Sunday, September 11, 2005

E-mail

I got the following e-mail:

Dear sir;

I am a professor of the School of Computer Science & Engineering at the Konkuk University, Seoul, Korea.

I read your paper, titled "intersection Red and Blue Segments ~ ."

Would you please send me the Implemetation of the algorithm as soon as possible ?

Thank you in advance.

Best regards,
XXXXX


I kind of hate responding to these e-mails... are they really professors, or are they students trying to cheat on their homework? (Although in this case, a google search provided some evidence that this person actually is a professor.) But... sir? I am no sir. Is that a language/cultural mistake? (S)He got the paper title wrong too, although it's certainly close enough that I know which one (s)he's talking about. It would be nice to know *why* (s)he wants the implementation. I guess I really should send the implementation. Of course, my implementation is a hack. But then, I tend to look down on my coding ability, when I probably shouldn't. I've had others compliment my style. I just don't put as much effort into "optimization" as I probably should... I am, after all, only writing the implementations as proof-of-concept. Maybe these requests bother me because it means someone will see my written-for-me-and-not-others code?

Do these sort of e-mails bother you too, or am I being overly sensitive?

7 comments:

Michele said...

HI!
Just passing through using the "Next Blog" button.
Love your crafts pictures.
Envious that you crochet so well.
I have the yard and the hook but no idea what to do with them, much to the dismay of my Mom, crafter extraordinaire.
Ohwell.
Nice blog.
What do you do with a big red crayon anyway??? :-)
Have a great day!

Michele said...

Oh, gee, even with a short comment,I still do a finger burp.
So sorry.
I meant to say...I have the YARN.
Lots of Yarn.
Hope your up-in-coming week is better than my typing! *grin*

noricum said...

I figured that was a "finger burp", and understood what you meant... after a second reading. ;)

Thanks for the compliments! The crayon will be a stripe in a baby blanket. I'm designing the blanket myself, for a friend who's due in December.

Michele said...

Wow!
Thanks for the thanks and for visiting me!
A baby blanket?! I am SO impressed.
Said baby is going to be haute couture ( I hope I spelled that right) of the diaper set.
Lucky tyke.

Glad you liked the ad. Cute ones like that are hard to find, but when I do, I like to share.
Toodles!

Fern Lady said...

I tend to delete all emails even remotely like that. I get some pretty wierd ones--once you have a website, the whole world can find you. I get a lot of requests to donate my artwork to auctions for good causes like schools & animal shelters. It's not that I don't want to help, but I'm not in the art-for-free - to-the-whole-world business. The ones I hate the most though, are the viagra and porn spams. Yuck.

Anonymous said...

The worse the English usage and the less they seem to know or care about me, the less likely I am to reply. Spam is generally aggravating, particularly spam written to me as an individual. (I received a few back in grad school.) I did respond kindly to an email from a guy claiming to be a student in Alaska and asking about my Matlab raytracer.

fillyjonk said...

In some Asian languages (Japanese I know this is a case in), some speakers have a hard time with the he and she pronouns...or at least a friend of my mother's who was Japanese did. I don't know if that's part of the issue.

I get a little irritated by emails soliciting information from me...it's like, I did all this work (I often get them asking for my data sets), what am I going to get out of it if I send it to you? Will you even mention me in your acknowledgements?