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Here’s an oddity that washed up in this morning’s tide:

From: Montgomery, Luke <Luke.Montgomery@tektronix.com>
To: dan@dansdata.com
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2011 16:18:47 -0700
Subject: Tektronix Site Resource

Dear Daniel Rutter,

I found your website, Dan’s Data and wanted to thank you for providing such great information about PC Hardware and Gadgets. I was wondering if it would be possible to provide a link to our website (http://www.tek.com/products/digital-multimeter/) as a potential resource on Multimeters. We noticed you already reference the phrase on the following page: http://www.dansdata.com/io072.htm, so hopefully, it’d be an easy change on your end.

Link should look like this if possible:

I did some resistance measuring with my multimeter between the legs and got:

Once you’ve completed this task, if it’s not too much trouble, would you mind just sending a quick confirmation email? That way, I can mark your website off my action and follow-up list.

Thank you in advance for your support. If you have any questions, please let me know.

Luke Montgomery
SEO Specialist, Worldwide Marketing
Phone: 503.627.4672
www.tektronix.com

On the face of it, this is a normal link-spam e-mail. Your standard form letter - “I found your site, $SITENAME and wanted to thank you for providing such great information about $SCRAPED_SUBJECT…”, and then a request for a link from some random machine-detected page on the site - in this case, the question portion of this letter.

But this link-spam’s an odd one, because tek.com really is the Web site for Tektronix, who really are a big name in test and measurement gear - they’re possibly the biggest name in oscilloscopes, just as Fluke are the biggest name in multimeters.

(And now, thanks to Wikipedia, I know that Fluke and Tektronix are today both subsidiaries of the same corporation!)

Tektronix.com redirects to tek.com, and they’re not even trying to get some Google juice for a new domain name; tek.com and tektronix.com are similarly antiquitous.

If a human had bothered to look at the page they were asking me to link from, they probably would have noticed that such a link would only be appropriate if the multimeter being mentioned was a Tektronix product. Which, since the meter in question belongs to one of my readers, not me, I do not know. But I doubt it, because Tektronix multimeters are really nice and really expensive. The entry-level model on the page they want me to link to lists for $US750, and the top-of-the-line model is $US1350.

That’s too rich for my blood, so I couldn’t even validly link to the tek.com page from some use of the words “my multimeter” that was actually me talking about my multimeter. My good multimeter for formal dinners and meeting heads of state is…

…a Protek 506, here seen in the company of one of my random sub-$10 meters and my Micronta 22-195A, which was the very first multimeter I ever bought, when I was so young I still thought it was pretty cool to buy things at Tandy. (It still works. Might even still be accurate.)

So, to Luke Montgomery, SEO Specialist: Send me a Tektronix DMM4050 and I assure you that even though I’ll never use at least half of its features, I will link to any page you like the next time I refer to using it, without the tiresome nofollows I’ve put on all the links to your site above.

And, to Tektronix: Don’t do this. (Or pay an Experienced Organic Web Strategist like the windswept and interesting and possibly insomniac Luke Montgomery to do it for you.) It’s stupid.

If Tektronix made a general site about what multimeters are and what they do, then links of this sort, to that site, would be valid. Links to particular products from general terms are the opposite of informative, though. This one would be worthless to readers who already know about multimeters, and would either annoy or actively misinform readers who don’t already know about multimeters. It’s like asking someone to link some random mention of “my car” to BMW’s page for the current 5 Series.

Search engine optimisation can be perfectly valid - when, for instance, it makes it easier for people who want to buy the sort of thing you sell to find you.

Tell someone you’re in the “SEO” business, though, and they’ll probably assume you spend your days pursuing a higher Google PageRank by polluting the Web with misleading and useless information. And they will probably be right.

In conclusion, as regular readers will by now be expecting: Take it awaaaaay, Bill!

UPDATE: Luke Montgomery got back to me, with about the best response I think the laws of physics permit in this situation:

Okay I admit the email did seem a bit spammy. I realize you must receive a lot of spam/email/link-requests all the time so I just wanted to apologize. I send out emails all the time requesting links and I guess after I while I just get in a rut and start to sound like a robot. I am sorry for the spam, my intention was never to bother you. Your post made me realize how I was sounding and I’m sorry.

Luke

There may be hope for the boy yet!

OpenOffice (technically “OpenOffice.org”) used to be clunky and slow and questionably compatible with Microsoft Office. But nowadays it’s pretty darn good. I’ve recommended it to many people who need a proper office suite - or just a proper word processor or spreadsheet - but don’t want to pay for MS Office, or rip it off.

