Silence is...frustrating.

It's now been eight days since I killed my laptop. This is a long story that deserves a proper telling once I'm back up and running again. Basically - I had the machine ticking along beautifully, new modem and all. Then I decided to tinker. Stoopid, stoopid, stoopid.

Hence: the blogdrought continues. I'm posting this placeholder/apologia from the office, in a gap between more pressing stuff.

Don't know how long it will take to fix the trusty Compaq. I really hope I haven't inflicted permanent brain damage on the thing - it's a great machine and puts up with a lot of abuse.

Meanwhile, I'm filling the Palm with blogthoughts for later development.

Check in every couple of days - we hope to restore normal service as soon as humanly possible...

/m

I’m sure there are legitimate reasons for including this sordid little feature in most email packages. It’s fine if you want to send an email newsletter, a gag or whatever to a whole slew of friends and care to respect their privacy by not shoving all the email addresses into the To: line. But in my experience the way the “BCC:” line is most commonly used in corporate life is unpleasant, dishonest and just plain snarky.

It’s the ultimate passive-aggressive CYA tactic.

Passive-aggressive because in most cases it comes from people who don’t have the integrity or mettle to just pick up the phone or walk down the hall to pick their fights. You’ve got a problem with me? Come tell me about it. What kind of insidious audit trail crap are you trying to pull by firing your snot at me under cover of an email in the first place?

As if this wasn’t bad enough, you then double-cover your devious ass by making sure your boss, my boss, and half the world gets to watch as you hang me out to dry. This kind of sanctimonious, conniving filth distorts the wholly marvellous and wonderful collaborative medium of email into something acrid and rancorous.

One of the places I worked at in the last few years seemed to breed champion BCC-ers. Everyone was doing it – it was a venomous, barely hidden undernet spreading throughout the corporation like some vile, choking fungus.

BCC begets more BCC. You cover my ass and I’ll cover yours, and together we’ll all point the finger at everyone else and no one will ever have to take ownership of anything. The damn thing’s so insidious, I freely admit I even fell into the trap on occassion myself. I hate this. I hate the fact that I’ve lowered myself to this level. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Pass me the birch rods, matron.

Of the average 250+ emails I’d get on a daily basis, sometimes as many as a third were blind-copied to me. The subtext was always an “FYI”, a “friendly word in your ear”, “just thought you should know”.

Ack! Phhhhtttffft! “Just thought you should know” be hanged – you’re snotting on your colleagues. You’re staging a pissing match without even the courage to come out from the cubicles – directing your malicious stream over the three-quarter walls with lethal accuracy, so your opponent can never know who or what has hit them until too late.

I caught one of the snivelling, bush-league weasels at it once. I’d just got this offensive, wretched little message, addressed only to me (or so it appeared) and marked “confidential”, from a bloke in one of the project teams I was part of – beating me up for my alleged failure to deliver on a deadline. (OK, the truth: I had, in fact, dropped the ball. It happens).

The phone rang. It was a fellow VP in one of our other offices, calling in all innocence to say: “Boy! He really fried you on that one, didn’t he?”

“Huh?”

Of course, he’d missed the fact that his copy of the flame in question was sent to him blind. I had no idea he’d seen it. This also meant that I had no idea who else had seen it. So I checked. One phone call to my boss – he’d seen it too. And his boss, the Chairman of the Mothership.

Banzai! Fava beans in one hand, Chianti in the other – I hit the cube farm in search of a bloody reckoning.

This actually happened (well – all except the Fava beans thing). Today, the same grotty little yob showed up in my email again – two years down the track. He’s been downsized from the old place and wants my assistance, networking, resume counseling, whatever.

So what would you do...?

Housekeeping

Archives seem to be working again. Much bloggering about with templates and other arcana. Final grateful sighs of relief and thanks to Phil Ringnalda's Blogspot troubleshooting page.

I have no idea why what Phil suggested worked (seemed a lot like the Blogger equivalent of switching everything off, unplugging everything, turning around three times widdershins, plugging everything back in, three Hail Marys, take away the number you first thought of and switch it all back on). But work it did. This makes Mr. Ringnalda a hero as far as I'm concerned.

Thanks mate.

The debate about Microsoft's much-trumpeted "Hailstorm" initiative continues to rage through the blogvines. Everyone's weighing in on this one, it seems. Much good stuff deconstructing the FUD from, amongst others:

Tim O’Reilly & Crew
Doc Searls
CNET
/.
Craig Burton

As you would, no doubt, expect - given my extraordinary and unprecedented level of behind-the-scenes insight into Redmond's most covert machinations (i.e. I'm on first name terms with one Microsoft employee) - my tireless investigations have at last uncovered the complete truth behind these shenanigans.

Here then, for the first time, is a sneak peek at Microsoft’s secret new site in development that reveals their full intent with the Hailstorm initiative. All they want to achieve is this.

Evil & dangerous? You be the judge...

I advise you to click on the last link above quickly, before the Borg detects the leak and rains down upon my entire blog.

