meyerweb.com

This afternoon, I spotted the following sitting in a driving rain on a street corner half a block away from our house.

Uh…

Now that’s how you package parts. It’s almost enough to take the fear out of the words “Some Assembly Required”.

You know the effect where, if you only catch a TV show every now and again, it’s always the same episode?

Whenever I happen to catch Stargate: SG-1, it’s always the episode “Window of Opportunity“. Seriously.

How awesome is that?

It turns out that the reason Durstan wasn’t on the cover of his book is that he’d made his way onto the covers of some other books. All of them from another publisher, even. I present the shocking evidence!

Believe it… or don’t.

So late this morning—that would make it the fifth and final day of the conference—I was doing what everyone else in the freakin’ conference was doing, and taking pictures of attendees while standing in the hallway. As I held up the camera to get a high-angle shot of a group of friends, one of the badge checkers was suddenly leaning around me to look at something. “You don’t have a press tag on the camera,” she said.

“No, I don’t; it’s a personal camera,” I told her.

“You still have get a tag,” she said.

“You’re kidding,” I said. But she wasn’t. I offered to put the camera away, but she wasn’t really satisfied with that. “You’ll just pull it back out again, won’t you?”

She was right, of course, but that just didn’t seem like a problem to me. She said, “All right, I’ll tell you what. When you get a chance, go down to the press booth and get a tag. All right?”

Now, most people would have agreed just to get her to go away and ignored the request. But me, I’m a little different. My sense of the totally absurd had been engaged, and I decided to do just as she had suggested and obtain a press tag. Porter Glendinning, having heard the story and possessing a similar sense of the absurd, came along to pick up one of his own.

So yes, along with Porter, I am now duly authorized and my camera tagged with badge #331 to indicate that I am an official SXSW Videographer/Photographer, and as such am permitted to take pictures of people standing around in hallways talking. Also, I have official authorization to take pictures of people taking pictures with their own personal non-tagged cameras. That’s fun too.

I just got back from Search Engine Strategies New York—more on the conference later—and had a fascinating encounter there.

What happened was I decided to check out the exhibit halls (they had two). As I looped around a large booth, a well-dressed man standing in the aisle said, “Excuse me, sir. Are you a webmaster?”. He had the kind of smooth English-Australian accent so favored of infomercial hosts and lower-grade movie villains. I admitted that I was, and he informed me he represented an online casino firm that was looking for “revenue partners”. He was very keen to sign me up so I could start making money.

That’s right: I was being spammed in person.

I was so stunned, I could only tell him I wasn’t interested and walk away, shaking my head. It wasn’t until later that it occurred to me that I should have gotten his contact information and then passed it on to Jonas.

I recently started receiving, for no readily apparent reason, bloated HTML e-mail from Dakota Air Parts, whose site is as lovely as their unsolicited e-mail tactics. Anyway, I noticed that the mail was coming from what appeared to be a single human, and given that the message also included their 701 area code phone numbers, mailing address, and so on, I could reasonably go ahead and respond with a removal request. I sort of had to, since there wasn’t a dedicated address for unsubscribe requests.

So off went my response, stating that I’d never asked for the mail and would like to stop receiving it pronto. Not a few minutes later, I received a new message. Here’s how it started out:

K.C. here,

I'm protecting myself from receiving junk mail.

Just this once, click on the link below so I can receive your emails.
You won't have to do this again.

http://spamarrest.com...

So in order to stop receiving junk mail from K.C., I had to prove that my mail to him wasn’t junk.

Ah… the sweet, sweet taste of irony, mixed with bold hints of utter cluelessness. So delicious.

See, that’s why presentational class names are such a bad idea.