(Which is not to say that I think you should pirate MS Office, but that does seem to be a pretty popular pastime, and it’s silly to pretend that it’s not at least an option for a lot of users.)

I just downloaded the current version of OpenOffice to install on this computer, though, and had one of those experiences that us computer suuu-per geniuses can deal with quite easily, but which would have been an utter disaster if I’d just sent some hapless Ordinary User off to openoffice.org to claim their free office suite.

I went to download.openoffice.org, and selected the friendly green option at the top of the list. That earned me a brief look at a “You are about to download OpenOffice.org…” page that redirected, long before any non-cyborg could have read its contents, to this PlanetMirror page.

I got sent to PlanetMirror because I’m in Australia, and so are they. As it turned out, this choice could have been better made.

I, like many of you faithful readers, have been on this particular fairground ride before. So I could quite easily figure out that the thing I wanted would be in the last of the listed directories - “contrib”, “developer”, “localized”, “packages” and “stable”. Never mind whether Great-Uncle Fred could figure this out, though; many perfectly competent computer users who know about backups and spyware and other such things would be taken aback by this.

Into “stable” I went, and then into “3.3.0“, after briefly checking to make sure that 3.3.0 actually is the version number of the most recent stable release of OpenOffice.

(The “You are about to download…” page actually says “You’ll find the OpenOffice.org downloads in the subdirectory stable/version”, but only down at the bottom where you won’t have time to read it. And I can just see a normal human being looking at these directories with numbers for names and saying “but there’s isn’t one called ‘version’!”)

Now PlanetMirror proudly presented an ordinary alphabetic view of all of the very-long-named OpenOffice 3.3.0 downloads, which thanks to alphabetic sorting put the Windows version right at the end, after the SPARC Solaris versions and the source-code archives.

Page down, page down… ah, there it is, “OOo_3.3.0_Win_x86_install-wJRE_en-US.exe”. Obviously. So I click on it, and…

File not found.

After all that, the damn file is not actually there.

OK, no problem, how about “OOo_3.3.0_Win_x86_install_en-US.exe”, the version that doesn’t have the Java Runtime Environment bundled with it?

Nope, that’s not there either.

Not a single damn file in that directory listing actually exists.

So I just said “oh, for pity’s sake…”, and headed off to ftp.iinet.net.au. IiNet is my ISP, and like many ISPs has a general-purpose FTP server dangling off its main domain like a vestigial organ (non-iiNet users probably can’t access it).

OpenOffice is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect to find on such an FTP server, and indeed I do find it, in “pub”, then “openoffice”, “stable”, “3.3.0″, and then the same big list of big-named files, except now they actually bleeding exist.

I’m sure this OpenOffice.org/PlanetMirror Australian-download… issue… will soon be fixed. I shudder to think how many potential Aussie OpenOffice users have given up in entirely justifiable disgust, though. Anybody who already knew about BitTorrent would probably find it easier to rip off Microsoft Office 2010 than go through all this.

And I know, I just know, there’s some poor Aussie geek out there on the phone to his mum, trying to walk her through the process and rapidly losing the will to live. You’d rather just e-mail the installer to her, if it weren’t 150Mb.

Most, if not all, of the other official OpenOffice mirrors actually work. If, once again, you know what you’re doing, you’ll be able to go back to the “You are aboute to download…” page and whack Escape before it redirects, then click the “select a mirror close to you” link, which leads to this page. I picked one of the Indiana University ones, which actually works.

Even if the auto-redirection takes you to a working mirror, though, it could work a lot better. Obviously there should be a brightly-lit and cheerfully-signposted path directly to the Windows, Mac and Linux installers, not just a page-flip to an FTP directory that expects ordinary users to find their way down through “stable”, et cetera, by either trial and error or mental telepathy.

I could have avoided this whole rigmarole by downloading LibreOffice instead. It’s a recent fork of OpenOffice and thus far pretty much identical, and has exactly the sort of sane download page that I wish OpenOffice.org had. So I’m doing my best to search-and-replace OpenOffice with LibreOffice in my mental tech-support database. If I hadn’t been writing this whinge-y blog post, though, I probably wouldn’t even have remembered that LibreOffice existed.

I hereby throw the floor open for your own similar tales of woe. Bonus points will be awarded for each hour over the first two which you spent on the phone to a family member on any “five-minute” computing project.