September 2008 Archives

I mentioned a little while ago that I was hoping to get more involved in Dartmouth CCC’s ministry this year. Well, that has happened, and it’s been fun so far, though somewhat crazy. This was kickoff week, when all the freshmen go through orientation, and looked something like this from my vantage point:

Last Weekend

Looked at my survey and web site hosting code, which I haven’t touched in roughly three years. If ever you want a measure of how far you’ve come as a programmer, try working with code you wrote three years ago, and see how much you despair.

In any case, I needed to get it off of one server and onto another, and eventually stopped beating my head against the desk and started making progress.

I also switched version control systems from CVS to Mercurial for just about everything. Mercurial (aka Hg) has a rather nice advantage in that you have the entire repository available on your computer, so you can be in the middle of Vermont (Bridgewater Corners) and be able to check code in and out, commit revisions, and be a good doobie programmer without needing to suffer through trying to get an Internet connection through a cell phone and keep it for more than 30 seconds at a time.

Monday

Figured out how to do direct deposit for payroll. Paid quarterly estimated taxes. Ordered paper and envelopes. Sent 46 E-Mails. Helped with a few mailings. Finished getting all of the relevant code on my laptop, and having some semblance of a working LAMP stack (of the Linux Apache Middleware PostgreSQL variety).

Then, at 4:30 or so, went to the post office, tried to buy stamps (the line was out the door, so I decided to skip it until Wednesday), then went to Dartmouth to meet CI people going to the kickoff retreat.

Brought laptop, with the three year-old survey code, and started revising it while dinner was being made, and while listening to stories from the summer. Kept working on it after dinner before the meeting proper started, and got enough it more or less working on my current setup right as the meeting was about to start.

Left the retreat at roughly 12:30, drove home, wrote a few more E-Mails, went to bed.

Tuesday

Went through previous day’s E-Mails, found out that the mailing equipment was having a Bad Day, drove back to the retreat. I’m not sure how much of the meeting I missed, but it didn’t seem like much had happened yet. It wrapped up around 4:30 or so.

Spent a rather long time trying to get an Internet connection via my cell phone. Since I have all three major OSes on my laptop, I was curious to see which would work best. Linux (via Ubuntu) failed completely. It’s probably possible, but I’ll need the Internet to figure out how to do it. This is more or less per expectations (many things are working quite nicely in Ubuntu, but DUN over bluetooth is a little obscure). Strangely, my Mac vs. Windows experiences were opposite their stereotypes — the Mac involved a fair bit of configuration, and then locked up each time it was trying to authenticate (complete freeze, of the ‘need to hold the power button for five seconds to reset’ variety). Windows just worked.

Once connected (which required being outside at a particular picnic table, holding the phone at a particular angle, and not moving a muscle except for those in my other hand), downloaded a document that Chris needed to peruse before I would take on any new commitments (i.e. finish one big project before starting on something new), and connected to Chris’ E-Mail (via POP3 directly using telnet, which is something I haven’t done in a while, but which is a whole lot more bandwidth-efficient than anything else), to find out that we’d received a good sized donation to help with the outreach activities we’re planning for the fall.

Got people hooked (with Ryan’s enthusiastic game-playing skills) on Settlers of Catan. Had dinner. More meetings. Figured out final cost for the retreat. Then two more games of Settlers. The first was more or less a repeat of the earlier game (same guy won by a huge margin). The second one was pretty amazing. I left at 1:30 (not having played in any of them), because it was clear it wasn’t ending any time soon. Apparently, it didn’t end until about 3:00!

Got back to the Upper Valley around 2:30, went directly to the office to try and scold both inserters into working. Wasn’t successful. Disassembled enough of the main inserter to bypass the broken part. Researched some more portable sound equipment. Refused to make a “buy” decision at whatever hour of the night that it was at that point, went home, went to bed.

