Web lusers...
Carl Schelin
Joel Maslak <jma...@antelope.net> wrote:
*snip*
>[...] I wonder if this was a problem for the post office at first?
>People sending mail to "Uncle Bob" with no street, city, state, or
>country? How did the BPostmenFH ever teach the lusers how to address
>mail? We should learn from history. [4]
>
Postal Story: Back in my great-grandfather's time my family name was
Anderson. Unfortunately he lived in a western USian town *full* of
Andersons. The Postmaster came up with a novel idea. He went through
the town and arbitrarily gave out new names for purposes of receiving
mail. Ours was Schelin. My GGF had 6 kids. The three born after the
decree kept the name "Schelin".
Carl
[4] NMF
--
Carl Schelin (BOFH, Badlife, DNRC, Sun CSA and CNA)
finger csch...@x500.hq.nasa.gov for information
Having a non-smoking section in a restaurant
is like having a non-peeing section in a pool.
Joe Moore
>maslak, but jmaslak, at antelope, that is antelope with an 'e' at the end,
>dot net, not dot com, but dot net." Every once in a while, this works.
Do you realize how many TLWs[1] that was in a row? 10. That's hard to do.
--Joe
[1] Three letter words
[3] NMF
--
I think the key thing to remember is that the http: at the front of
a "Web address" stands for Hyper TEXT Transfer Protocol.
<img src="d.gif" alt="d"><img src="u.gif" alt="u"><img src="h.gif" alt="h">
Alan J Rosenthal
>No, every toaster will have it's own domain. Under .com.
>
>"bobs-toaster.com"
>"marys-toaster.com"
>
>What next?
Bob decides that "bobs-toaster.com" is too long and goes to register b.com.
Since that's taken, and so are b1.com, b2.com, ..., b113.com, he registers it
as b114.com. Now his toaster has two domains. Until he finds out from his
friend that MOST people are registering their toasters under t#.com, so he
also gets t8314.com. Then NSI sends him a letter suggesting he register the
.org and .net addresses too, which he agrees with.... I'm up to nine now...
(this is apart from come.to/toaster, but that's not its own domain)
>[...] I wonder if this was a problem for the post office at first?
>People sending mail to "Uncle Bob" with no street, city, state, or
>country? How did the BPostmenFH ever teach the lusers how to address
>mail? We should learn from history.
There are luser tales of mail getting delivered when addressed in this way,
such as "Mr Spock, Hollywood, USA" which apparently was faithfully delivered
to Leonard Nimoy at one point.
I wonder if a neighbour knows how a certain piece of mail got to her a
few weeks ago. It was addressed to the wrong address, right postal code,
wrong CITY. I guess they ignore the city in preference to the postal
code info (which I think is actually OCR'd these days, which would have
succeeded in this case because it was typewritten), and then when it got
to the local carrier they just used the street address, which was wrong,
so I got it, but knew the name and dropped it off up the street.
I seem to recall that UUCP used to work like that...
Peter Gutmann
fl...@dgp.toronto.edu (Alan J Rosenthal) writes:
>I wonder if a neighbour knows how a certain piece of mail got to her a
>few weeks ago. It was addressed to the wrong address, right postal code,
>wrong CITY. I guess they ignore the city in preference to the postal
>code info (which I think is actually OCR'd these days, which would have
>succeeded in this case because it was typewritten), and then when it got
>to the local carrier they just used the street address, which was wrong,
>so I got it, but knew the name and dropped it off up the street.
I once recevied a postcard from my parents in Siberia addressed to me in
Auckland, Germany. I guess you could figure it out eventually from the city
name, but I'm still impressed that it got to me.
Peter.
David Scheidt
: I wonder if a neighbour knows how a certain piece of mail got to her a
: few weeks ago. It was addressed to the wrong address, right postal code,
: wrong CITY. I guess they ignore the city in preference to the postal
: code info (which I think is actually OCR'd these days, which would have
: succeeded in this case because it was typewritten), and then when it got
: to the local carrier they just used the street address, which was wrong,
: so I got it, but knew the name and dropped it off up the street.
In the US, at least, city and state are ignored for the first pass sorting.
