Terminally Incoherent

Here are few literary gems from my inbox. These emails were sent to me by some of my students over the few last semesters. I will preface this by saying that the strange linguistic constructs you will see below were produced mostly by A or B students, native speakers of English - who at other times sent me much more coherent and understandable correspondence. Names were naturally removed to protect the innocent.

First one is from my “Subject field does not have spellcheck” category:

Subject: ques tion reguarding hwk

Reguarding kinda reminds me of havening. It’s kinda my new favorite word. Then again, maybe it was a honest typo. I have done much worse in the past (and on this very blog). Still, I can’t help but thing I had the famous George in my class and I didn’t even know it.

Some of my students apparently subscribe to the “punctuation inhibits communication” school of thought:

hello quick question for the hw 2 is it due next class

Careful analysis, tells me that this would have made perfect sense as an IM or a text message. Think about it for a second and the places where one would hit enter will become obvious. It seems that the art of writing email is slowly forgotten by the generation of people who use IM exclusively.

Then again, I wish all the letters I get were this coherent. For example, look at this one (reproduced complete with the weird spacing and etc..):

Hi prof on may 7 at 23:45 after the class I send my hw thru d
        But today today i checked my grades and i didn’t any grades for     it then I check m the file which i
      i send it to u It didn’t’ say that u received it the file.( i don’t know maybe i could submit it rite way or?
   well anyways i am resending it.

I’m not sure what was going on in there, but I guess the gist of this message is that the person is re-submitting their homework because they didn’t see their grade listed in the LMS. It took me a while to figure this out, but the last sentence is the key.

Btw, there is a lesson I have learned over time - if I add a new assignment in the online grade book but do not put the grades right away, I get students trying to re-submit their work thinking it didn’t go through or that I somehow missed it. It’s even better when I add a project that I didn’t assign yet in there. I get few dozen emails with people begging me to email them the instructions because they never got the handout them in class. These days I don’t add anything to the online grade book until I have graded it.

Sometimes I just can’t tell what an email is about. I found one like this in my mailbox last semester and I could not figure out how to respond:

Hello, professor….I completed lab was an able to do so at home because i do did not windows 2007. So i completed in the comp. lab on campus.

Did he complete the lab? I think my response went something among the lines of “Thats ok. Let me know if you can’t submit it before the deadline”.

Also, Windows 2007 FTW. When I ask them on the test whether MS Office 2007 is an Operating system, or if Windows XP is Application Software most of them get it right. But they still use Office and Windows interchangeably in common speech.

I actually don’t I mind the odd punctuation, innovative spelling and fragmented sentences. As long as I can make sense of it, I will try to reply to it, or grade it to the best of my ability. Sometimes I wonder how professors with degrees in English cope with this sort of things.

At some point in the past we sent out an email to the staff saying that we can assist them with file conversion services. Very often they get large data files (agings, inventory, sales receipts) in various formats. Some are plain text, some are comma/tab delimited ASCII but most are PDF. Using tools like Monarch we can relatively easily extract the data locked inside the PDF files and convert it to just about any format. The one requested most often is of course Excel.

To this day we regret not wording that email a little bit better. We still have to explain to people how this conversion process really works.

For example one guy found out that we can convert PDF files to excel from a co-worker. It just happened that he had some large, tab delimited text files that he wanted to manipulate in excel. So he came up with a brilliant plan:

1. He printed out what came out to be close to a 60 pages of data
2. He then scanned them in as PDF files
3. Naturally he was scanning them one page at a time since he didn’t know better
4. The copy machine sent the ~60 scanned PDF’s to him, one page per email
5. He then took the time to download all these files, save them, rename and reorder them
6. Finally he zipped the 60 PDF files and emailed them to me asking if I could convert them to excel

I didn’t know this story. I’m recounting it to you now because it’s silly but at the time all I knew was that I got 60 PDF files all of which essentially contained scanned images. I really didn’t know whether I should laugh or cry. I decided to call him up and find out what the deal was. When he recounted this process to me I had to take a break to bang my head against the wall for 5 minutes. Afterwards I called him back and explained to him how to open the tab delimited file in Excel and then click next 2 or 3 times and watch the built-in import feature does the magic.

