Scott Hanselman

The topic came up on a mailing list this morning, when a colleague (whom I respect and am friendly with, to be clear) posted an email where his email signature was, according to Scott Stanfield's measurements, about 810 pixels tall. It is recreated here in a two-page format, because the signature was too long to fit on one page.

I responded, in jest,

Could you speak up? I couldn’t hear you over your email signature…

...and a discussion about Email Signature Etiquette ensued. Adam Cogan has some good suggestions on signatures:

• They should include the phone number – if you want business
• They should *not* have the address/location – rarely needed so find it on the website
• They should have a URL
• They should have a tag line (Scott: I disagree)
• They should *not* have the email address
• I don’t believe in images in footers – although I now have an exception for photos as they make things more personal
• I believe in a tiny bit of corporate colour – for branding purposes
• Your big signature should only be included *once* a thread

Looking back in time through the list server, with Scott Stanfield's help, we see a lot of different email signature styles.

Now, none of these are REALLY obnoxious...Some are classy and understated, with small icons as flair:

Some are a little louder and include a picture of a bull horn and a human ear:

Some are quick minimalist and to the point. Phone, Messenger, Blog. Full stop. I like.

Some use five different fonts and 7 colors, without being too garish:

Some have the audacity to include a picture of the author's huge head and an animation. Apparently you can get banner ad space on the forehead for a price.

Some have logos and certifications as pictures...

Others include everything there is to know about that person, including a quote from Einstein.

After we teased him, Joel went minimalist, and it was good.

The he went more minimalist...

Then he, apparently, became a Buddhist, threw out all his worldly possessions and became like Prince, recognizable only as a symbol. ;)

I think a good email signature says what you need it to say without distracting from the message.

As far as the address to my work, my phone number, these are things I'll send them out of band via Plaxo or IM, or whatever. Email is the primary way I start a conversation, and phones, IM, and other things are easily exchanged later, so I don't need them in my sig.

Now, go audit yourself. How long is your signature? Are you including inspirational quotes that might not be germaine to the conversation, or is your address and phone number on 8 lines instead of 2? Maybe we need a Daily WTF for Email Signatures?

If you have some REALLY obnoxious signature examples, post them on flickr, or on your site, link to them in HTML in the comments, or link back to this post.

UPDATE: I've since changed my mind and I'm against pics in signatures. I just have two dashes, then my name and domain. Like this:

--

Scott Hanselman http://hanselman.com

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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If you're looking to read feeds on a PocketPC or SmartPhone and listen to podcasts, there's a number of choices. NewsBreak 2.0 just came out, and this site's feed looks pretty decent on it.

While this blog renders pretty nicely on a PocketPC due to DasBlog's mobile support, the site isn't very bandwidth friendly, nor, of course, is it available offline.

The screenshot on the left is the site in PocketIE, and the screenshot next to it (and the one at far right) is my blog's Feed in NewsBreak. Notice that NewsBreak uses ClearType in its reading view - not sure why that's not working in PocketIE or in NewsBreak's view showing list of posts.

It also supports podcasts, which is pretty sweet. I'm still evaluating options, but seems to be that $8 for a piece of software is pretty cheap. It supports PocketPCs and SmartPhones.

For now, NewsBreak is US$7.95 until it's not, then it'll be $19.95. Check it out.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Stuart discovered splogs today and Jeff learned to lower his blog's bandwidth. Hard learned lessons both, but both got me thinking.

Splogs: If you look at SplogSpot, their weekly splog dump XML file is 56Megs this week. I guess if you filled a library with 90% pron and 10% content (or 99% and 1%) you'd have a pretty interesting library. Does it make things hard to find? Sure, especially if the goo is mixed in along site the good stuff.

Distribution of Responsibility: Jeff's starting to distribute his content. Images here, feed there, markup here. Ideally his images would be referenced relatively in the markup and stored locally, and he'd rewrite the URLs of those images on the way out, be they hosted on S3 or Akamai, or Flickr.

Aside: The Rails guys are definitely ahead of the .NET folks on this stuff, with things like asset_host, and gems that support hosting of files at S3 and elsewhere. Distribution of content and load is a good thing, but only if you can turn it off at any time, and easily. Every external dependency you add is a potential weak point in your content delivery - and content permanence - strategy.

I went looking for something yesterday and found it, I thought, on an old broken-down Tripod.com site. When I got there, however, it was just the text, the links to CSS, some JavaScript and more importantly, images, were long gone.

Broken images on a web site are the equivalent to broken windows in a building; fix them, or they mark the beginning of the end. - Me.
(Call back to old partially-related-but-not-really-but-he'll-tell-me-it-is Atwood post :P )

Which leads us to the Day's Questions:

• Is the addition of splogs to the Global Index representative of a watering-down of content? Does the proliferation of content-free MySpace pages increase the internet's usefulness, or decrease it?
• Does the breaking apart of "atoms" of content - like this post, for example - into "quarks" of text, images, styles, etc, all hosted at different locations, affect it's permanence and, forgive me, historical relevance?

I would propose that in both cases, there are emerging problems. Spam and Splogs must exist because there are eyeballs looking at them. Otherwise they (the evil-doers) would stop, right?

Breaking apart content into multiple delivery channels at different hosts helps to offset the cost to host the content. Right now the bandwidth costs for hosting this blog are covered by advertising because I update the blog regularly.

