I just read this article over at the site formerly known as The Daily WTF.  It is about someone who worked for a government agency and couldn’t send e-mails to a client named Mr. Gookin, because the filtering system was flagging this as a racist e-mail.  Apparently “gookin” is a racial slur (I’ve certainly never heard it used).

This story doesn’t really surprise me, but what does surprise me is when I read some of the comments to the post, how many people have had the same thing happen.  And some of them are just completely ridiculous, like an e-mail containing the phrase “one group” because (if you remove the spaces) you can see the word “negro” in there (which I guess makes the United Negro College Fund a racist organization).  Or filtering out an e-mail containing the word “Saturday” (because of the “turd,” of course).  Or people with the name “Dick” that run into this problem all the time.  Or someone with the name “Callahan,” since that contains “Allah.”  Or the person who was involved with forensics, and frequently had e-mails to and from police departments filtered out (I guess it’s kind of hard to discuss a rape investigation without using offensive words like “rape” or “sex”).

What’s even worse than the stupidity of the filters is the refusal of many IT administrators to remove these words from the banned word list, even when it presents a problem to the employees.  And even when it prevents them from conducting business!

Fortunately I don’t have this problem at my office, otherwise I probably wouldn’t be able to exchange e-mails with Rakshit (that’s really the name of someone I work with).  But this kind of thing happens often enough that there is even a name for it: The Scunthorpe Problem, named after an incident in which AOL blocked mail from people living in Scunthorpe, England.  Follow the link if you’re not sure why..

I wonder is Spam Assassin blocks e-mails about Spam Assassin...

My what a big month April was.  Kip and I had our second anniversary, as he posted about, there was Easter, I decided exactly when I would be quiting my job, and I have sprained my foot pretty seriously by falling down the stairs at church on Easter Sunday.  That is correct ladies and gentlemen, I said fell down an entire flight of stairs, and as it was on Easter Sunday, I was dressed appropriately in my new Easter outfit.  I was told that my skirt did not go over my head though, so I managed to remain modest on my quick trip down to the basement of the church.  So, I spent my Easter Sunday in the emergency room of Northeast Medical Center in Concord, NC.  I fell down the stairs because the heel of my shoe caught on the step and I lost my balance.  I am very heart broken because the very tip of the heel, or the grip of the heel, broke off when I fell down, and those were the shoes that I wore on my wedding day.  They are irreplaceable.  After spending the day in the emergency room, having a pregnancy test (it was negative for those of you keeping track or at all interested), having four x-rays taken, and waiting for quite awhile, we learned that they couldn’t see that anything was broken, so they think it is simply a sprain.  However, the doctor told us that if it still hurt after a few days I should to to the orthopedist to have them do a more thorough exam of my foot.  Well, it is now several weeks later and I still have a sore foot, and it pops almost daily.  On the shoe front, Kip took me to the mall and I bought the cutest flat ballet slippers that were eyelet material to match my Easter skirt perfectly (the same one that I fell down the stairs in).  Of course they were flats as I have pretty much decided to give up high heels for the time being until my foot heals and I will be able to walk in them again.  I shared all of that to share that within the month of buying these brand new shoes, that I absolutely adored, I ruined them too.  I wanted to wear them to Scott’s (and for those of you living under a rock, that is my brother-in-law) graduation ceremony at High Point University.  I didn’t expect it to be such a miserable day, or that we would be sitting on folding chairs on the lawn.  Needless to say, wet grass and perfectly white cloth shoes do not mix in a positive fashion.  The shoes are now grass stained, and no longer white.  I did enjoy Scott’s graduation, and the fun of listening to the arguing African-American family that sat directly in front of us for the better part of the ceremony, and listening to Bill Cosby give the graduation address without having planned a speech (we think).  All in all, it was an ok day.  I go to the doctor on Monday to see how my foot is doing, and exactly what is wrong with it.  I’ll keep you posted on the foot and shoe fronts as the week progresses.

I just finished playing through Resident Evil 4 last night, and even though the game came out over two years ago, I’m going to post my thoughts here.  For those of you unfamiliar with the game, it is a survival/horror(/action?) game in which American agent Leon Kennedy (who is possibly homosexual?) must save the President’s daughter (Ashley), who is being held hostage in Europe (Spain I think?).  In his adventures he discovers that a mind-controlling parasite has infected all of the locals, causing them to attack him relentlessly.

I should preface this by saying that I have only played one Resident Evil game before, which I think was Resident Evil 3 on the Nintendo 64.  Whatever game it was, you start out in a burning building and I never really got past three rooms before getting too frustrated by it (I had only rented it).  If it werent for the extremely good reviews the game has received, I might have had the same experience with Resident Evil 4.  This game was just not very accessible to new players.  There is nothing resembling a training mission or in-game tutorial.

One of the things I didn’t like was the feeling of scarcity that you don’t typically have in video games.  For instance, you can actually run out of ammo if you’re not careful.  And you’ll play some parts of the game over and over again because you keep dying because health items are so rare.  And I usually had to play for about an hour between save points (counting the times I died and restarted).  I think as a survivor/horror game this was the intention, in order to put you in suspense.  According to the Wikipedia article, though, this game gave out many more health and ammo items than any of the previous Resident Evil games.  I didn’t find that to be the case until I was into the second disc.  Of course this could be because I had learned how to play the game well by that point, or because I had read the weapon upgrading FAQ on GameFAQs and figured out how to pick which weapons to buy/upgrade.

