Some People Can’t Read

by Zef Hemel

A couple of months ago I made a post “about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation”:http://www.zefhemel.com/archives/2003/10/03/what-many-people-don-t-know-about-bill-gates. All I did was copy a bit of text that I found on some weblog that told about the good work they do etc. But during the last months quite a few people have commented on this post by asking for help. For some reason they think either that I am Bill Gates or that I’m in direct contact with him:

bq. Bill Gates is a hero. I have heard so many good things about him. He gives to the poor and creates lots of jobs for the poor. I want to ask him to do me only one fever, I want him to help me with my brother who has a kidney problem. I want to know if he can help me to pay for one of my brothers kidney to be removed. If you get in touch with him,please let him know that I don’t ask for too much. God bless bill gates.

or

bq. Gosh, bill gate,…if you are so rich…why don’t u give some money to the poor…I mean one million dollars wouldn’t even be .01 percent of your earnings. In the bible the rich man gave money to the church but it was only about .01 of his wealth, and the poor lady, gave the church 2 pieces of silver and that was all she had, God bless the lady, and she has a reward waiting in heaven for her…which is eternal life. God doesn’t like greed. Bill Gates are you a Christian or a man of God…well only you in your heart knows, and only God knows, that everyone knows that’s when you die, you can’t take the money with you. God hates greed. Not to say that your greedy…But with all that money…you can make this world a better place! THis message is for Bill Gates Himself!! Give money to the churches!!

or

bq. I don’t who is responsible for this charity. I would like to know if you can help the poor people in Africa who have come together to buid their little clinic. They nee help to funish building the clinic and some medical facilities.Please tell me how can you help these poor people in Africa.

or

bq. Gate Foundation is every good but I’ll try to find the way you get in to the foundation be cause I get a good shoot at geting in to a college for football but I’ll still whom have the money to pay for it all I’ll live seattle washington my address is 1625 M.l.k. jr way apt #14 I’still get two year left in high school please send the info to my house so I’ll can get in the Foundation

or

bq. I am Dr. M. Wakil from india have been running a charitable foundation in India since 1999. My foundation work in feild of Education, Medical, Health, Public Services, orphanns, widows, poor, construction, Church, or another many feild.
I would like to tell you that although it easy to run any foundation but it is only for rich man nor for poor becaz I have seen that there are many foundation run by many person but it does not work for poor or another feild.

bq. So I would like to tell you that Please tell me trhat how can I get any donation from your company.

bq. Dr. M. Wakil

or

bq. Good day,sir/ma
i am writing you this letter to solicite for your assistance.I have decided to forward this letter to you because of the good work i hear and see that your noble and prestigeous organization do to save the lives of people. my name is olumide oludemi i am about 51 years of age and i live in italy,tolentino to be precise,i have kidney problems and my two kidneys are not functioning any-longer.i have been with this kidney problems for almost 18 years now and i have been un-able to work adequatly for a living,i do the dialysis three times in a week in other to be able to pass out the waste in my body which is so expensive for me to bear with,i am suppose to have done a kidney transplant but i cant meet up with the finacial state.day by day i grow more weaker because of the unreliefness state i am.i really need your financial assistance to undergo my transplant operation.or if you could help me in any of your hospitals to do the transplant for me.
I will appreciate your most gracious and life saving help,and i pray that the good lord continually be with you.
I hope to hear back from you soonest.

The Gmail Experience

by Zef Hemel

For those unfortunate who haven’t been invited to Gmail (I pity you), I’ll put up a couple of screenshots that might give you a slight idea of how Gmail works and why it is better than any webbased mail I have ever used. I’ll not be talking about “accessibility”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/04/10/gmail-accessibility or “the privacy issues”:http://gmail-is-too-creepy.com, just about what it’s like to use Gmail. All the screenshots in this post are clickable (to view the full-size screenshot).

Anyway, after you’re logged into Gmail (you can stay logged in, to go to your inbox, just go to http://gmail.com) you’ll see your inbox:

The green tags before some of the subjects mean they’re labeled. Labels are a bit like folders in common e-mail applications, they can be assigned dynamically (using rules) or by hand. More on that later.

As you can see, some messages have multiple authors. The “swi vergadering …” one for example. Those are discussions. When you get a mail and reply to it and someone replies back etc. the messages are automatically grouped and can be viewed in a chat-like fashion. When I click the discussion I get to see this:

By default all messages except the most recent one are collapsed and only a summary is shown. But when I click the “Expand all” link at the right all messages are expanded (without a full refresh, using some spiffy Javascript):

At the bottom right there’s a label saying “Daniel Neeteson” this tells us that the next message, just outside our current screen, is from “Daniel Neeteson”, this label changes as we scroll through the discussion.

