Collage 242               H u m o u r N e t               28 MAR 96

For some time now, I've been collecting cutesie ".sigs" (the lines
that some mailers automatically attach to the ends of mail messages;
also called "tag lines"), and I finally decided to drop them on a
Collage.

(BTW, Holly mentioned to me that "Collage" should not always be
capitalized. (Holly's a member of the K-12 school system in
Kentucky.) Well, she's entirely correct about that -- and it
irritates me, too, to capitalize "Collage" all the time -- but it's
an advertising campaign, so I'm allowed to do it. Her message
surprised me, tho -- I didn't know Kentuckians were that familiar
with the English language. ;-)

(Speaking of KY: Years ago, I attended a ceremony for Tau Beta Pi
(an engineering fraternity -- we swap oscilloscope-repair stories
instead of beer-drinking stories) in which the presidential baton
was being passed to the new president -- who was from *Kentucky*.
The departing president told the following joke as the baton
officially changed hands:

    "Remember when the high/low-beam switches in cars were moved
    from the floor to the steering column several years ago?
    Apparently, Kentucky had to ask GM to put them back on the
    floor -- the hillbillies kept getting their legs caught in
    the steering wheel."

The person at the receiving end of the baton (and joke) looked as if
she was going to clang him over the head with the thing. Luckily,
in this particular case, Holly is several states away, so I should
be safe. For a while. :-)

Back to the topic du jour: E-mail.

One of the amusing behind-the-scenes things on the 'Net can occur
when two mail servers connect to trade e-mail: there are standard
messages that are exchanged, and the first one -- the "220/ready"
command -- is customizable at many locations. Most administrators
don't bother customizing the message, since it is [typically] only
seen by SMTP (mail) servers when making connections; humans rarely
see them.

Thus, when you connect to the server at Sun Microsystems, for example,
you see the following typically bland ready message:

220 Sun.COM Sendmail ready at Thu, 28 Mar 96 18:25:09 PST

No humor there. But, for those rare cases when a human *is* the thing
at the other end of the connection, some sys admins have opted to
customize their ready messages. For example, the rather friendly mail
server at Case Western University has this to say:

220-po.cwru.edu Sendmail 8.6.12+cwru/CWRU-2.3 ready for love ...

Cornell University is apparently running a fundamentalist mail server:

220 mail.med.cornell.edu ESMTP Sendmail ... Mon, 18 Mar 1996 21:59:23
... The next best thing to death... is resurrection...

And even CompuServe has a sense of humor:

220-arl-gw-6.compuserve.com
Sendmail (it's not just for breakfast anymore) ...

And, not to be outdone by Case Western, CI$ appends this to their
ready message (making it one of the more verbose messages out there):

8.6.10/5.941228 sam ready for love at Thu, 28 Mar 1996 21:19:43 ...

(I think Sam's gonna be in a little bit of trouble when his boss
finds out about this. :-)

There are more, but these are some of the best ones I've run across.
Point is, humor can be found the 'Net in some of the most unlikely
places.

Of course, it exists in *spades* in the likelier places -- which
often include e-mail signature blocks. And Collage 242 features some
of the better .sigs I've seen. Some of these were mailed to me, some
I just happened to notice. Since e-mail .sigs multiply like bunnies,
I cannot provide authorship; in each case, I've attributed the person
who sent me the message.

Not surprisingly, today's attribution list is rather long, so I'll
forego the circumstance:

Shawn in Vancouver: "Advertising on the 'Net for the I.Q. Impaired"

Duncan from Spacenet: "Those Wacky Southerners Just Don't Give Up"

Jim: "ACME U-DO-IT SIG"

JD in NJ: "The Programmer's Sig"

Loretta (aka "Mom"): "Ordering Priorities"

Christopher: "Employee E-Mail Disclaimer, Stochastic-Process Version"

Rob: "Better Idiots"

Andy: "Reality"

Robert: "Revised Quality Goal?"

