My Work

Surya does its business via phone and email, and our email has been overwhelmed by spam. Last week, I trained SpamAssassin on one of our sales manager’s spam folder and set it loose over the Thanksgiving weekend. It blocked well over a thousand spam mails from reaching people’s inboxes. Instead, I sent them to mine, so I could make sure non-spam wasn’t getting blocked. Many spam mails today are one big image with an ad in it, followed by random snippets of text that have nothing to do with anything to make it seem to a spam filter like it was an actual email. ...

Business is incredibly slow here at Surya at the end of a year. This year, we’re asked to work only four-day work weeks in December. Now since I’m salaried, I shouldn’t care, as I supposedly get a fixed annual pay regardless of how much or how little I work. That was the meaning of ‘salaried’ every other place I ever worked. Here, however, it’s used as a starting point from which money is deducted. So no matter how much I work I can never make more. If I miss any time, however, I will make less. So these days I am being told to take off in December will be taken from my salary. ...

* Note: My decision to take the pencil sketch and redraw and ink it in Photoshop over the objections of the assistant sales manager for the line who said the sketch’s roughness was “why we liked it,” was vindicated when the sales manager said she liked it, but needed the background to be a blue gradient to match the backgrounds of the models in the brochure. Woohoo! And just another note: Photoshop CS2 is a real dog on my cheap work computer. My uncle Bruce Holloway is a professional illustrator. We visited him this summer while we were out in New Hampshire. He has this beautiful state of the art Mac and Photoshop setup, and he works on the second floor of a reconverted old barn with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over picture-postcard rural New Hampshire beauty.* ...

[ ](http://picasaweb.google.com/brendahol/SuryaHavenGirlSpring07)[ ](http://picasaweb.google.com/brendahol/SuryaHavenGirlSpring07) Surya/Haven Girl Spring ‘07 Just finished a new Haven Girl brochure and put it on the web via Picasa 2. People inside the company are even asking for me to put things up here; it has truly become a useful way of getting high resolution pictures of our lines to people for use in advertising. The JPEGs Photoshop CS2 made look a lot darker than the original TIFs. I wonder if this is due to the TIFs being in CYMK and the JPEGS in RGB. ...

I am spending all my EQ2 time on the Echoes of Faydwer beta at the moment, so there’s not a lot to post about EQ2 until they lift the NDA. Enjoy the next couple weeks of ramblings about life, television and IT :) It took years to stop thinking of myself as a programmer after the dotcom bust put me and thousands like me out of work. Years of complacency left me without the kind of specific skills to get jobs in a suddenly far more competitive world. Sure I’d programmed in Java for four years, but was it J2EE? Did I use JDBC? I knew Javascript, but how about Perl? PHP? I knew basic SQL, but could I explain how to use explicit joins to optimize a complex SQL SELECT statement? ...

I promised Atlas hearts and smiles when he finally began working. Got all the email issues sorted, wrote workarounds so the salespeople could still read their email and I am being very careful with him. He’s earned his name; he really does have the whole world on his shoulders. The security guard didn’t like the name “Atlas”. He wanted to name the server “Jessica”, so he could say, “Oh, Jessica isn’t feeling well today,” or “Jessica is very busy this morning.”. I mean, come on. It’s just a machine! And my little wookums would never complain if he was busy now, would he? Come on, give momma a hug! ...

(I wanted to head this rant with a picture of my trusty little mail server, Atlas, but he and I are not speaking at the moment, and the digital camera was out of power. So for no real reason, a gratuitous picture of Dina as a Square-Enix heroine.) About two weeks ago, our email provider, ABAC.com, decided not to allow us to send mail to people within the company from within the company. No reason given, and they accepted mail from outside the company (for awhile, anyway) no problem. ...

So… that postcard I made a few days ago and wrote about here is ready to be mailed. But the printers say our address list has some bad postal codes; in particular, Canadian postal codes have had the last digit truncated. A little investigation, and I find out what’s happened. Our obviously US-centric database restricts postal codes to five characters. The salespeople have been putting the overflow in the ZIP+4 field. So I think of a simple fix: ...

Today I came in intent on rewriting my internal web apps so they didn’t use frames. See, I’ve been migrating people from the custom Visual BASIC apps to the web-based equivalents I’ve been writing, and they’ve been such a success people are starting to print them out. And sometimes they get the report, and sometimes the navigation frame. So I was going to off the navigation frame. Never got the chance. In advance of some shows coming up really soon, I was drafted to help with a few flyers and make a new postcard. ...

An EQ friend, Caldabuse, and I were talking a few years back about what was right and wrong with MMOs. An individual player has no impact on the world, and has the same abilities as everyone else. In fact, conformity is seen as the perfect ideal in the MMO world. We’d both just started playing City of Heroes, which prizes individuality to some extent. But CoH was still just like the other MMOs. The devs plotted out your path, and pretty much all you could do was follow. Success was defined as how closely what you did matched what the devs designed. ...