When we click on the “More options” link next to the name of the sender of a particular message, we get more information about that message, his/her mail address, the date the message was sent etc.

Now we’re going to “Compose Mail”. From here it’s possible to send someone an e-mail (well duh):

Nifty thing about it is that when start typing a name or e-mail address in the “To:” field a list of possible completions appears, you can pick one by using your mouse or using the up/down arrows at your keyboard. This is also done using a Javascript:

Adding attachments is easy too, adding attachments can easily be done by clicking the “Add attachment” link. An attachment field is shown immediately, without refreshing. More attachments can be added aswell:

Then there’s the automatic spam filtering which works very well. Most of my spam mail is automatically detected and put into my spam box:

Then the labels. As a said before, labels are like folders in most e-mail applications, but a message can have multiple labels. You can define your own labels and you can view all messages with a certain label by simply clicking on the label name in the left menu:

Labels can be assigned using filters:

or by hand:

Certain actions can be applied to multiple messages at once aswell:

And then there’s Google’s famous search feature which means you have now fulltext search on all of your e-mails:

What I found remarkable about Gmail is its lack of postbacks. When applying labels, removing messages, archiving messages etc. etc. there’s no full page refresh. Also when you’re viewing a message and return to the inbox it appears to be cashed as it appears right away.

On top of that you can use Gmail nearly without your mouse. I’ve enabled the quick keys which means that I can compose an e-mail by simply pressing ‘c’, can return to the Inbox by pressing ‘u’, can walk through the messages using vi’s ‘j’ and ‘k’ and can open a message by using either return or ‘o’ and archive it by pressing ‘a’.

Oh yes and you get 1Gb of space, which is plenty.

Some Jokes

by Zef Hemel

I was reading this “‘Favorite jokes’”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/06/18/favorite-jokes post Mark Pilgrim made and there are a couple of really great jokes in there (in particular in the comments).

Here are my favourites:

bq. Three kids are walking down the street, called Shit, Fuck Off and Your Manners. For some, unexplained reason, Shit collapses. Your Manners stays to see to him, while Fuck Off runs round the corner for help.

bq. He runs into a stereotypical English policeman and starts gibbering at him, visibly shaken, in an attempt to solicit help. The policeman says “‘Allo, ‘allo! Calm down, young lad! Now, tell me, what’s your name?”

bq. “Fuck Off” comes the reply. “Now, now!” says the policeman, “Where’s your manners?”. The boy replies “Round the corner picking up Shit”.

and

bq. What do you call a boomerang that doesn’t come back?

bq. A stick.

and

bq. What’s the difference between roast beef and pea soup?

bq. Anyone can roast beef.

and

bq. Q: Why do ducks have big flat feet? A: To stamp out forest fires.

bq. Q: Why do elephants have big flat feet? A: To stamp out flaming ducks

and

bq. A penguin, bored with the Antarctic weather, was on holiday driving through outback Australia when he started hearing a strange knocking sound from the car’s engine. Knowing how dangerous it would be for a polar sea-bird to be stuck in the middle of the desert, he quickly pulled into the next service-station.

bq. The mechanic took a quick look at the car, and said “Mate, it’ll take me a few minutes to find out what’s going on”, so the penguin ducked (penguined?) into the shop and bought an ice-cream. Unfortunately, the hot sun was melting the ice-cream, and penguin flippers not being the most dextrous of limbs, he got as much ice-cream on his face as he did in his mouth.

bq. Rather annoyed now, the penguin went back to the mechanic to see what was wrong. The mechanic looked at the penguin for a moment, and shook his head.

bq. “Mate, I’m sorry, but it looks like you’ve blown a seal.”

bq. “No, no!”, replied the penguin. “It’s only ice-cream!”

Twenty one

by Zef Hemel

I turned 21 today. Hooray for me!

The first one to give a birthday present was “PWG-Lucas”:http://www.foruminsider.com/forums/index.php?showuser=211 who sent me a GMail invite, thanks Lucas :)

Your First Website

by Zef Hemel

For those that are about to create their first website (statistically, most probably a personal website): Skip it. Either skip it or keep it a secret. And if you’re not going to keep it a secret, be sure to remove it after you’ve moved on.

Also after you think you’re finished, go visit a couple of your favourite websites. See how they differ from yours and why they do (ignoring the fact that they have different content):
* Might there be a reason why not everything is moving?
* Might there be a reason why there’s no background music?
* Might there be a reason why they used colours that don’t stay printed in your eyes for three days?
* Might there be a reason why their site doesn’t contain loads of type errors?
* Might there be a reason why each of their pages looks roughly similar?
* Might there be a reason why they chose not to use every single HTML tag and JavaScript on the planet?
* Might there be a reason why they didn’t put up a chatbox that nobody is in?
* Might there be a reason why they don’t have a forum that nobody uses?

