With better prospects after this.

[reddragdiva]

Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 11:45:26  0100
To: Boss, Boss's Boss, HR person, other HR person
From: David Gerard
Subject: Resignation
Cc: dgerard[AT]gmail.com
Bcc: lgerard, arkady

14 September 2004


Dear Boss and HR Person,

I resign. If you wish me to work out my full notice, my last
working day will be four weeks from today, or Monday
11th October.

yours,


David Gerard.

(As inspired by zotz.)

Comments

[zotz]

Nicely done, sir.

[sarcaustik.livejournal.com]

Direct and to the point. Congratulations?

I really must get Wesley (WINOLJ) to put his resignation letter from his last job up online somewhere. Let's just say I don't think he's likely to ask his former employees for a reference any time soon.

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

Congratulations!

[untermensch.livejournal.com]

Yeah, beating is a bit rough. One should always stroke, nibble and caress around the bush.

[squiddity.livejournal.com]

Nicely done.

[medusa.livejournal.com]

Excellent stuff! :)

[tintintin.livejournal.com]

Proper NFA* style!

* No Fucking About

[redcountess]

*pint*!

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

Oh, I dunno - some people like that sort of thing.

[reddragdiva]

What bush?

[untermensch.livejournal.com]

Hmm, well I can certainly think of a certain Bush that needs a fair share of beating.

[dcarson.livejournal.com]

That sucks, he got to write a shorter letter than you just because he only had to put "Dear name", not "Dear name and name".

All the best for the new job, sir!

[cyn-goth-prog.livejournal.com]

I was always terrified of using BCC lest I fuck it up and send the enlightened version to the unenlightened recipients.

Also, the whole [AT] thing is so turn-of-the-century. These days, depending on my target audience, I'll either replace all the dots with spaces and the at-sign with " at " (tech savvy audience), or just replace the at-sign with a small image of an at-sign (tech naive audience).

Nevertheless, congrats. To quote an old Chinese blessing: "May wealth spring up between your toes, and servers fall at your heels."

[j]

[andymariachi.livejournal.com]

If you're going to do it, do it in style O;-)

[incy.livejournal.com]

How good does it feel

(though give them a paper/signed copy as well)

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

I found it useful, at low points during the working day, to re-read my letter of resignation. Cheered me up for hours at a time: people used to see the GREAT BIG GRIN and come up and talk to me, hoping the happiness would rub off on them too.

[reddragdiva]

My boss is on a customer site in London. His boss is on a course in Aberdeen. I can probably find Personnel somewhere in this building ...

(Although boss's boss just acknowledged it by email and Personnel will apparently be calling me shortly.)

[redshira.livejournal.com]

Fabulous stuff. :)

[mjg59.livejournal.com]

Both of these are somewhat crap for blind users. Just using HTML entities seems to deal with the majority of harvesting without actually limiting functionality.

(Quite why the appropriate response to people doing bad things is to make life miserable for ourselves and then have them learn how to adapt resulting in us being both miserable and still having bad things happen rather than, say, KILLING THE BAD PEOPLE WITH STICKS AND AVOIDING THE ENTIRE FUCKING PROBLEM is still unclear to me, but I assume I'll reach enlightenment at some point)

[cyn-goth-prog.livejournal.com]

Both of these are somewhat crap for blind users.

Of course, when I use the at-sign image, I'm sure to set alt=" at ". Aside from that, blind users get exactly the same deal as non-blind users in both situations, no?

Just using HTML entities seems to deal with the majority of harvesting without actually limiting functionality.

What are HTML entities? Aside from a bit of an XHTML/CSS fetish, I'm no markup guru.

[j]

[lastaii.livejournal.com]

Splendid. Very efficient too :o)

[ejde.livejournal.com]

Concise and to the point - will take notes for when I have to do the same.

[mjg59.livejournal.com]

HTML entities are the ampersand things - an at sign can be represented as @

[greylock.livejournal.com]

Eh. They gave you a job.
I'd always be polite.

/my industry is smaller.

[reddragdiva]

I was very polite in the exit interview! You know, the one where they said they'd pay me out and I could leave today, never to return ...

[cyn-goth-prog.livejournal.com]

Are you kidding? Surely that would be next to useless at deterring the harvesting bots.

Adding an extra string comparison is trivial. Image processing to check for at-signs is computationally expensive and tricky to implement. Searching for the word "at" and then trying to narrow that down to the set of obfuscated email addresses is ridiculously impractical (can you say "needle in a haystack"?).

[j]

[razorjak.livejournal.com]

Heh - I so read that as:

"Dear HATED and Bob"

[redcountess]

Of course there's the matter of the season ticket to Gatwick and the monthly Zone 1-3 travelcard that still have three weeks on them :-/

[mjg59.livejournal.com]

It would be trivial, but currently it's not being done. Any argument that something is too computationally intensive for spammers ignores the rise of use of zombie machines - it's trivial to farm stuff out to them. Parsing of "foo at bar com" is made massively easier by the fairly tiny number of valid top level domains, and getting false positives is unimportant. The spammers won't be getting the bounces, and they won't be the ones doing the actual sending nowadays, either.

Fundamentally, you have the choice between three obfuscation methods. None are currently known to be picked up by spammers. One (s/@/at/ and removing dots) is very common and offers the biggest win in turns of number of extra addresses gained. One (use of picture) is uncommon and so doesn't offer a big win. However, the use of "at" in the alt tag makes it trivial to parse, and failing to do that screws any blind users. The last (use of an HTML entity) is uncommon and so doesn't offer a big win. However, (and most importantly) it doesn't break anything. You can cut and paste addresses without having to fix them up afterwards, and screen-reading software will work without having to know too much about layout.

Given that, I'd go for the solution that doesn't break anything rather than spending time finding more and more convoluted ways of breaking stuff.

[cyn-goth-prog.livejournal.com]

It would be trivial, but currently it's not being done. Any argument that something is too computationally intensive for spammers ignores the rise of use of zombie machines - it's trivial to farm stuff out to them.

The existence of zombie machines is a good point, but I still think the low return on investment makes it impractical to crunch images for text. This is made redundant anyway by the inclusion of the alt tag (a point you make below with which I agree), which means that it boils down to a text search anyway.

Parsing of "foo at bar com" is made massively easier by the fairly tiny number of valid top level domains, and getting false positives is unimportant.

These are both good points, and I'll admit I hadn't considered either of them. The first one in particular implies that the s/@/at/,s/\./ / technique has a limited life.

The last (use of an HTML entity) is uncommon and so doesn't offer a big win.

I disagree: for the amount of effort and computation it requires, I would say it is a very big win. If I were programming a harvesting bot, things like different representations of characters (particularly the characters '@' and '.') would be the first thing I would check for.

You can cut and paste addresses without having to fix them up afterwards, and screen-reading software will work without having to know too much about layout.

I am less concerned about this. Your penpal-to-be only needs to decode/retype/whatever your obfuscated address once before they whack it in their address-book forever.

[j]

[reaverbob.livejournal.com]

Nicely done sir!

[reddragdiva]

The remainder of the Gatwick ticket has been refunded ;-)

[severina-242.livejournal.com]

YAYYYYYYY!!! {runs around celebrating like a dickhead} Good onya Mayyyyttteeee!!!