Sigh… At least he didn’t photograph the pages on a wooden table.

Another lady was doing test counts one day. She painstakingly recorded the values of the counts using the old fashioned pen and paper method. Normally she would have to re-enter all this data into some XML file but fortunately she remembered that email we sent out. So she scanned in all these hand written notes into a PDF file and then sent them to me for conversion. It took me a while to explain to her that I didn’t really have tools to do this type of OCR. She just kept saying “But they are PDF files!”.

I don’t think she ever got it, but she eventually gave up trying to convince me to convert them. She probably figured I was lazy or something.

There seems to be something about PDF files that makes the small minded people very confused. We had another guy who kept sending word documents to the office to be “scanned in as PDF”. The secretary would then print them out, walk across the hall to the copy room, scan the printout, type in her email on the copy machine’s touch screen, go back to her desk, wait for the email, and forward it back to this guy.

They were both floored when I introduced them to PDFCreator. They absolutely loved it but it introduced a brand new problem. The Word guy would now create a document, generate a PDF and then realize he had few typos and/or mistakes in it. Fortunately he remembered we had full version of Adobe Acrobat (the one that can do touch-ups on PDF files) in the office. So he would now send us his newly converted PDF file along with the list of corrections.

I called him up and our conversation basically went like this:

Him

“Can you remove the fourth and sixth sentence in the third paragraph? This should make the whole document fit on 2 pages.”.

Me:

“Well, you see… The Adobe tool is mostly for touching up text objects. It doesn’t really re-flow the paragraphs. Btw, how do you know it will cut down the size to 2 pages?”

Him

“Oh, I did it in my word document so I can see how it will look when you do these changes.”

Me:

“Um… Wouldn’t it be easier if you just used PDFCreator to generate another PDF file out of this updated Word document?”

[long pause]

Him

“Sigh… I just thought it would be easier with the adobe thing”

I don’t know what is it about the PDF files. These folks seem to be doing ok working with Word and Excel files. But PDF files seem to have some sort of extra magical properties that induce confusion in some people.

Here is a fun little game we play around here. This is ideal for IT shops or generally places where you have bunch of geeks installing crappy software on windows boxen. It’s called the PK Master. The goal of the game is to type in the product key/CD key perfectly the first time around. A perfect game is worth certain number of point’s. We use 3 because of the old saying “3rd time’s a charm”. You can use 1 if you are all or nothing type of a person, or 5 if you want nice round numbers. Each time you mess up, you lose a point. This means that with our setup you are allowed 2 typos to score the minimal amount of points.

You can optionally subtract points for style. For example hitting tab in a system that automatically moves the cursor into the next box (in other words effectively skipping a box) can be penalized. Backspacing is another optional penalty. And of course if you are nasty you can take away points for squinting or picking up and re-reading the key.

At the end of the week/month you tally up the score and the person with the highest scoring average wins. It’s only fair to use averages because people do not always get equal number of attempts even if you all take turns. This someone only got to go once this week can still win, if he scored 3 points.

What does the winner get? It’s up to you - for example, the lowest scoring player may have to buy a lunch for the highest scoring one. This makes reinstalling windows on a box that is not imaged a little bit less of a chore because at least you get an opportunity to score 6-9 points and significantly improve your average.

Before you say this is easy, please think back to the last time you had to do enter a product key. If I give you a MS Office CD right now do you think you can score 3 points? Personally I can’t even remember the last time I got a perfect score. I always mess up and type 8 instead of B, G instead of 6 or O instead of 0. And if the product key is lower case I always fuck up 1 and l.

Then there is that tricky “are the dashes/spaces part of this key?” problem. Sometimes they are, sometimes they are not. Do they tell you this on the sticker? Of course not. Does the system complain when you type a dash when you don’t need it? Silly idea - that would just be to easy. This uncertainty adds element of chance to this game. When you are installing a new or unfamiliar piece of software it’s always a gamble. Do you risk plunging your average into oblivion, or do you let your co-worker type it? It’s a tough choice!