Wonder why? “This is friggin’ why”:http://greatsoftware.webhop.net.

WDDaTLOLDOI Inc.

by Zef Hemel

“Hello, I’m Cindy and I’ll interview you today.”
– “Could you tell me about this company a little in advance please?”

“Sure, the company is called ‘We Don’t Do a Thing Like Our Lifes Depend On It Incorporated’, we’re proud of the name, as it covers what we do so well. Which, as you probably can guess is exactly… zip.”
– “I like the sound of that!”

“Ok, I’ll ask you some questions and you’ll answer them, alright?”
– “Sure.”

“Ok, to start off, tell me, how motivated are you to get this job?”
– “Not very.”

“Good, good. Very good. What kind of jobs have you had before this one?”
– “I’ve worked as a system administrator at an elementary school.”

“Ok, and what did that job involve, what kind of things did you do at a regular day?”
– “Pretending to be awfully busy, mostly.”

“And you quit your job voluntarily?”
– “No, no, they found out.”

“They found out and fired you? That’s absurd! Well, don’t expect such absdurd actions taken here. The less you do at WDDaTLoLDOI Incorporated, the higher your sallary. But I think we’ve talked enough, you’re hired.”
– “Cool, thanks ma’am!”

Fiction? Not entirely. My brother launched a site with a friend a couple of months ago. It’s one of those sites where you can buy ringtones and logos for your mobile phone. There are companies that deliver all the scripts and services to do this and allow others to resell their services. All you have to do is create a nice lay-out, insert the javascripts and there you go. The site will be automatically stuffed with new ringtones every day. The trouble is to promote it and get customers. Apparantly my brother and his friend did this. Now they make like $100 per day, that’s $50 each, while not doing anything for it.

Until recently they had a “Dutch site only”:http://www.mobilelogos.nl. Now they’re expanding, there’s already an UK site and many more are coming up. I heard my brother even approached his German teacher to translate the site. Apparantly he forgot he could do it himself, oh sorry, that’s against company policies. Stupid me.

The fact that he might now be making around $1,500 per month causes some problems. He’s only 16, our dad pays his taxes. The trouble is that as my mom and dad make enough money to be in the highest tax scale (which is, don’t be shocked) 50% in the Netherlands. Which would mean $750 would go to the governement. On top of that our parents, until now, received some amount of money to pay for each of the children. But they’re not eligible to this money if this child makes more than, say $1,100 per 3 months or so, which is an amount he might just pass. My brother will have to pay the $250, they used to get, back to our parents aswell. He’s now probably going to start a company because of tax reasons. “Can you drive me to the chamber of commerce mom?”

You can understand that the meaning of the word “earn” has changed over the past few months in our family. In a way, sure he’s lucky, made the right deals, so he “earned” it. But in a way, to me, “earning” implies you doing something. Which is not really the case.

This reminds me of Ben Woldring. Ben Woldring, a boy from Groningen (like me), launched a little website which compared mobile phone contracts, he made this site as a school assignment (he was about 15-16 back then). At some point a TV programme invited him to talk about it which made the ball start rolling. He got different deals from different phone companies, got a domain name (bellen.com, “bellen” means to call) and launched his own company inventively called “‘BenCom’”:http://www.bencom.nl. At some point he had his mother working for him as his secretary. He appeared to have great businessman skills, debated with the Dutch parlement and spoke to Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer. He’s a millionair now and does business school at the same university I’m on. I sometimes see him walking the halls.

Had I mentioned the world isn’t fair?

Changed site setup a little

by Zef Hemel

As I felt I wanted to post less in quantity and started to do longer articles I still felt the urge to do quick posts with interesting links I found. A solution for this was to save them and post them in one batch once in a while, however links quickly outdate. Then I found the “wp-recent-links”:http://rebelpixel.com/projects/wp-recent-links/ plugin for “WordPress”:http://www.wordpress.org (the blogging tool I’m using). This plugin allows you to add a list of recent links with brief comments to your blog. It was exactly what I was looking for. You can find the links on the bottom of the frontpage.

So, if you’re purely interested in links to stuff I find interesting, either subscribe to the “Links RSS Feed”:http://www.zefhemel.com/recent-links/feed/ or quickly jump down when you visit ZefHemel.com, if you only care about the more longer articles you can subscribe to the “RSS Feed”:http://www.zefhemel.com/feed/rss2/ or just visit ZefHemel.com regularily. Or you can combine the options any way you like.

Oh yes, and the rss feeds moved as I moved to WordPress (a couple of weeks ago). A couple of people have contacted me that they only recently found out I _was_ updating my site. So, now you all know…

Oh wait…

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