So if I send a letter to someone in NY NY, and put an LA zip code on it, it
will get to the supposed end post office, where they will realize that it is
screwed up, and redirect it to NYC. The assumption is that most mailers are
more likley to screw up a city or a state than the zip, I guess. Certainly
I get lots of mail with my city mispelled. I blame my handwriting for that.
: I seem to recall that UUCP used to work like that...
"used to"?
David
--
dsch...@enteract.com
The thing about becoming an "urban legend", is you either have to die in
a bizarre way, create havoc and mayhem, or stuff a rodent up your ass.
-- HWM
Kirrily 'Skud' Robert
I'm not sure what, but "something" at any rate.
I used to work for Australia Post, not in any postal-delivery capacity
(though several times almost in a "postal" capacity), but as "EPOS
Support/Technical Analyst". Now, as we all know, job descriptions
mean jack shit. What I actually did was:
- angst about the crappitude of all the databases around me
- rant about my inability to get direct access to said databases
- throw together nasty kluges to extract data from databases I
didn't have access to
- put reports based on said data, with nifty pie charts, on my
boss's desk, and my boss's boss's desk, yesterday if not sooner
That was the year I learnt Perl. A typical question might be "Can
you tell me how many of the post offices in Queensland are open on
Saturday and have more than six counter terminals?" This was because
we would do remote software installations overnight, and if we did
them on the Friday night and they took too long (as would happen
with too many CTs) then the PO wouldn't be able to trade the next
morning.
Now, you'd think I could just query a database for this sort of thing,
wouldn't you? No. No such luck.
Step one, ask NMS (the mis-named Network Management System) to list
all POs in Queensland, along with an estimate of the number of CTs.
I say estimate because it was usually correct(ish) at time of data
entry, but didn't get changed as post offices were up/downgraded.
Available report formats were to put it to the screen or to email it
to our All-In-One mail system (apologies to those who just suffered
convulsions and vomiting at the memory of that FPOS). I would choose
to have it emailed to me, then have to detach the report, save
locally, and munch it through a Perl script to remove all the page
headers and turn its fixed width format into something useful, like
a CSV file.
Step two, ask a different part of NMS to tell me how many CTs had
actually sent through messages in the last while. "While" was
defined as however long NMS kept its data for, which IIRC was one
month. The messages that the post office terminals sent to NMS
were along the lines of "I'm running version X, I've got version
X+0.01 awaiting installation, and version Y of this other software
didn't install properly the other night -- help!" So you would ask
for a report of the software status of every terminal in Queensland,
for later processing to group them by actual post office etc, thus
finding out how many CTs at each PO.
Repeat rigmarole with All-In-One, perl, etc.
Step three, figure out which of the POs were actually *open* on
weekends. No use asking NMS for this, as it got messages whether the
PO was open or not. No, for this, we had to ask the WAN servers
which POs had been sending through actual transactions on the days
in question. We would usually look back at the last 4 weekends.
So, into the server room where I had to physically interact with the
WAN servers. These were a couple of racks of PCs running OS/2 v1.3
-- twenty seven of them in all, because each one could only handle
about a hundred post offices. I had to figure out which ones served
Queensland, hunker down in front of them with a floppy disk, and go
grovelling through their file systems to find the transaction logs.
When I'd collected the logs I needed, I would take myself back to
my desk, grind them through some more Perl, then finally get down
to doing the reports needed.
The actual reporty bits, I would have to do in Microsoft Access.
Beautifully formatted, dinky little graphs and stuff, which would
then mostly be either ignored or complained about by the people who'd
demanded them.
In between this, one of my other duties actually had to do with
postal codes and addressing envelopes and stuff. See, I *was*
getting to the point!
Someone asked/commented on OCR. Australia Post has used OCR for
postcodes for years and years and years, and sell their equipment for
it to other countries. Things I know about the OCR include:
- it prefers 10 point courier above all other typefaces
- handwritten postcodes should always go in the little orange boxes
(do you have them elsewhere?)
- it sorts on postcode automatically. Any mis-routing that then
occurs is sorted out at the local delivery centre to which
the mail was mis-delivered.
Things that muck up the OCR include oddly shaped or sized envelopes,
punctuation, and little old ladies who address envelopes in perfect
copperplate.