I really love how the software makers keep finding innovative ways to keep this game challenging. In most cases they print the keys in very small, non-distinct sans-serif font on some crazy colorful background. Most normal people would put a long alphanumeric key like that on contrasting background in a large font with big serifs and other features that clearly distinguish letters and numbers (such as crossed zeros). But not these guys - they literally go out of their way to make it fun for us!

Sometimes I wonder how normal people deal with this whole product key thing. I only see it in the game terms these days. I pick up a CD and go “oh boy, this one has too many B’s and 8’s… I better drop it on someone’s desk and hope they fall for it”. I actually find it hilarious to find a sequence like 8B8B6G6B within a key. It’s funny even if it causes you to score poorly because you can then show people the damn key and talk about Microsoft conspiring against you and your free lunch. But normal people… Hell, they must be mighty annoyed with these damn things. I would be if I didn’t see these stickers as free lunch opportunities.

Then again, if you think about it, the CD key is the least annoying and obtrusive form of copy protection. Much more convenient and harder to lose than a hardware dongle, and way better than some crazy DRM rootkit that makes your optical drive explode after detecting a blank CD.

Naturally they don’t work - even if you combine them with an online activation. All the copies circulating on torrent and warez sites are cracked and have the key/activation parts removed. Then again no DRM really works anyway. Digital copy protection is just a pipe dream of the software industry. But until the proprietary software moguls figure this out we might as well stick with the lesser evil.

Seriously, try this game people! Let me know if it catches up! I would love to see it spread into the wild.

I’ve been running this blog on a 7 day schedule for quite a while now. I pretty much got it down to science, cranking out posts out on time. Recently though I noticed that this self imposed schedule started becoming tiresome. Weekdays are usually fine, but since my weekends tend to be hectic I’m sometime struggling to get these posts out. Obviously this schedule doesn’t work for me anymore. So I decided to decrease my posting frequency a bit to give me some space to breathe.

I’m officially cutting the Sunday posts for now. 6 days a week is still a tight schedule and I may need to drop it down to 5 at some point but not yet. I don’t think I will ever need to go below 5. Hopefully this slight drop in frequency will result in improved quality (ie. more proofreading for example).

Why am I posting this? Because if I don’t I will keep trying to make the 7 day schedule. If it’s out there in writing, I won’t feel guilty for skipping out on a day.

tl;dr version: no more posts on Sunday

As an appeasement offering I leave you with the “Near Death Experiences” sketch by Picnicface:

This one has became like a local meme recently. I don’t think I will ever be able to watch any show or a movie dealing with near death experience with a straight face.

Here is a fun way to start the year: incredible amount of pain and frustration. If you ever wanted to play the most annoying, maddening, anger inducing game with heinous, sadistic and downright evil level design and physics try I Want to Be The Guy: The Movie: The Game. I lack words to describe the horror this game can unleash on the minds on unsuspecting gamers. It was basically designed by taking all the frustratingly difficult bits of old NES age games, and ramping them up to the point where they can make the most mellow person to scream in rage after about 2 minutes. But I guess this experience cannot be described - you have to see it to believe it:

Please note that JMan who made this video, is actually doing really good here. I dare you to download it and try to get as far as he got in this video in one sitting. Hell, I couldn’t get past the first screen before I got pissed off and turned it off. If you get farther than that, you are better than me at this. Which is really not a great accomplishment - I have zero eye/hand coordination to begin with.

And if you haven’t guessed it yet, yes this game is intentionally made this hard. It’s sort of a joke - a parody of the ridiculously difficult Nintendo games of old. This experience kinda reminds me of the time me and my brother were trying to beat Mega Man on NES. Every once in a while one of us would relinquish the controller and then go to the other room to punch the furniture and scream out of hopeless rage. Only “I Want To Be The Guy” is like 100 times worse.

JMan actually did a series of these videos and I watched like 15 of them in a row mostly because I have no patience to work my way past the first screen. The game is actually pretty funny if you consider the many innovative and surprising ways it kills you in each level. My favorite ways so far were: being crushed by the falling moon, being stabbed by giant Link, and being Hurricane Kicked by Ryu from Street Fighter.

Do you have what it takes to be The Guy? Play it and let me know what you think.