Wooden Table Redux



  • So, I just received an e-mail with a PDF attachment. (Names, etc., withheld to protect the ignorant.)

    Subj: FW: Dangerous Drug
    

    FYI

    ----- Original Message -----

    Good Afternoon,

    Please see the attached article concerning internet purchase of
    

    drugs. Very interesting with a hard life lesson for the two guys that did.

    Please spread the word to all your folks.  Let's hope this never
    

    happens here.

    I open the PDF to find the referenced article, scanned into the PDF, apparently (the text and images are askew; there is what I call 'copier shadowing' which further indicates a scan.)

    I read the article, which was about two men who were poisoned by purchasing recreational drugs online, but apparently some mixup happened where they got something (even more?) dangerous than what they thought they were buying.

    I then see at the bottom of the scanned image the following:

    http://www.drugfree.org/join-together/drugs/two-men-poisoned-by-recreational-drugs-purc...  2/10/2012

    So the originator of this pulled up the web page (the url was PROBABLY forwarded to them for their information), printed it, scanned it, produced the PDF, forwarded to hundreds/thousands of people in e-mail.

    Now that's what I call efficient.



  • Talking about PDF attachments reminds me of a spam email I received this morning. It included a PDF document of a supposed parking violation ticket (I didn't open the attachment) that I need to pay. According to the email the violation occurred somewhere in the UK. I have never been to the UK in my life.



  • @mott555 said:

    Talking about PDF attachments reminds me of a spam email I received this morning. It included a PDF document of a supposed parking violation ticket (I didn't open the attachment) that I need to pay. According to the email the violation occurred somewhere in the UK. I have never been to the UK in my life.

    There was something similar to that here in the UK where someone went around putting false parking tickets on windscreens, which told the victims to go to a website which demanded they install an ActiveX component to see the details which obviously carried a nasty payload.



  • TRWTF is that you're reading spam.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @zelmak said:

    So the originator of this pulled up the web page (the url was PROBABLY forwarded to them for their information), printed it, scanned it, produced the PDF, forwarded to hundreds/thousands of people in e-mail.
     

    Why would they do that? Were they on drugs?


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Lorne Kates said:

    Why would they do that? Were they on drugs?

    Yes, but they bought them the old fashioned way. Seriously, this is obviously just FUD from your local dealer afraid of losing his job to globalization.


  • BINNED

    @Lorne Kates said:

    @zelmak said:

    So the originator of this pulled up the web page (the url was PROBABLY forwarded to them for their information), printed it, scanned it, produced the PDF, forwarded to hundreds/thousands of people in e-mail.
     

    Why would they do that? Were they on drugs?

    Wouldn't drugfree.org be the Partnership for a Drug-Free America website (not sure if safe for work, so I didn't check)? If so, they don't need the drugs; it's all natural.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @mott555 said:

    Talking about PDF attachments reminds me of a spam email I received this morning. It included a PDF document of a supposed parking violation ticket (I didn't open the attachment) that I need to pay. According to the email the violation occurred somewhere in the UK. I have never been to the UK in my life.

    PDF attachments like this are TRWTF. Also, idiots who want to send you a bunch of cat pictures, and roll 'em into a PowerPoint.



  • I guess figuring out how to send e-mail properly is some kind of far-out journey that wasters go on after a couple of peyote buttons.



  •  Powerpoint? Everyone knows you should paste them into Word, because then you can resize them.



  • Ah, but in Powerpoint you can set them up with whatever interval you need between them to match the length of the cheesy soundtrack you add.



  • @Watson said:

     Powerpoint? Everyone knows you should paste them into Word, because then you can resize them.

    Word does a good job of presenting images at a controllable size without introducing aliasing or information loss. I've got no problem with using Word for that purpose. I'd prefer to just get a PNG attachment, but for secretaries, etc., Word's an OK medium for this sort of thing.



  •  @bridget99 said:

    @Watson said:

     Powerpoint? Everyone knows you should paste them into Word, because then you can resize them.

