So how have we been hacked?

The only way to know is to view the source of the page and you will see a bunch of links near the top of the page.  They are all placed into a CSS DIV tag that is set to not be visible.  At first glance this may seem pointless as nobody can see the links.  Well no person using a modern browser that is.  Search Engines on the other hand see every one of the links.  Basically what happens is part of how some search engines determine what order sites should be listed in search results is to look at how many sites link to it.  Thus someone has hacked these sites to trick the search engines into ranking their sites higher.

Now for the absurdity.

It won’t do them any good.

I can hear people now.  ”Wait you just said the links would make search engines list the sites higher”.  There are two problems with this though.  First, this is related to what Google calls “Page Rank” which other search companies have developed their own versions of.  The thing is, all of the search engines use this as only one of many things to determine how high a site should rank.  What is far more important is the content of the site and how relavent that content is to the search terms that have been entered.  Second, Google and others have stated that links only add noticably to page rank if the page linking is related to the content of the linked to site.  Thus indicating that the site being linked is considered an authoritative source.  The links all deal with links to information about cars or manufactured homes and other things that have no relation what so ever to the content of any of these blogs.

So basically someone created some code that is capable of infecting all WordPress installations on a server in order to create link-backs that will do them absolutely no good at all.  The only thing it accomplishes is to annoy those of us that have to go in and clean things up.

You know, if you are going to hack my site, at least do something that makes sense.

I mean is if this really has been the worst day ever, why didn’t I notice?  Surely if the day had been worse than the day JFK was shot or the day the Challenger blew up I would have noticed something.  Surely if it was a worse day than when the World Trade Center collapsed there would be something on the news.  I just want to look at these people and ask them how today was worse than any of the days during either of the World Wars.

The thing is, this really does apply to just about any absolute statement.  ”This is the worst meal ever” really, have you seen what they eat in third world countries.  ”This is the best song ever” really, this pop song you are listening to is superior to all the great classical music ever created?

Ok, yes I understand what people mean when they say these things.  My issue is, why do they need to use these grandiose statements when it would be much better to just say what they mean.  Does the statement “I have had a really rotten day” truly have so little weight that we must push it into some grandiose statement of an unlikely absolute?

Sometimes I just don’t understand people.

I get this email from an individual that is not stupid.  He knows his job well and is an authority in his area of expertise.  The problem is he is trying to ask for something that is outside his area of expertise and instead of just describing what he wants in plain english he tries to throw in a term he has heard but does not fully understand.  The problem is, he used the term  in a way that is completely inaccurate and not only made it hard to decipher what he actually wanted, he made himself look bad in the process.

I guess my real confusion is about why do people who are good at what they do want to seem like they know something they have little or no exposure to.  I mean, sure I know computers and databases fairly well but I know when I am out of my area of knowledge.  I don’t walk into a chemistry lab and start throwing around terms I don’t know.  I’m not a chemist, I am not going to pretend to be a chemist.  Better yet, I know databases, but I am not an Oracle DBA.  When I speak with an Oracle DBA, I try to speak plainly and only use terms I truly understand so that I can communicate my needs to them.  I am not the expert and I know I am not the expert so I am not going to pretend to know things I don’t.

In the end, it is my opinion that pretending to be something you are not or know something you don’t is absurd.

Am I the only one that finds a policy like this absurd?

I asked once why they had this policy.  I was told it was to make sure that people weren’t coming back to work when they shouldn’t be.

Ok, I see two problems with this.  First, because it is such a hassle a lot of people come back to work for at least partial days even though they are still sick and contagious.  Their complex process completely defeats the stated purpose of the process.  Second, if you don’t follow the process exactly, they punish you by taking away your vacation days for anything over the first two days.  Thus no matter how sick you were, if you can’t find how to navigate through their process you will be penalized.

This seems to me like a sure way to make sure that sick people come back to work well before they should.  In fact,  I have heard management tell people to come in for a half day so that they don’t have to deal with this process as it is a hassle for them as well.

It would be one thing if the information on this policy was easy to find.  The thing is, nobody in my office even knows who our Human Resources (HR) contact is let alone how to call with questions.  The Intranet is no help as there is no menu item that mentions HR or anything to do with sick leave.  The only thing we have is the generic emails that blast out to the company which usually get immediately deleted because we don’t have time to deal with their latest morale boosting excersize since we are all overworked due to cut-backs.

