At tonight’s KPLUG meeting, I volunteered for service on, and was voted in by acclimation, the board of the San Diego Computer Society. I will spend the next two years serving as a director-at-large on the board.
I’d like to thank jaqque for pressuring me into doing this. I expect it to be a lot of fun. Really.
I like e-mail, in general. It’s a convenient, asynchronous, mostly-reliable method of communication. I can receive a message, mull over it for a while, formulate a semi-intelligent response, and it hasn’t really pulled me away from what I was doing like a phone call would.
Many would consider me a Luddite, preferring Mutt as my MUA. of choice. I can imagine the cries of people who use so-called modern mail readers: fancy text formatting! embedded images! annoying layouts! hidden viruses! phishing scams!
What happened to the power and effectiveness of the written word? I suppose many aren’t capable of scribing a well-formed sentence, so they compensate with fonts, colors, and cryptic abbreviations. Still others are attracted to the shininess of the formatting. They can send mail that looks like a web page! Even when all they wanted to do was ask a short question!
This is progress?
Normally, I’m content with killfiling any mail that arrives with a content type of text/html. Unfortunately, there are some people I simply must communicate with for whatever reason (usually it involves money in one way or another). One of the fastest ways to get on my bad side is to send me mail that requires extra effort for me to read. This rant is a result of one of these messages.
I drafted a message of moderate length to discuss some points I thought important. Normally, I would expect any responses inline or, at worst, top posted. No, the response I received was even worse than what I see from users of Eudora’s unintelligible reply style. The responses were added directly to the paragraphs I had written, but styled bold and red for “readability.”
Hello, this is my opinion on the matter. I see, but have you considered this other thing?
As can be expected, this style doesn’t lend itself well to reading in plain text. Of course, I don’t think this style lends itself to any kind of comprehension.
I responded to this message, demonstrating how difficult it was for me to read without jumping through hoops, and expressing my annoyance at being forced to jump through said hoops. I tried to be kind, blaming the bad-habit-inducing tools (Outlook) rather than the writer. So this fellow tries again.
With an attached PDF file.
Seriously? Was he so enthralled by the font styling that he felt compelled to force upon me an attached document in order to render correctly? Maybe e-mail really is dead. Apparently a well-written, plain text message is too much to ask for.
[tags]annoyances, e-mail, people[/tags]
Last week, on Wednesday afternoon, my Dell Inspiron E1505 developed a blue line on the LCD panel. It was one pixel in width and spanned the entire height of the display just left of center. Man was I ever annoyed! I immediately submitted a support request to Dell, not really expecting much.
My impression of Dell is very much improved from what it was. I was never really one to speak ill of Dell (I think the Inspiron is a great notebook computer), but neither has Dell really struck me as a great company. I’m not the type to buy a desktop or server computer from Dell, but the notebooks are a pretty good deal, particularly with the employee discount through Qualcomm. Well, apparently, I have an on-site service agreement with Dell and today a tech came out to replace the LCD panel. It would have been done on Friday, but we had some scheduling problems.
Really, I’m impressed. A support representative (likely in India) contacted me almost immediately to help me isolate the problem. I knew it was the LCD panel, but I went with it. By Wednesday night, I was informed that a replacement part was on its way to a tech to be replaced on-site.
I find Dell’s support even better than AppleCare. First of all, I don’t have to deal with the pretentious “geniuses” at the Apple Store’s Genius Bar; second, I don’t have to ship my computer anywhere to have it serviced. Congratulations Dell, I may even be a repeat customer.
Okay, enough cheerleading.
I’ve been reading Google Hacks as an “assignment” from my local Linux user group. Basically, we raffle off review copies of books donated to us from O’Reilly. One of the requirements of this is that we review these books. Well, I’ll have my review finished soon. But that’s not what I wanted to write about in this post.
One of the final chapters in the book contains hacks for webmasters. As the master of my own as well as a few other web sites, this chapter was very interesting for me. It pointed me in the direction of Google’s tools for webmasters, in particular Google Analytics. I’ve known about this tool for a while, but I finally decided to check it out. I love it. All I have to do is add a snipped of JavaScript on all of my web pages (view the source of this one and you’ll see it there at the bottom), and Google gives me all sorts of pretty graphs.
Most people awake on Sunday morning to thoughts of brunch, church, or football.
Not me.
I awake with Perl in my head. Sigils, modules, and regular expressions snaking their way through my dreams. I have to climb out of bed and make my way to the computer before it’s gone. I have to prototype this code before it stops making sense. I have to commit these arcane symbols to disk before they fade away like so many other hazy, indistinct dreams.
I have to seek help.
Lately, I will be sitting in my office, working one of my notebook computers, when I will hear what sounds like a mouse coming from my left. Only it’s not a mouse, it’s the hard drive in my desktop. Uh oh. My desktop computer is archaic by today’s standards, containing a measly 1.0 GHz Athlon XP and a mere 512 MB of RAM. So much so that I use it primarily as a file server and an SSH gateway into my notebook (a 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo with 2.0 GB of RAM).
Looks like it’s time to replace my aging desktop. I’m thinking a 2.x GHz Athlon64 X2 with 4.0 GB of RAM and two high capacity SATA drives in a RAID-1 configuration. Depending on cost, I may even get two CPUs for a quad-core system. Oh yes, that will really make my day.