samuraipanda.com

Please, oh please, do not use the built in notification functions of the various services out there. I work very hard to keep my email out of the wild. Once you start putting it out there, I get inundated with spam.

If you think I’m interested in a bit of information, use copy and paste. If you want me to have the fancy graphics, send the link to your own email address and the forward it to me. Then again a fancy graphics-heavy email is likely to get moved to the trash quite quickly.

I get a lot of fluff email, things not really important, but sometimes nice to receive. The problem is that people have a tendency to just forward a cute message without acting like an editor. Like many others annoyed by this behavior, I offer the following rants:

• I don’t care if the email is intended for the recipient only, since I’m the recipient. Adding a “contact us” message in the event I’m not the intended recipient is making me point out you’re an idiot for sending an email to me. I already know that. Why should I tell you?
• No amount of legal mumbo-jumbo at the end of your message is going to affect what I do with the email. You gave it to me, so I can do what I want with it. Most likely I will delete it because of the legal mumbo-jumbo.
• I don’t want “inspirational” messages sent to me. Cute or interesting pictures, yes, but inspirational messages about how a kid survived on peanuts and flour for two years all the while writing poems to his dead mother is not going to make me feel better about my life. If it does, then I’ve got issues that are better handled with medication.
• I don’t care about the path this email took to get to me. The fact that you are too lazy to remove the trail of forwards and reply headers from your now forwarded or replied email makes me question whether the email is worth my time reading as it obviously interested you.
• I don’t care who you send the email to. Putting everyone in your address book in the TO: field is both annoying and a breach of their confidentiality. The fact that your cousin has an email address of thecatcher69@yahoo.com tells me a lot about them. BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) is there for a reason.
• If you don’t know it’s true, but think you should forward it just in case it is, think again. The Internet will not collapse if you do not forward an email. snoopes.com is your friend and trusted source for real or unreal. And no, Bill Gates will not send you money for forwarding an email and it does hurt to do so. It hurts my brain.
• Funny pictures should speak for itself, so please avoid commenting on the image in a comedic way. There are paid professionals who make a lot of money to be funny. You are probably not one of them. Explaining a back story is allowed, commenting “real MORTAL COMBAT” is really annoying.
• Do not embed your comments in the image. You may think it’s relevant or amusing, but if I decide to forward the image on (which I won’t if the comment is embedded), then I have to hang my head in shame for your asinine comment. The exception is names, dates, or a brief description.
• Clean up your subject line. I don’t want to see “re: Fwd: fwd: RE: re: Re: FWD: cute Pictures”. Select the text and delete the extra information.
• Please, please, please, spell check your email, including the authors original message. You are not working with Shakespeare, so correcting ovious mistakes is allowed.
• Even better, remove the original authors thoughts and comments. I’m sure it’s quite touching for grandma to read a message from her grandson, but as a trice removed receiver of the email, I don’t care if little Timmy misses his nana.

I don’t like the Bush administration. I feel it’s botched just about everything it’s tried and moved the country to a more divided nation. But unlike a lot of people I don’t believe Bush is doing so intentionally or with maliciousness. I think he’s doing what he believes is right.

So when I read an article like this one, it further enforces my belief. Bush is a man who had an believes he is doing what he thinks is best, it’s just that that belief is wrong. There’s no maliciousness to his actions, he just doesn’t have the right path for this country.

So I start to feel sorry for him. The majority of the American people are against him. People in other countries are burning him in effigy. The US has moved from one of the most respected countries in the world to one of the most feared. All of this takes a toll on a person, who by all accounts is a generally nice guy.

The thing that most people forget is that the US elected Bush to the Presidency. The American people may be against him, but they put him there and they should, at the very least respect that what he does because he is doing what he was elected to do. If we wanted a different path we would have elected Gore or Kerry (ya, ya, Gore won the popular vote). Instead we collectively chose Bush and his agenda.

So for the next year and a half (barring a sudden surge in Impeachment support, which I’m not entirely for), he is our President and we should, at the very least voice our opposition in a civilized manner and not attack the man with hurtful, emotional rebukes.