Also found via Google: MS-Word is Not a document exchange format. Quite a useful rant, and something I entirely agree with; too many times I’ve gotten an e-mail through the campus listserv in which the content was only available as a Word or WordPerfect document, despite the fact that the attachment consisted almost entirely of plain, unformatted text.

Since I’ve been ranting so much about e-mail viruses lately, I figured I’d link to this EWeek article I stumbled across via Google: Idiocy Imperils the Web.

Instead of a headline like “Dangerous Fizzer Worm Attacks the Internet,” how about “Thousands of Morons Open Obviously Virus-Laden E-mail Attachments”? I kind of like it. It has a light, comedic feel similar to headlines found at The Onion. But as Homer Simpson would say, it’s funny because it’s true. Stories like that should embolden smart users so that, instead of accepting their co-workers’ incompetence, they will feel free to mock and ridicule these Typhoid Marys of the computer world.

Of course, another columnist wrote a very similar rant, this one for Wired, over two years ago. Some things never change, do they?

Oh my. Here’s the actual text that accompanies one of the latest e-mail viruses, which sends itself out with a spoofed Microsoft return address:

Dear friend, use this Internet Explorer patch now!
There are dangerous virus in the Internet now!
More than 500.000 already infected!

How do people fall for these things? How? If the fact that Microsoft never sends out patches via e-mail isn’t a dead giveaway, the ESL-esque grammar should be… [Edited 3:16pm: Also, as one of my friends pointed out, it’s very unlikely that a real e-mail from Microsoft would begin with the words “Dear Friend”!]

And besides, I doubt that Mozilla would benefit all that much from an Internet Explorer patch, but that’s another rant entirely.

So, why the dearth of blog posts lately, you ask? No, it’s not because of an overabundance of homework, nor is it because I’ve been particularly busy in the past week.

No, rather, it’s because I’ve been getting transfer rates that sometimes reach below one kilobyte per second over the residence hall network, thanks to the insane spread of such worms as MSBlast and SoBig.

On the bright side, however, it seems that tech support has finally gotten an idea of how bad things have become; they’ve sent students door-to-door to pass out information on protecting computers from the aforementioned worms and from further infestation. Perhaps in a week, we’ll see some improvement in that regard…

Speaking of SoBig, incidentally: if you, or any mailing lists you’re on, receive any very vague e-mails from blog@zone38.net featuring a suspicious-looking attachment, don’t open it. This should be obvious, but it bears repeating. I only use the blog address as an inbox, never for outgoing mail– yet I’ve already gotten several bounce notifications at that address for messages I never sent in the first place, along with 20 or so virus-generated messages with other spoofed addresses (but with the actual attachment stripped by the mail server).

Oh, and I’m glad I’m not the only one who sees the utter stupidity in including potentially virus-infected attachments in a message bounced back to its apparent sender; someone made a comment of a similar nature in the latest Risks Digest.

Sound familiar? It is. I posted a very similar rant several months ago after getting fed up with the number of copies of Klez I was receiving. I guess some things just never change…

Reason #142857 to avoid HTML mail: browser incompatibilities. Yes, for the curious, that is an unaltered screenshot (besides the necessary blurring of addresses, of course) of how one particular HTML-formatted message from the campus listserv displayed in Mozilla/Netscape 7’s rendering engine at the default font size, thanks to some bizarre nesting of <BIG> tags. Naturally, it was rendered at a reasonable size in Outlook Express; go figure…

EDIT: Oh, man. That’s not the worst part. Looking at the headers, I discovered that the message was composed in Netscape 7 (albeit an earlier version, based on Moz 1.0)…

To the two people that have searched for “great exceptions” on Google in the past month and stumbled across my site: I seriously hope that you weren’t trying to find information on that Charles Dickens novel. If you were, you might want to check your spelling next time you run a search; otherwise your expectations may be a bit too optimistic…

As the politically independent creature that I am, I must help spread the meme that everyone else has been throwing about…

So, as much as I hate what seems like shameless self-promotion, I’ll nonetheless concede that Zone38.net has one of the most fair and balanced archives of proofreading mistakes on the Internet. With the exception of personal sites, I’m not afraid to pick on sloppy proofreading from any source; I feature typos spotted everywhere, from small local ads and public access stations to major operating systems and major ISPs. Indeed, I’m not even afraid to pick on Arnold every once in a while…

So readers, help me with my quest for fair and balanced reporting of typographical errors! Send your submissions to The Proofreader’s Hall of Shame today!

As you can probably tell from most of my recent blog entries, not much of interest has been going on in my life lately– unless you’d consider packing for school to be interesting in some way, which I doubt most of you do.

But it’s a necessary evil, for I’ll be moving back onto Mercer‘s campus this Sunday, so that I can get everything ready for the start of classes the following Wednesday. Much as I don’t want to deal with loads of homework, procrastinator that I am, I’ll nonetheless be glad to get back on campus, away from home, with my geekish crowd of friends. And come to think of it, homework doesn’t seem like such a bad thing, as boring as this summer’s been for the most part.

Busy Marquee: a collection of photos of marquees that have been anagrammed by pranksters. I’ve been tempted to do something along these lines a number of times, wordplay geek that I am, but I’ve never actually followed through with it… [via In4mador]

Amusing search request of the day: +the used +video +download

How does it relate to my site, you ask? Well, because this searcher didn’t put “The Used” (the name of a rock band, for those who don’t follow such things) in quotes, the results included the fonts used in video games available for download from my site…

In yet more search request news (can you tell I’m bored?), some person went through fifteen pages of results for the utterly inexplicable miss entraNCING and ended up at a couple of old blog entries on bizarre Flash animations and directional impairment. Very puzzling indeed…