Wednesday, June 18, 2008

It's Not Easy Being BI

I've been known to sometimes say that "being BI effectively doubles your chances of getting a consulting engagement on a Friday night." Yeah, it's kind of cheesy, but if you can't have fun with wordplays, what can you do, right?[1]

Well, the joke is sounding a little less funny today.

I'm currently involved in organizing a business intelligence conference[2] and have been sending emails to colleagues and potential speakers and have not been having the best of luck. In fact, when sending one email to an employee of a certain software company located in the Pacific Northwest, I got this explanation for why the email was rejected:

<Your e-mail was rejected by an anti-spam content filter on gateway (1.2.3.4). Reasons for rejection may be: obscene language, graphics, or spam-like characteristics. Removing these may let the e-mail through the filter.>

Yeah, no kidding.

I then went through the email and replaced all instances of "BI" with "Business Intelligence" and the email went through without error. But today I've been fighting with a few more similar problems - what a way to waste a few hours I didn't have to spare.

Has anyone else seen this issue?

 

[1] There are many other humorous stories that revolve around this particular play on words, like the well-known Microsoft speaker who wore his "BI Power Hour" t-shirt to the hotel bar at TechEd last year (not knowing that there was a gay pride event going on at the same time) and ended up having lots of nice men buy him drinks.

[2] More details on this in the days and weeks ahead - stay tuned!

5 comments:

Matt Masson said...

haha.. love the title.

That's amazing that the email filter blocked it. It'll make this year's BI conference interesting.

Matthew Roche said...

Thank you! After Chris Randall decided to attack my amazing sense of humor ( http://blogs.ameriteach.com/chris-randall/2008/6/18/ssis-tools-learn-to-use-pacman.html ) it's nice to know that at least someone appreciates the puns. ;-)

SDC said...

I've pondered starting a BI blog called 'BI Curious', but that's sure to get flagged as spam...

Matthew Roche said...

This was one of the titles I was considering too:

Other blog names considered but ultimately rejected included:

BI and Proud
BI Curious
The Big BI Guy (sort of a homage to "SoCalDevGal")

http://bi-polar23.blogspot.com/2007/05/photomerge.html

Marco Casalino said...

Well, a friend of mine has some problems sending emails because his domain is "analytics" and there seems to be some offending part in there.