A correctly formatted Australian address looks like this:
Kirrily Robert
Netizen Pty Ltd
GPO Box 2265U
Melbourne VIC 3001
Note the town, state and postcode all on one line, two spaces between
each element, and the state given as a 2-3 letter abbreviation all in
upper case.
So now you know.
Oh, and I believe that those OS/2 boxes have been replaced by NT. Ugh.
K.
--
Kirrily 'Skud' Robert - sk...@netizen.com.au - http://netizen.com.au/
Reality is for those who can't face Science Fiction.
Ben Sandler
>
> [1] I've found these two things were both bad ideas. I'll mention,
> j-m-a-s-l-a-k at antelope dot net[3] to someone, and they'll send mail to
> jo...@antelop.com. They can't spell antelope and they don't send E-mail
> without automatically inserting .com.[2]
>
I was once doing some work for someone who was supposed to email me
stuff around Tuesday. Sunday (afterwards) he calls me and says the
email bounced and my email/server must be broken. I run my own mail
server, so I think maybe there is something wrong (we had just done an
OS upgrade), so I give another address, and ask him to send the bounce
message as well.
He had addressed it to www...@mydomain.org.
Doink!
PS. He later skipped town and never paid me for my services.
--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--
Ben Sandler
email me: sandler at ymail dot yu dot edu
The Roman Rule
The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the
one who is doing it.
Felix von Leitner
> >I wonder if a neighbour knows how a certain piece of mail got to her a
> >few weeks ago. It was addressed to the wrong address, right postal code,
> >wrong CITY. I guess they ignore the city in preference to the postal
> >code info (which I think is actually OCR'd these days, which would have
> >succeeded in this case because it was typewritten), and then when it got
> >to the local carrier they just used the street address, which was wrong,
> >so I got it, but knew the name and dropped it off up the street.
> Auckland, Germany. I guess you could figure it out eventually from the city
> name, but I'm still impressed that it got to me.
The German postal system is expensive, the clerks are unfriendly, and
I always have to fetch packets sent to me from the post office because
the delivery guy is apparently on drugs and always delivers a note that
I should fetch it instead of the real thing, but they are reliable.
A few years ago, a story went through the press that they delivered a
post card from some 40 years ago that someone found while they cleaned
up one post office that they were about to shut down.
The woman who had sent it had died a long time ago, and the guy who got
it was in his 90s, but at least the delivered it at all.
Felix
--
And in January in Perth, Australia, John Douglas Young, 47, was
convicted of a child-abuse charge for attempting to hire two boys for $5
each to pass gas in his face so that, according to the man, he could
later masturbate to the "mental picture" of the encounter.
--News of the Weird [475] - 14Mar97
Christian Bauernfeind
Felix von Leitner <usenet-...@fefe.de> writes:
>
> The German postal system is expensive, the clerks are unfriendly, and
> I always have to fetch packets sent to me from the post office because
> the delivery guy is apparently on drugs and always delivers a note that
> I should fetch it instead of the real thing, but they are reliable.
>
Since I moved to the states, I was surprised that they would just leave
packages on the front steps. I'm somewhat more surprised that so far,
nothing seems to have disappeared.
Plus mail is dirt cheap here.
OTOH, since about ten years, German postal service has managed to
achieve overnight turnaround on about 90% of all letters. I'd like
to see USPS do that, at least on intra-state letters.
OTGH, both of their opening hours suck.
Christian
--
Christian Bauernfeind
Not speaking for Infineon
Not even working for IBM
e-mail: v2ba...@fishkill.ibm.com
Eric R Torbenson
: We talk about every toaster having it's own IP address.
: No, every toaster will have it's own domain. Under .com.
: "bobs-toaster.com"
: "marys-toaster.com"
: What next?
NSI will figure out that there's some money to be made from this, and start
selling domains in the TLD ".tst". Foriegn toasters will be ".tst.??" with the
?? replaced with a country code.
Those who get in on it early can get ".microsoft.tst" and ".aol.tst," et al.
Similarly, you could have:
Coffeemakers .cfm
Lawnmowers .lwn
TV's .tv (if AOL or MS hasn't reserved the whole domain yet.)