This ole blog’s been a bit thin on the ground of late – a little too busy with “real” (i.e. client-funded) writing.

So in the absence of higher pith-content content, we interrupt our regularly scheduled programming with this short humour break. Here’s my three favourite (clean) gags of the moment:

*****
Waiter: "May I take your order?"
Bloke: "Yes, how do you prepare your chickens?"
Waiter: "Nothing special sir. We just tell them straight out that they're going to die."
*****

What did the Zen Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?
-- “Make me one with everything”
*****

Two lawyers went into a café and ordered two drinks. They then produced sandwiches from their briefcases and started to eat.

The owner got all twitchy and marched over and told them, "You can't eat your own sandwiches in here!"

The lawyers looked at each other, shrugged, and then exchanged sandwiches.

********
OK. Be warned that unless one of you out there sends me some chocolate some time soon, there’s much more where these juicy little nuggets came from…

More Bush

To combat the looming "energy crisis" in the U.S., the mighty Shrub issued an edict to federal agencies tonight, ordering them to reduce power consumption across the board - cranking down the air conditioning, turning off the lights - that kind of thing. All seems to make sense, on the surface – good PR.

But the coverage on CNN and other U.S. channels seems to have missed the best piece of this story - elegantly deadpanned tonight by CTV News Anchor Lloyd Robertson:-

"President George Bush has ordered all federal agencies to curb electricity use. The major focus will be in California, where federal offices were told to cut back on email, turn off escalators..." etc.

Bush has missed a great opportunity here to pull back the geek vote from nerd favourite Gore. It all starts to make sense to me now. His unilateral rejection of the Kyoto treaty and inspired plans to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge don't mean he's a profligate environmental crook and despoiler of the planet at all – he’s merely trying to ensure that future generations of Americans will still be able to email sideways smiley faces to each other, without fear of draining the nation’s precious energy resources.

“Cut back on email.” That’s going to make a big difference fer sure.

Can there now be any doubt…?

UNITED NATIONS, May 3 — For the first time since Eleanor Roosevelt led the opening session of the U.N. Human Rights Commission in 1947, the United States failed to win re-election to the body Thursday. U.S. officials said they were disappointed with the result, which observers attributed to dismay over several foreign policy initiatives by the Bush administration, including its opposition to the Kyoto climate change treaty and its pursuit of a missile defense shield.

Full story from MSNBC here.

Here’s one of the most amazing things about this story:

“Countries elected to the commission included Bahrain, South Korea and Pakistan from the Asia Group, as well as Croatia and Armenia from the Eastern Europe Group. The Latin America Group selected Chile and Mexico without a vote, and the African Group chose Sierra Leone, Sudan, Togo and Uganda, also without a vote.

Think about it: Sierra Leone & Armenia! Without a vote!! Elected to the U.N. Human Rights commission!!! That the U.S. didn't make it onto!!!!!!!

The international reputation of the U.S. under Dubya has sunk lower than that of Sierra Leone. A country whose human rights record is, to put it mildly, “characterized by serious problems” – problems that include government-sanctioned political executions and “extrajudicial killings”, torture, arbitrary arrest, exile, arbitrary and random state interference with personal privacy. In fact, according to the annual reports published by the United Nations, Sierra Leone fails to come up even close to acceptable standards in every single category of the human rights charter, with violations of basic human rights, civil liberties, political rights, discrimination and workers rights.

Yet Sierra Leone is elected to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. The U.S. isn’t.

In times like this, you know you can always depend on hard-boiled Cro-Magnon Republican Henry Hyde to let us know exactly what the Shrub’s peers and backers really think on the issue: “This is emblematic of the increasing irrelevancy of some international organizations,” he said today.

Which is, of course, nicely emblematic of the increasing illiteracy of the Republican Congress.

"One of these days you're going to quit. You might not know when..."

Check out The Quit Clock for your personalized chucking it in projection.

And while you're at it, perhaps someone could tell me what the heck is going on with that interstitial after you click the submit button? Weird.

An example of one company’s marketing department trying really hard to get a clue, but falling face down in the cinders as the train steams out of the station…

IBM caught red-handed in grafitti campaign
Reuters News Agency - Chicago - City officials were surprised but not amused Wednesday to learn that computer giant IBM was behind an advertising campaign to spray-paint symbols of penguins, hearts and peace signs on Chicago sidewalks.

The Armonk, New York-based company could face fines of $50(U.S.) for each of 100 defacements to defray the costof blasting away the pavement graffiti, part of International Business Machines Corp.’s “Peace, Love and Linux” marketing strategy designed to draw attention to its Linux computer operating system.

“We’re rather surprised - it’s such a reputable company,” said Debbie DeLopez of Chicago’s Streets and Sanitation Department.

A 20-year-old man who works for a local advertising company was arrested spray-painting a North Side sidewalk last week.

The guerrilla marketing campaign was halted on San Francisco sidewalks last week, though the paint used was said to be biodegradable. The effort in Chicago was supposed to be done with chalk, not paint, IBM told the Chicago Sun-Times.

An IBM spokesman could not be reached for comment.