    Word does a good job of presenting images at a controllable size without introducing aliasing or information loss. I've got no problem with using Word for that purpose. I'd prefer to just get a PNG attachment, but for secretaries, etc., Word's an OK medium for this sort of thing.

    Either my sarcasm meter's broken, or this was a really bad joke. Please tell me either of these is correct.

     



  • @Monomelodies said:

     @bridget99 said:

    @Watson said:

     Powerpoint? Everyone knows you should paste them into Word, because then you can resize them.

    Word does a good job of presenting images at a controllable size without introducing aliasing or information loss. I've got no problem with using Word for that purpose. I'd prefer to just get a PNG attachment, but for secretaries, etc., Word's an OK medium for this sort of thing.

    Either my sarcasm meter's broken, or this was a really bad joke. Please tell me either of these is correct.

    Or maybe is bridget99 being bridget99.  Read some of his other posts, you will get it.



  • @Monomelodies said:

    Either my sarcasm meter's broken, or this was a really bad joke. Please tell me either of these is correct.
     

    bridget99 is a frightened yet jaded man. That should explain his posts, I think.



  • @dhromed said:

    @Monomelodies said:

    Either my sarcasm meter's broken, or this was a really bad joke. Please tell me either of these is correct.
     

    bridget99 is a frightened yet jaded man. That should explain his posts, I think.

    I thought bridget99 was a lady.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @dhromed said:

    @Monomelodies said:

    Either my sarcasm meter's broken, or this was a really bad joke. Please tell me either of these is correct.
     

    bridget99 is a frightened yet jaded man. That should explain his posts, I think.

    I thought bridget99 was a lady.
    bridget99 isn't real, and neither are any of you. Only I am real...


  • Ha, a couple of days ago this happened here:

    Person A receives email, forward email to worker B with instruction to scan the email into Word and then forward it as an attatchment to manager C.  Enterprisey!



  • @serguey123 said:

    Ha, a couple of days ago this happened here:

    Person A receives email, forward email to worker B with instruction to scan the email into Word and then forward it as an attatchment to manager C.  Enterprisey!

    I guess worse would be the boss I had about 6-8 years ago (an O-6 - "Full Bird" Colonel - in the military) required all of his e-mails be printed. A couple reams of paper a day.



  • @zelmak said:

    @serguey123 said:

    Ha, a couple of days ago this happened here:

    Person A receives email, forward email to worker B with instruction to scan the email into Word and then forward it as an attatchment to manager C.  Enterprisey!

    I guess worse would be the boss I had about 6-8 years ago (an O-6 - "Full Bird" Colonel - in the military) required all of his e-mails be printed. A couple reams of paper a day.

    Yeah, this one only want them in digital form so they print the email, scan it and send it to him via email, then the copy needs to be shredded.... I miss burn bags :(



  • @Monomelodies said:

     @bridget99 said:

    @Watson said:

     Powerpoint? Everyone knows you should paste them into Word, because then you can resize them.

    Word does a good job of presenting images at a controllable size without introducing aliasing or information loss. I've got no problem with using Word for that purpose. I'd prefer to just get a PNG attachment, but for secretaries, etc., Word's an OK medium for this sort of thing.

    Either my sarcasm meter's broken, or this was a really bad joke. Please tell me either of these is correct.

     





    What would you suggest people do, then? Keep in mind, please, that I am talking about the sort of person who doesn't know what ALT+TAB does, can't find files unless they're on the desktop, etc.



    I am sure that Windows includes some kind of photo-resizing feature as a part of Explorer, and there's always MSPAINT... the problem with teaching people those options is that they just change too damn much. XP's great-when-released image-editing features are not Vista's great-at-the-time image editing features, nor are Vista's methods continued in Windows 7. Windows 8, of course, completely invalidates everything we thought we knew about computers, since We Were Doing It Wrong The Whole Damn Time (trademark of Microsoft Corporation).



    Microsoft even changed MSPAINT (and CALC.EXE) in Windows 7. They just can't leave well enough alone, at least at the OS level.