Webified appliances are a scary thought. Imagine walking into a garden center
and looking at lawnmowers. "Check out the NEW Microsoft LawnBoy 2000, now
internet-ready with Active Server Pages! Surf to find the status of your
appliances while you're on vacation. Check whether your husband's cutting the
grass while you're at work! Comes with a free copy of MS FrontPage CE, and a
$30 rebate for domain registration! Buy now!"
Hmm. And with that bit of spooky imagery, I take my leave.
-Eric
Alan J Rosenthal
>TV's .tv (if AOL or MS hasn't reserved the whole domain yet.)
It's the country of Tuvalu's if they want it.
I seem to recall it made a brief appearance and then disappeared? Was it
one of these wholly-owned-American-subsidiary things like, um, what's that
one which is entirely operated by that guy in California and all the DNS
servers and everything is in California and it has nothing to do with the
country itself except that they get a cut?
Chris King
<e...@callisto.acsu.buffalo.edu> writes
>Webified appliances are a scary thought. Imagine walking into a garden center
>and looking at lawnmowers. "Check out the NEW Microsoft LawnBoy 2000, now
>internet-ready with Active Server Pages! Surf to find the status of your
>appliances while you're on vacation. Check whether your husband's cutting the
>grass while you're at work! Comes with a free copy of MS FrontPage CE, and a
>$30 rebate for domain registration! Buy now!"
I can just see it now...
Tech: LawnBoy Tech Support, my name's Bob - how can I help you ?
Woman: Your LawnBoy 2000 just went out of control and shredded my
husband's toes !!!
Tech: Hmm, sounds like you need to upgrade to LawnBoy 2001, with
Safety Guards (tm)...
Chris
--
Chris King
ch...@csking.demon.co.uk
http://www.csking.demon.co.uk
Rodger Donaldson
>There was, some months ago, a story about a card that was delivered even
>later than that. It appears that a young soldier from, I think, New
>Zealand sent a card home to his wife from Europe. He then died a while
>later in a battle.
>
>Card sent - WWI
>Card received - 1998 or 1999
The only item of this sort I'm aware of that occurred recently was a message
in a bottle, rather than a postcard.
--
Rodger Donaldson rod...@ihug.co.nz
UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this
IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED.
Paul Tomblin
>I'm still boggling over that one.
I'm still boggling over an experience in the UK: I needed orienteering shoes
for a meet that weekend. The only store that sold orienteering shoes was
about 200 miles away. Since it was Tuesday already, I wanted to phone order.
So I phoned the place, and asked them to fax me the page with the shoe
descriptions and prices from their catalog, since I needed to place the order
ASAP. They seemed to think that was a really stupid request, and said they'd
just mail it. I envisioned running around the North Yorkshire Downs that
weekend in shoes that were up around my ankles (it's happened before) because
I was still expecting Canadian-style service where I'd be lucky to see the
catalog by the end of the next week. The next morning while eating breakfast,
the catalog came through the door. I phone ordered, and was told that their
van was going to be at that meet, so I had my shoes.
--
Paul Tomblin, not speaking for anybody.
SETI@Home: Finally a *good* way to impress Jodie Foster
http://www.setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/
Paul Tomko
Joe Thompson <sp...@orion-com.com> wrote:
>In article <37C031E2...@the.sig>, Ben Sandler <s...@the.sig> wrote:
>
>> He had addressed it to www...@mydomain.org.
>
>forms. If you get addresses of the form "WWW.<foo>@aol.com" just process
>it as f...@aol.com and 99 times out of 100 it'll be correct. The other
>time they put in their username wrong. I'm told something in some AOL
>documentation implies that the WWW. is required, something along the lines
>of "Internet addresses start with WWW."
>
>What I really love is getting repeated e-mails from AOL people going "why
>haven't you answered my e-mail?" "Because you have 'accept Internet mail'
>turned off in your AOL preferences, you ass." Yes, AOL system allows you
>to send Internet mail but refuse to receive it. -- Joe
I've had AOLers sign up for my mailing list, and the approval form gets
bounced because they have internet mail turned off.
Another feature of AOL allows you to specifically deny e-mail from certain
senders. Since they are too stupid to actually unsubscribe from mailing
lists, they just disallow e-mail from my mailing list when they no longer
want to receive it. This causes TWICE the traffic of a normal subscriber
because now a bounced message comes back. I hope they are happy in knowing
that they are doing their part to make the internet busier than it needs to
be.