But, if I stopped adding new content, I'd stop getting advertisers, then I'd stop paying the bandwidth bill and the blog would rot. Folks might stumble upon the rotting carcass of this blog in some far-flung theoretical future (like two years from now...WAY out there in Internet Time, people) and find only text, no images, broken javascript and wonder if a library burned? How is content permanence possible? If I don't pay my DNS bill, the site disappears. If my ISP goes out of business, the site disappears. If flickr goes out of business, many photo links on this site disappear. Is it reasonable to depend on these external services?

When the Library at Alexandria was at its peak, apparently 100 scholars lived and worked there. In the time it took to read this sentence, I'm sure 100 MySpacers have joined up. Not exactly scholars, but you get the idea. Things are moving fast, and they aren't lasting long. Some might argue that Wikipedia itself isn't "scholarly" and lowers the bar as well, although I find it useful more often than not. Either way, there's a crapload of information out there with 20% of the planet adding new content everyday.

Alexandria failed because it had no geo-located redundancy. Like the vast majority of of human knowledge, it wasn't clustered. The internet, on the other hand, is a cluster in more ways than one. But is it useful and is its usefulness permanent?

If I may mix my metaphors, is the future of the Internet a worldwide library like Alexandria at its peak, or are we doomed to collectively search a Bathroom Wall for the wisdom of the ages?

I don't know if the flash-mob that is Digg qualifies as a good filter.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I've been reading less and less lately. It takes about 90 minutes to get Z to sleep, from the time we announce "night-night" through bathtime, and reading of five or six (of his) books, and then rubbing his head until he finally passes out. These aren't things to be rushed, so one has less time to read. Here's what's on my night-stand right now (compared to October last year, and compared to two months before he was born).

• The State of Africa - I picked this up on our trip to Tanzania in the airport store. It's fantastically dense with information, each chapter is almost a book itself. It feels balanced and thoughtful and the author is well thought of on the 'net and has an extensive bibliography and there's clearly a great deal of research and thought behind the book. I'm still learning, but it sure is whirlwind coverage of the last hundred years in Africa. Recommended if you're interested in the continent.
  
• Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran- This was loaned to me by my friend Michael Stanford. It's a very accessible book on neurology, dealing specifically with phantom limbs and phantom pain, and how the body remaps its image of itself. A fascinating read, much lighter than you'd think.
  
• Killing Rain (John Rain Thrillers) by Barry Eisler - I love the whole Barry Eisler "Rain" series. John Rain is a half-Japanese, half-American professional assassin who specializes in making it look like a natural death. Because he's in Japan, he doesn't have a car, so there's incredibly detailed (and apparently, accurate) descriptions on how he gets to and from his target's final resting places. He's an assassin on foot, using crowds and organizational behavior to stay in the shadows.
  UPDATE: Barry Eisler, the author, just left a comment below that the sixth installment, Requiem for an Assassin, comes out on May 22! That's so cool. I love blogs.
  
• Cell by Stephen King - Folks are picking on this book, but you either like Stephen King or you don't. In this book, the end of civilization starts with a cell phone call...how can you not like a book that starts like that? Can you hear me now?
  
• Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions by Neil Gaiman - I can't remember who in my blog posts recommended Gaiman, but I'm hooked. My family is hooked. My parents are hooked. Stardust the Movie is coming out this summer and I just ordered the BBC Miniseries of Neverwhere, for Pete's Sake. This compilation of short stories is great "bathroom reading." Just put it in there and you'll eventually make it all the way through. 
  
• Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman - More Gold from Gaiman (Neil Gaiman blogs here), another Armageddon novel I'm reading, although this one is decidedly "jollyer" than Cell. It involves a mixup in the birth of the Anti-Christ and wackiness ensues along with an unusual partnership between a demon and an angel.
  
• The Honor of the Queen (Honor Harrington (Paperback)) by David Weber - Darn that Chris Sells, he told me to read the first Honor Harrington novel and now I have to read all, what, eleven of them? The first one started slow...real slow, and then something like fifty pages in, I was hooked. It's better than Star Trek (in terms of space combat) when Star Trek was great. My dad's hooked too. I keep wanting Angelina Jolie to play Honor in a movie, but that would cheapen it, wouldn't it?

By the way, all the links and pictures in this post were quickly and easily added using my CueCat for Windows LiveWriter Plugin that you can download and use as well!

What are you reading?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Here's a new Coding4Fun article I did on interfacing with your Microsoft FingerPrint Reader. I used the very easy GrFinger SDK from Griaule and I want to thank them for their help with my questions for this article. They've got a fine product that's very easy to code to and their drivers were rock solid for me. Check them out for if you're interfacing your .NET application to any FingerPrint reader, not just Microsoft's.

"In this installment of the "Some Assembly Required" column, Scott Hanselman creates a Family Fingerprint Manager using .NET 2.0 that interfaces with the Microsoft Fingerprint Reader and the GrFinger SDK from Griaule."

In the interest of preparedness, I figured we needed to get the family fingerprinted and to put those finger prints with my "Preparedness USB Getaway Key" and in the safety deposit box, so I created a family fingerprinter.

It's a pretty simple application, I save the fingerprints in an XML file for portability. Note the "auto next finger" feature, so you can fingerprint your friends and relatives just like the cops do. ;) Enjoy.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

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