    You might ask, "who's to say Microsoft won't just change the way images work in Word?". They can, of course, but in my experience the Office team has a much more pragmatic attitude toward breaking changes than the (post-Chen) OS team does. We are still waiting on Office Automation to embrace this new .NET thing, for example... 11 years later. This is a bit of a drag in some ways (e.g. having to do COM interop to actually do the sorts of things that knuckle-dragging end users care about), but it's also nice to have little islands of stability within the ocean of utter chaos that the OS team engenders.



    For me, the islands of stability that I use to actually do my job are things like Cygwin, MinGW, and CMD.EXE. For my users, it's Word, Excel, and (gag) Outlook. The rest of you have time to play silly fannies with the OS team, and good for you. You're cooler than me, and my living has been made ingloriously cleaning up the messes made by people like you. Be that as it may, though, there are damn good reasons why people who aren't "cool" like you (and who therefore have to make a dirty living) use Word as an imaging tool.



  • @bridget99 said:

    The rest of you have time to play silly fannies with the OS team, and good for you. You're cooler than me, and my living has been made ingloriously cleaning up the messes made by people like you. Be that as it may, though, there are damn good reasons why people who aren't "cool" like you (and who therefore have to make a dirty living) use Word as an imaging tool.

    bridget99 might be the most clever troll or saddest legitimate poster ever.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @bridget99 said:
    The rest of you have time to play silly fannies with the OS team, and good for you. You're cooler than me, and my living has been made ingloriously cleaning up the messes made by people like you. Be that as it may, though, there are damn good reasons why people who aren't "cool" like you (and who therefore have to make a dirty living) use Word as an imaging tool.

    bridget99 might be the most clever troll or saddest legitimate poster ever.

    I am waiting to hear how you resize images. Explain it to me as if I were a secretary (but without the pitiful, self-conscious stammering that happens when you talk to a girl).



  • @bridget99 said:

    I am waiting to hear how you resize images. Explain it to me as if I were a secretary (but without the pitiful, self-conscious stammering that happens when you talk to a girl).

    Daaaamn, that was a nice one! Bravo!

    I actually don't have much of an opinion on the resize thing. I was just commenting on the fact that most of your posts devolve into bizarre, self-pitying tirades against the software industry.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @bridget99 said:
    I am waiting to hear how you resize images. Explain it to me as if I were a secretary (but without the pitiful, self-conscious stammering that happens when you talk to a girl).
    Daaaamn, that was a nice one! Bravo!

    I actually don't have much of an opinion on the resize thing. I was just commenting on the fact that most of your posts devolve into bizarre, self-pitying tirades against the software industry.

    Yeah, that's a very apt description.

    Bizarre? I can't deny that.

    Self-pitying? Sure, why wouldn't I be?

    Againt the software industry? Only with every fiber of my being! (Have you read the press releases this "industry" generates? Have you used Failpoint or SAP-the-life-out-of-your-Enterprise-Edition?)

    Sending an image as a Word document is a good way to ensure that the recipient (e.g. your boss) will get a predictable GUI / printout. If I just send the image, Windows gives him too many choices, which are really irrelevant. I've never sent an image at work that needed to be printed out as 6 wallet-sized pictures on a single 8.5x11, for example. Stupid old Windows, though, being designed for the geriatric printing their baby pictures, will give this option every single time most people open a PNG or a JPEG. Wrapping my image in Word eliminates this (completely inexcusable) option, and also prevents the recipient from opening it up in some unknown and unwelcome cell phone image preview program (and subsequently asking me a bunch of weird questions over the phone while driving around).

    Also, if I paste an image into Word, I can easily and intuitively resize it, either preserving the aspect ratio (by dragging a corner) or modifying this ratio (by dragging a side). For comparison, think about the mental gymnastics necessary to teach an end user to do these things in MSPAINT, Paint.NET, or Photoshop (which are programs they probably don't use anyway). Electing to use Word instead is not at all a WTF.



  • I feel a hammer/nail disturbance in the force...


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