Paul
--
Paul Tomko pa...@tomkoinc.com http://www.tomkoinc.com
8000+ Humorous Quotes http://www.tomkoinc.com/quotes.html
"Crime does not pay ... as well as politics." - Alfred E. Newman
void
>
>Another feature of AOL allows you to specifically deny e-mail from certain
>senders. Since they are too stupid to actually unsubscribe from mailing
>lists, they just disallow e-mail from my mailing list when they no longer
>want to receive it. This causes TWICE the traffic of a normal subscriber
>because now a bounced message comes back. I hope they are happy in knowing
>that they are doing their part to make the internet busier than it needs to
>be.
As if they could be arsed to know anything at all about the network they
use.
--
Ben
[X] YES! I'm a brain-damaged lemur on crack, and I'd like to
order your software package for $459.95!
Jasper Janssen
>[1] A game show on Comedy Central with an unusual concept, some not very hard
>questions in very funny category names, and a very funny sidekick.
Wow.. how bloody unusual. You should watch the BBC Comedy Zone more
often..
Jasper
Joe Zeff
>He had addressed it to www...@mydomain.org.
About a week ago, I got a call from somebody *very* new to the
Internet that wondered why her email had bounced. She'd sent it to
http://www.somedomain.com/~lusername.
--
Joe Zeff
The Guy With the Sideburns
"If you haven't seen it, it's new to you."
http://www.lasfs.org http://home.earthlink.net/~sidebrnz
Mark W. Schumann
Joe Zeff <the.guy.with....@lasfs.org> wrote:
>Ben Sandler <s...@the.sig> wrote:
>
>>He had addressed it to www...@mydomain.org.
>
>About a week ago, I got a call from somebody *very* new to the
>Internet that wondered why her email had bounced. She'd sent it to
>http://www.somedomain.com/~lusername.
Blame the boggling number of radio shows and companies and billboards
that say, "email us at www.$OURDOMAIN.com!"
The lusers are just doing what they're told.
Christian Bauernfeind
cat...@apk.net (Mark W. Schumann) writes:
>
> Blame the boggling number of radio shows and companies and billboards
> that say, "email us at www.$OURDOMAIN.com!"
>
Actually, I can't recall seeing that. Usually its "Log on to
www.$OURDOMAIN.com!". Which is equally stupid.
Personally, I blame Canada.
Paul Tomblin
>Blame the boggling number of radio shows and companies and billboards
>that say, "email us at www.$OURDOMAIN.com!"
As they say at the end of "Win Ben Stein's Money"[1] "write, call, or email us
at futility.com".
[1] A game show on Comedy Central with an unusual concept, some not very hard
questions in very funny category names, and a very funny sidekick.
Christian Bauernfeind
ptom...@xcski.com (Paul Tomblin) writes:
>
> As they say at the end of "Win Ben Stein's Money"[1] "write, call, or email us
> at futility.com".
>
I'm tempted to send mail to u...@futility.com, but I'm afraid it might
not bounce, and there's no way I could make test shoots in the LA area.
Paul Tomblin
>In article <7qjri1$ito$1...@stratus.xcski.com>,
> ptom...@xcski.com (Paul Tomblin) writes:
>>
>> As they say at the end of "Win Ben Stein's Money"[1] "write, call, or email us
>> at futility.com".
>>
>
>I'm tempted to send mail to u...@futility.com, but I'm afraid it might
>not bounce, and there's no way I could make test shoots in the LA area.
Actually, futility.com doesn't even resolve right now.
Paul Martin
>In a previous article, cat...@apk.net (Mark W. Schumann) said:
>>Blame the boggling number of radio shows and companies and billboards
>>that say, "email us at www.$OURDOMAIN.com!"
>
>at futility.com".
Any relation to "Win Jeremy Beadle's Money" which airs on our Channel5?[2]
[1] NMF
[2] Only reaches about 60% of the population, with less audience than
either of the "minority" stations: BBC2 and Channel4.
--
Paul Martin <p...@zetnet.net>
at home, swap dash to dot to email.