lazy people, loafers, clockwatchers and the unemployed Brent so its relevance to normal people is questionable Brent so yeah….people working the midnite shift at burger king who are “getting a degree in IT” during the day might digg a story Brent but CEOs of small to medium companies don’t even read digg Brent thats why i think the friends feature of digg is good Brent most of the time, i hit the front page and i see what you and josh have dugg…cause perhaps its relevant to me Brent this should be an SE post Jeff yeah, it should Brent copy - paste….done
The plot: I wanted to build a new menu for my cousin’s site, and learn some web programming.
I had a Flash menu that was pretty sweet. It was fast, and when you moused over the thing, the item you were mousing over would change colours. That was pretty slick, but I needed to change that menu, and don’t own Flash anymore. I also wanted to make things a bit more fun than just change colours. So, when you mouse over an item, I wanted it to gradually highlight the item in a different colour. And when you mouse-out from that item, I wanted it to gradually change colours back to the starting colour. I wanted it to change colours quickly on a mouse over, and wanted it to change slowly on a mouse-out. I wanted to be able to define the colours to start and stop with, how fast to change colours, and all the usual stuff, like item heights, widths, and screen refresh speeds.
After an exhaustive search of the net, I couldn’t find anything that did exactly what I wanted. I’ll admit that I don’t really know where to look - I mostly relied on Google - some of you more experience web-dev’s probably know where to get something like that already. Since I couldn’t find it, though, I decided to learn the tools and write one myself. The good news is that I actually managed to get it working! A small miracle, to be sure.
I’m no expert in JavaScript, so what I did was probably pretty basic to the guru’s out there. When the page loads, I started a function that really just refreshes the colours of the menu. Then, on mouse-over events, I set a flag to either change the colour to the highlighted colour, or change it back. The code that refreshes the menu pays attention to those flags and alters the item colour accordingly when it’s called. Pretty simple stuff.
I tried my solution on a few browers, and it seems to work just fine. I couldn’t figure out how to make the list of items to be dynamic, but it really wouldn’t be hard. I might do that some other time, or you’re welcome to - this suits my needs for now. Really, the whole thing was pretty easy, and fun!
You can check out an example, if you’d like. Of course, you can just look at the source of the example to see the code, although feel free to email me if you want a file or if you have any questions about it.
This was a billboard near my office, which I found pretty funny. It’s kinda too bad it wasn’t serious ’cause I love the idea of a bunch of ultra-nerds hanging out around a vending machine, giving each other high-fives over this one.
Since I enjoyed A Game of Thrones so much, I decided to read the next in the series, aptly named A Clash of Kings.
Because of the interesting style of story-telling that I mentioned in my last post, Martin is able to intertwine the beginning of this book with the end of the last book in a really interesting way. By shifting the perspective of the person narrating the story, he was able to start the second book chronologically before the end of the first. What that means is you don’t really get a feel for the first book ending, it’s more like the story just keeps on going.
As much as I enjoyed the first book, I have to admit that I like the second book even more. It’s about the same length as the first book - and you can pretty much guess the general plot lines just from the title.A Clash of Kings?! Yeah, I’ll bet there are 2 or more kings, and they, you know, fight. Well, friend, you’d be right if you were that astute.
Indeed, there is much kingly clashing to be had in this book. But even more interesting is the further development of the other characters in the book. While the first book touches on things like magic, dark wizardry, dragons, people of the wild, and really vague entities they call “The Others”, this book has characters specifically involved in each of those areas. So, you get to read about these things happening, usually from a few different perspectives - and since they’re pretty big topics, they usually concern most of the people in the stories in one form or another; so you also get to read about them from other characters very far removed from the events.
This novel is definitely intelligent. When there’s an easy way out to save a character, Martin will usually opt for the harsher and arguably more real path. This usually means people die, unless they’re very clever. If someone is acting all “poor me” - yeah, they’re gone. That’s not to say people aren’t emotional - ’cause they very much are.
This book has quite a bit of wars going on. It’s neat to see how little things that happened in the last book, have a huge affect on this one. A seemingly random act of finding some direwolf pups and giving them to the kids to keep as their own? Yeah, that has a pretty damn big affect on the lives of many. I’m also very much enjoying hearing the story from the perspective of the same characters (well, those that are still alive), as some of them I’m really interested in following. Bran, Arya and Jon Snow are my favorites today. Take note, there will be a test, a la Lockhart: What are Brett’s favorite characters as of the end of the second book? [10 marks] Bonus Question: What item made of Valyrian steel does Brett wish he had?
At this point, I’m very much reminded of the Lord of the Rings, or even Harry Potter stories, which get better and more involved as time goes on. I look forward to the next - called A Storm of Swords … which I’m guessing has something to do with many swords. Probably some even hitting each other, due to conflicting interests of those wielding them there previously mentioned swords.
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