As for the graphics, which are often heralded as the best the GameCube has to offer, I wish they had used all of the screen.  The entire game is forced into letterboxed widescreen.  I guess this is because the GameCube only outputs 4:3 graphics and they wanted 16:9, but I wish they had included an option to render it as anamorphic widescreen (so that it would render the 16:9 view fullscreen, so that it would look correct when stretched to fill a 16:9 TV).  I mean, Eternal Darkness was able to do that four years earlier on the GameCube.  Letterboxing the display means they are just throwing away 25% of the pixels that the system can output.  And it means I need to zoom in on my widescreen TV, making the graphics look more pixelated.

When I finished the game it said I had played for 27 hours, but I don’t think that includes cutscenes.  If you include cutscenes, and all the times that I died and restarted, I probably played the game for twice that long.  So for twenty dollars I definitely got my money’s worth.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s really a great game, but in my opinion not as great as most of the reviews say it is, mainly due to a lot of frustration (especially at the beginning of the game).  I’d give it 8 or 8.5 out of 10.

mah fat baby loves tuh eat

About a year or so ago I came across a link to this paper (warning: PDF file) in the comments to a blog.  I found it very interesting, and since reading it I’ve been able to recognize this phenomenon “in the wild” so often that I figured I should share.  I’ll warn you that the paper is a 14-page academic paper from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology... and it reads like one.  After the first page or so it gets pretty tedious to read.

Even so, here’s the gist of it:  Often times, someone who is unskilled at something is unaware that they are unskilled, because they don’t have enough skill to evaluate their own skill.  If you ask students how they think they did on a math test after taking it, for example, the students who performed poorly will grossly overestimate their performance.  They usually have some idea that they didn’t perform well, but they aren’t good enough at math to realize just how badly they did.

I’ve seen this kind of thing happen a surprising number of times.  Like someone a few years ago that claimed to have a “heavy graphics background”, then showed me something he made in Flash that was a bumpy model of 3D text, with a glaring shading error on one edge.  I remember someone I went to high school with, who would typically say “I didn’t miss any questions on that test” after taking a test, which would have me worried because I thought I might have missed one or two.  Then we’d get the test back and he’d get a seventy-something.  But he never quite caught on that maybe he was judging his own performance poorly.

Long before reading about this behavior, I learned to distrust confident people.  Upon reading this paper, I realized why most advice you receive is bad:  most people who feel entitled to give advice are not at all qualified to do so.  The great irony is that for most people confidence is a desirable quality in a leader, misinterpreted as an indicator of competence.  You needn’t look far into the world of politics to find dozens of examples of this principle at work.

So to conclude, I ask that my readers (all ten of you) watch for examples of this in your life.  It happens way more often than you might expect.

maybe if we’re loud we’ll stay alive

Nearly a year ago I blogged about the schedule for Lost season 3.  Now the producers have announced that there will be exactly three more seasons of Lost before it ends, each of which will air only in the spring, for 16 consecutive weeks.  I think this is a great step in the right direction for the show.  After the craptacular mini-season aired last fall, Lost lost a lot of viewers.

Reading between the lines, it seems that the show’s writers always knew where they wanted to take the show to end it, but the networks would (naturally) like to keep the show on the air until it stops bringing in money.  And that might be the best thing for the networks, but it’s certainly not good for the fans or for the show’s story.  To extend the show, the writers would have two basic courses of action: 1) write filler material to go in the middle of the story, to delay the ending; or 2) write the ending, then make up stuff after that ending that you never planned to write.  For a show with lots of mysteries, option 1 is really the only choice, and it seems the network was pushing the writers to stretch out the plot and forget about some things that were introduced in season 1.

The last ten episodes or so of this season have (in my opinion) gotten way better, and I’m looking forward to the next three seasons.

You’ve seen it way too many times.  Two people who are clearly wrong for each other are supposed to get married.  An elaborate wedding ceremony has been planned, family has come in from out of town, and everyone is excited to wish the new couple well.  Everyone, that is, except one of the two people getting married.  Ten minutes later still no bride.  Or maybe the bride shows up, and as the couple exchanges vows, one of them gets the shocking realization that maybe this isn’t right.  And in response to “do you take this man/woman to be your lawfully wedded husband/wife?” there is a long pause.  The minister will repeat himself, as if somehow he was misunderstood.  Then the bride/groom responds “...no... no, I can’t do this, it’s just not right.”  Suddenly everyone in the church gasps in awe because they didn’t see this coming and honestly they were just there for the free booze.  At this point, either the bride runs out of the church in tears, or the groom scrambles off.  Or sometimes one of them will confess their true feelings for someone else present in the church.

I’m sure you’ve seen a scene very similar to what I’ve just described in countless movies and TV shows.  You may have even read such a tale in a book or two.  It is super cliché, but it must be the first thing they teach you in screen writing school.  Just before they teach you that one bullet is enough to make a Ford Explorer explode.  But does this ever actually happen in real life to real human beings?  I’d say it’s pretty rare.  I’ve never known anyone who’s encountered such a situation.  I’ve never even heard a third-hand tale of someone being left at the altar.  Given how much people like to gossip about the misfortunes of others, you’d think word would spread fast and linger for years.  But the only incident I know of is the runaway bride from two years ago that got far too much media attention.  So I ask all of the writers who read my blog: please don’t write a scene involving someone getting left at the altar.  We are all pretty tired of it.

by now you should’ve somehow realized what you’ve got to do

I heard this on the radio this morning and had to share.  Director Mike Figgis (who directed Leaving Las Vegas) was going through security at LAX, when he was asked the reason for his visit.  “I’m here to shoot a pilot.”

It’s not clear if he was making a dumb joke, or if he just wasn’t thinking (I’m inclined to believe the latter).  You can read more here, if you’d like.

You’re not a pilot:  I know every pilot in the world!

Update: as Peter pointed out, this story is almost entirely fictional.  Oh well, it sounded plausible.