Getting .doc attachments and tired of it

So this semester I have been receiving a number of .doc email attachments from people, mostly mass mailings from university faculty. Tired of it, I created a rule in my email program to automatically send the following out:


**************
Autoresponse from (Edit: Address removed. It's never a good idea to post your email address like that)

You are receiving this as an automated response because you have sent an MS Word document as an attachment to this address. If you have previously gained permission from the owner of this address to send the Word document you may disregard this automated response.
**************

Sending MS Word attachments is considered to be bad etiquette when using email. This auto-response is a request that you cease sending Word documents unless you have first obtained permission. FAILURE TO COMPLY MAY RESULT IN YOUR ADDRESS BEING BLOCKED! There are several reasons for this.

First off not everyone owns a copy of MS Word. Word is a rather expensive program and not everyone uses Windows or Macs. Even if they do, Microsoft often changes their file formats rendering older versions incompatible with newer formats.

Second, if a recipient of your attachment does have a compatible copy there is no reason why they should start Word to read something that could have been pasted into the body of the email itself. Sometimes documents need special formatting. More often than not this is the case to simply read the contained information.

Also there are security reasons for not sending Word attachments. Word documents have been used to harbor viruses. Also, there is a feature in Word that tracks the development of a document. Unless you have deleted this information someone can be made aware of information you may not want them to know.

Thank you for your understanding.

For more information and for alternatives see the following:
http://www.georgedillon.com/web/netiquette.shtml
http://www.goldmark.org/netrants/no-word/attach.html
http://www.ece.uci.edu/~chou/nodoc.html

(Edit: I hope the message doesn't sound rude or stuck up as it has already gone out to some people. What do you think?)

GS301 blues

I have gone around and removed most of the posters advertising my computer repair service and I have already printed off a poster to sell my books for the class. The next seven days I am faced with assembling the "assignment portfolio" for this class that has wasted far too many hours this semester and has caused my focus on important classes to suffer. Perhaps after I have turned everything and made my presentation I can finally focus on homework for real classes. Until then I guess I am stuck dealing with blatant bad theology and BSing my responses.

(Edit: I'm not exactly sure where that breakdown and buy line in the post came from. It has now been removed.)

xBox 360 fun

So that newfangled xBox is out. I am personally not terribly impressed and will be placing my dollar votes in favor of the PC, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Revolution. Those are the systems with the games I am interested in. The few games on the xBox that I am interested in come out on PC anyways, such as the excellent Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Also, the PlayStation 3 is likely to have better graphics and the Revolution has that really neat controller.

Anyways, I am getting a few good things out of the 360. Mainly Anandtech's dissection of the system and Smash My XBox. Will be interesting to see the same done with the other two systems.

Late-night fun

So last night while I was awake from being a bit sick I came across Hugin. Hugin is a program that stitches together multiple images into one to make a panorama. So I downloaded it and, having no real idea how to use it as I didn't care to read the documentation at the time, proceeded to have some fun. I dived into my iPhoto collection and pulled out a few photos to play around with. My ignorant fun resulted in varying degrees of success, shown here:



The first set of images I came across was from our stop in Salt Lake city during last spring's band tour. Seen here are the Mormon Temple and the Mormon Tabernacle (the domed structure). This image was created from three images. The left two seemed to merge in quite well while the ones on the right had more trouble. My guess is I moved too much between the left two photos and the right one. Nonetheless it creates an impressive view, I just wish it wasn't cursed ground we are looking at.



Here's a couple photos I stitched together of the Brandonburg Gate in Berlin. This is from my family trip in 2003. This one came together quite well despite the odd angle at the top.



Another one from the family trip to Germany, this time where the Olympics were held. This one came out quite nicely.



Yet another one from the Germany trip, some random wall with me on the right. Although the wall is kinda neat, putting the two photos together didn't go so well. The horizontals are all warped, the two photos have too much of a difference in grain and lighting and what the heck is going on with the bottom? This what happens when someone like me gets ahold of something he has no idea how to use.



These photos came from my Petal Pushers trip to work on rose parade floats a couple of years ago. If you ever get the chance to be a Petal Pusher, do it. It's a great expirence. This one turned out quite nice.