One would think a Fortune 500 company would be able to come up with something better than this.

But what do we really know about this Holiday and the person it was named for?

Shall we start with Saint Valentine?  Honestly about all we know is that there were one or more people by the name of Valentine in Roman times that were considered martyrs.  Valentine was actually apparently a very popular name in the late Roman Empire.  Looking for the earliest records of when this Saint was recognized by the church we find that the Feast of Saint Valentine was established in 496 ce where Valentine was included among those “… whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose acts are known only to God.”  Basically even that far back, nobody knew who this person was or what they had done but only that the name was revered. So basically we only know that there may have been one or more Martyrs named Valentine.

Perhaps we can find some clues to what Valentine’s day is in this Feast Day that was established.  Surely it was intended as a day to celebrate love. While there is some theory that the day may have been placed on February 14th to be in the middle of the Pagan holiday of Lupercalia which was a fertility festival.  That connection is much disputed and honestly fertility isn’t exactly the same as Romantic Love.

Some say that the first tie of Saint Valentine’s day to Romantic Love was done in the late 14th century by Geoffrey Chaucer in his poem Parlement of Foules.  That is a subject of some debate as well though and many feel that the poem is being misinterpreted. The earliest, mostly uncontested tie between Saint Valentine’s Day and Romantic Love that I can find is references to a “High Court of Love” that was established in Paris on February 14th 1400.  The thing is the court was to deal with love contracts, betrayals and violence towards women.  About the only thing romantic about it I can find is that the judges were chosen by the women based on poetry reading.

While there are a few mentions of Valentine’s Day in poems and literary works, the holiday as we know it is recognized to have begun in the 1840’s in the United States.  In fact the first mass produced Valentine’s Day card was created in 1847.  While this may seem like a long time to many, honestly is 160 years all that much considering the history of the day goes back over 1500 years?

Even better, the celebration of the day was pretty much limited to pretty cards and bad poetry until the mid 20th century when the celebration started to spread to gifts and such.  One might ask why such a simple holiday suddenly became about buying things.  One might suppose that it had something to do with some sort of marketing scheme by the florists and candy companies.  I will leave that for the reader to think on though.

Ultimately what we have is a Roman Catholic feast day celebrating one or more Martyrs named Valentine that was placed in the middle of a Pagan Fertility festival and had no romantic connotations until over 1000 years after it was created.  Now it is the biggest day for the sales of flowers, candies, cards, and other gifts meant to show someone how much you Love them and if you don’t spend enough, obviously you don’t love them very much.

Absurd?

Earlier today I heard, over the cubicle wall, one of my co-workers talking about how her previous boss was very fond of the phrase “I need this and I need it Yesterday.”

So am I the only one who finds that phrase completely absurd?

Yes I know what a person who says this means.  They are trying to make a point that they need something quickly.  But “I need it Yesterday” seems ridiculous.  If you needed it Yesterday, you should have asked for it Yesterday, or better yet the day before.   Even worse, it seems to say to the person you are telling to do the task that no matter how hard they try, no matter how quickly they get the task done, there is no way they can make you happy as it is already overdue.  This just doesn’t seem like a good way to manage.

Wouldn’t it be better to simply say, “I need this as soon as possible”.  Or how about “This just landed on my desk and it is already overdue, please put this as top priority and complete it as soon as possible.”  Both of these phrases get across the urgency of the request while not making the person doing it feel like they are killing themselves for your mistake or in a hopeless position where they can not make you happy.

I’m sorry, this phrase is completely absurd and should be stricken from the vocabulary of any thinking person.

This blog is going to be my place to record some of the random thoughts I have on a regular basis about how absurd some common things are.  These are things that most people accept and even take for granted.  These are things that if looked at a certain way just don’t make any sense.  These are the things that I tend to spend way too much time thinking about so I thought I would share it with the world.  Who knows, maybe there are others out there who will at least find it amusing even if they don’t agree.

I can’t guarantee I will update daily or weekly or on any kind of regular schedule.  The thoughts just don’t come to me on a schedule.  Check back occasionally though and maybe there will be something new.