IT Elf: “Santa, you have 3 billion unread emails”

Santa: “Can you print them out for me?”

Who knew Santa was an attorney?

Never let it be said that I don’t share vital information with you. What could be more vital than this today?

Should we be overly concerned with the information people might be inadvertently sharing on social networks when many still haven’t learned about the dangers of using a cell phone in public?

That story reminds me of the time we were taking the train to Chicago and one of our fellow passengers spent part of the trip setting up a return of an item that had been delivered to her house. The conversation included her giving her name, address and credit card information, all within easy hearing range of a train-car full of people.

Dumb is dumb, no matter which communications medium you use.

The Friends in Tech group has released our Christmas special, A Geek Christmas Story today.

“Mattie Stevens, a young boy of the early 80’s, dreams of owning a Commodore 64. He sets out to convince everyone this is the perfect gift. But, along the way runs into opposition from his parents and everyone around him including old Santa Claus”

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to participate in this year’s Christmas special (A story for another time in itself…), but I know that a lot of hard work went into it, from FiT members and special guests, and that all that work really shows in the final production. Give it a listen and enjoy the geek humor, and if you enjoy this special, check the bottom of the post for links to previous FiT specials, some of which I did play a small part in.

Since I have mentioned here before that I love to watch CSI, but sometimes their “liberal” take on technology tools leaves me rolling my eyes with dismay, I have to share this link.

CSI Zoom Story

Yup, I know anyone out there who deals with audio/video/photographs runs into the “CSI effect”, where people actually expect that we can do things like this, so I had to laugh.

Occasionally, I will go through the spam folder in my gmail account, just to make sure there’s nothing in there that I actually want to see. It never fails that there’s some subject line that makes me giggle, just a little. A few weeks ago, I had 6th grade flashbacks when I saw an email with the subject line “Read this email, or you’re gay!”.

Then, as if they figured out that it’s 2009 and I’m not 11, the spammers upped the anty on me a week or so later, “Read this email, or catch a disease!”.

I’m not exactly sure that kind of disease you can get from not reading an email. Maybe the email had the secret cure to swine flu, or safe sex tips. Either way, I didn’t read it and thus far, no diseases!

So which is the worse email fail.

The other day, after replying back and forth with someone for part of the morning, over lunch I got 4 error messages from the remote email server that my messages hadn’t been delivered. The ones that had already been replied to.

That same night, the US Postal Service sent me an email to let me know that they had attempted to delivery my package, but couldn’t, and so I would need to contact them about picking it up. That would be the package that in fact, was delivered that afternoon. It was delivered to the office, just like I had ordered it.

So what kinds of email follies have you seen lately?

Ever since I created my Gmail account as my name, I’ve gotten occasional emails that are not meant for me at all, but are meant for people with the same name. Now, I have no idea how other people are getting the impression that my name @ Gmail is this other person’s email address, but it’s been frequent enough to make me wonder.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve gotten flight confirmations from SFO, notes from an aunt, a copy of a HS kid’s resume, and lately group emails from a group of Sununu supports rallying for his election.

Usually, I do send a reply letting them know they’ve got the wrong address. Do you?

Wonder what Google’s advertising within Gmail thinks of all that?

Many of you techies out there probably already have seen the PC Weenies comic on-line. I admit to being a pretty avid follower of it myself. Today, Krishna shared that he’s doing some artwork as a way to raise money for a friend of his who has been fighting cancer.

Yesterday I blogged about the idea of using the proceeds earned by commissioned guest-star strips for Cindy Randi?s fight against cancer. I wanted to make another option available.

For $50, I will create a custom piece of art (8.5? x 11?) featuring you and up to 3 PC Weenies characters of your choice. You will receive a high quality card stock print of the colored art, along with the original sketch (taken from my sketchbook) that was used to create the print. The money earned from these commissioned pieces will go towards Cindy (less printing and shipping costs).

So, if you’re interested in getting a unique piece of artwork, or even in being a guest star in one of Krishna’s strips, get over there this month and help out. I hear it makes a great gift too!

Over the weekend I updated my Macbook’s version of Firefox to RC2 (now RC3) because FF 2 had become completely unstable. Now, less than a week from the planned release of firefox 3.0, it seems that I’m running into instability on a couple of other machines as well, at work.

It’s almost like when something on your car breaks down 100 miles over the warranty mileage limit. FF 2 only has a few more days to cause problems before it gets replaced, so it’s doing it everywhere!

To be fair, the fact that I’ve been doing quite a bit of video capture/encoding and not restarting the machine afterwards might really be the problem with the instability, but it’s odd that only Firefox seems to actually crash on me.

Tuesday can’t get here fast enough. I’ll be contributing at least 4 downloads of the release version that day on different machines at home and work as part of the quest for the record number of downloads.