Monthly Archives: August 2009

For old time's sake

I unsubscribed from a bunch of mailing lists I don’t read anymore in an attempt to cut down on the amount of e-mail I need to deal with on a day-to-day basis. One of them was still managed not by mailman (the evilness of which is self-evident even to casual observers), not by Majordomo (“most recent version is dated January 2000”), but by LISTSERV. Which is something, in this day and age; you don’t see that very often.

LISTSERV has a whole host of weird behaviors that, even back in the day, seemed oddly quaint; now, they’re just bizarre. (It always felt to me like it was written by and for people who thought JCL and its ilk were the pinnacle of human-computer interaction. For all I know, this may actually be true — but whatever.) I had, however, forgotten about this little gem, tacked on to the end of my “SIGNOFF” request:

Summary of resource utilization
-------------------------------
 CPU time:        0.010 sec                Device I/O:        0
 Overhead CPU:    0.004 sec                Paging I/O:        0
 CPU model:         8-CPU 1.6GHz Xeon (1M)

It warms my heart to think that somewhere on the Internet, someone still cares about overhead and process accounting for e-mail.

This oughta be fun

My Blackberry went for a bit of a swim — well, more like a wading session — early this morning when I tried to answer it but knocked it into a glass of water. It worked fine when I talked on it (“I’m sorry, you sound all garbled and confused!” “That’s because I’ve been asleep for two hours!”), but the keyboard is, as would be typical with any electronic device like this, kind of… non-compliant. So it is now sitting on my balcony, in the sunshine, in a plastic bag full of rice, my stash of dessicant packs apparently having been lost in the recent move.

We’ll see how this works. We’re scheduled to go away for the weekend, and leaving my phone at home unplugged in a bag of rice might be a therapeutic thing for me; I’m not sure. Unplugging is a strange thing when I do it during travel; it’s doubly strange when you’re nominally at home.

The Jerry Maguire moment

The low-rent version, anyway.

I’m wrestling with a bunch of ideas right now. They seem incredibly important; they possess a kind of urgency to them, like I want to vomit them out onto someone’s shoes. That won’t work, though — obviously if I’m going to convince anyone, it wouldn’t do to have to give them a towel to clean up after me. Unfortunately, these ideas are only half-formed. So I’m trying to bring some semblance of order to my thoughts on the issue of organizational health and development. I’m not naming names, though anyone who knows me knows perfectly well what I’m talking about.

Skip this unless you want to hear my incomplete hack theories that would probably get me laughed out of any third-rate B-school. I’m serious. Buzz off.

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