Bert: "The Bad News"

Chris: "Perspective"

Dr. Mike: "The Truth About Golf"

Shazi in UAE: "A New Perspective on Ambition"

Phil Boulter in the UK: "The Pilot's Sig"

Dan in the Netherlands: "More Dwarf Humor"

Carrie in Denver: "YAWS (Yet Another Windoze Slam)"

Richard in Phoenix: "CDA-Approved Sig"

Thanks, also, to Jonathan at Case Western for adding Cornell's "ready
message" to the list of 220/ready commands shown above.

It's the select-a-sig Collage -- and it's fully RFC 822 compliant. :-)

- Vince Sabio
  HumourNet Moderator
  HumourNet@telephonet.com
____________________________________________________________________
          Opener (above) Copyright 1996 by Vincent Sabio
  Permission is hereby granted to forward or post this "Collage";
  please observe the guidelines stated at the end of the message.
____________________________________________________________________

SUBJ: Advertising on the 'Net for the Profoundly I.Q. Impaired

[Editor's Note: (1) Shawn sent this to me, and said that the person
(the "poster") posted this message to m.n.i.d.; carefully note the
message that he posted and the URL he referenced, then look closely
at his e-mail address. (2) For anonymity's sake, I have changed the
poster's name and domain. </vs>]

From: john_doe@scsu.net (John Doe)
Newsgroups: misc.news.internet.discuss
Subject: Web Page Designing!
Organization: Univ. of South Carolina

I have found the best internet web page design company located in
South Carolina. Check out their home page at:

http://www.scsu.net/users/john_doe/homepage.htm

Their homepage convinced me of their skills alone!

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

SUBJ: Those Wacky Southerners Just Don't Give Up ...

Richmond, Virginia --
Celebrating 130 Years of Foreign Occupation, 1865-1995

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

SUBJ: ACME U-DO-IT SIG

ACME U-DO-IT SIG
[insert unusual ascii art] [clever phrase goes here]
[html tag to your under-construction web page]
[for the reading impaired, click here to get a wav of this sig]
End of sig... if you hold your ear very close to this message
you will hear static at the end.(c) 1995

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

SUBJ: The Programmer's Sig

"The Definition of an Upgrade: Take old bugs out, put new ones in."

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

SUBJ: Ordering Priorities

Good:   "Save the whales!"
Better: "Save the rain forest!"
Best:   "Save 75% on designer clothes."

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

SUBJ: Employee E-Mail Disclaimer, Stochastic-Process Version

"Through sheer random chance, my employer may someday agree with
something I say."

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

SUBJ: Not Another Bake Sale ...

Bumper sticker on the 'Stealth' Bomber:
"If you can read this, then we wasted 32 billion bucks."

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

SUBJ: Better Idiots

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to
build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe
trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is
winning."
- Rich Cook

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

SUBJ: Reality

"Blaming soldiers for war is like blaming firefighters for fire."
- "Country" Joe MacDonald

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

SUBJ: Revised Quality Goal?

"Quality Is Job 1.1."

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

SUBJ: The Bad News

"I've seen the future. I can't afford it."

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

SUBJ: Perspective

"Warning: Objects on the calendar are closer than they appear."

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

SUBJ: The Truth About Golf

"Golf isn't a sport -- it's a business meeting on wheels!"

[Editor's Note: I must agree with that statement. Well, the first
part, anyway. :-) </vs>]

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

SUBJ: A New Perspective on Ambition

"Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy."

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

SUBJ: The Pilot's Sig

"I want to die like my father -- peacefully, in my sleep. Not
screaming in panic like his passengers!"

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

SUBJ: More Dwarf Humor

"When their numbers dwindled from 50 down to 8, the remaining dwarfs
began to suspect 'Hungry.'"

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

SUBJ: YAWS (Yet Another Windoze Slam)

"Windows is Microsoft's way of proving P.T. Barnum right."

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

SUBJ: CDA-Approved Sig

"Disclaimer: This message has been carefully scrutinized and found
to contain not a whit of indecent material. If you disagree, SCREW
THE CDA."

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</collage242>