Wednesday

Got up (somewhat late), called Pitney Bowes, did some catching up on things that had happened while at the retreat, ordered some sound equipment, started cleaning up the A/V storage room (Kevin put up some shelving for me earlier this summer, and I never got around to cleaning up and organizing it after that). Delivered mail. No stamps.

Printed lots of surveys. Did some research on projectors. The price point is getting very attractive on projectors that meet my specs. Haven’t ordered one yet, though (largely because I want two matching projectors and screens, which is, strangely enough, twice as expensive). Finished cleaning A/V storage room (for now).

Thursday

Because the week wasn’t crazy enough already, this was the day of the Care Net fundraising banquet, and the reason why I spent the evening on Wednesday cleaning the A/V room. It went really well — no skunk, no hyper-energetic rip-the-mic-off-the cable keynote speaker, no feedback. I actually got one noise complaint that it was too loud, so I’ll take that as a good sign (I almost always get the opposite from the people way in the back next to the kitchen). These particular people complained that it was too loud when they stood right in front of the main speakers, so I’m somewhat unapologetic about that (there’s a reason there was a gap between the speakers and the first table, known as the inverse square law).

After the banquet, spent a good chunk of the night getting the rest of the survey code working on my laptop.

Friday

Got up, went to work, unpacked sound equipment which had arrived (except for one case, which UPS left in Massachusetts, but that wasn’t a big deal), tested to make sure it worked. Transfered survey code from old server to new server (yay!), reconfigured main audio rack to handle video as well, packed sound equipment, bought stamps, went to Dartmouth. Arrived at 4:50 for a theoretical 5:00 start time, had a working sound system at 5:02, which is probably the fastest I’ve ever set up a sound system (thanks to having help and the new sound equipment). Set up this year’s survey on the new server during the meeting.

Meeting ended at 7:00. Took down equipment, hung out for a while, dropped equipment off at office, grabbed Subway, went to Chris’ house for a survey-entering party. Ate Subway. Started entering surveys while waiting for people to arrive (hooray for fast servers and non-buggy code!), then switched to getting other people set up to enter surveys. Discovered that I’d missed copying in the permissions from prior surveys when copying the database over, so started remedying that.

Switched to trying to get Chris’ VCR/DVD player to work, which involved taking it apart, extracting a VHS, dismantling it still more, discovered a bad motor and possibly a bad sensor, implanting another VHS tape to fool it into letting the DVD player to work, and finally getting it to work around midnight, once just about all of the surveys were entered. :-/ A few people decided to watch the movie (Monty Python and the Holy Grail) anyway.

Finished around 1:30, went home, and wrote this instead of going to bed.

Phew

I’ve had somewhat less interaction with people than I might have liked this week as a result of all of the above, but I think it helped some things run a little more smoothly than otherwise might have been the case. An unexpected aspect of this week was that I got a full night’s sleep every night except for Sunday night (even if it was relative to Alaska’s time zone, most nights). That was nice.

This is always the busiest week of the fall term for me — from here on out, things tend to go at a more normal pace, at least ‘til Thanksgiving week (regional staff conference, then the crazy mailing season). And I think it’s opened up an area of involvement and a way for me to connect with a few people this term/year, which is also nice, since I’ve had no idea what was going to come of that before this week. We’ll see how all that develops.

And now, I’m going to call it a night. Nothing’s on the agenda for tomorrow.

I was helping someone try and conquer E-Mail overload yesterday, and at one point he asked me how many E-Mails I get. I actually didn’t know, so I just ran a couple of searches on my logs.

In August, I received 14,273 E-Mails, of which 12,362 went directly to my spam folder. Yes, that’s 86.6% spam. One benefit of having your own server is that you can set up a really good spam filter, so I actually only see a spam or two every few days, and I’m not aware of ever having any false positives in over six years of using this system, except for one catalog E-Mail that I didn’t really want anyway.

That leaves 1,911, the vast majority of which went into my Inbox (I used to filter into folders, but now just have everything go into the one Inbox, and I deal with it right away). 69 got filtered to trash for one reason or another (things I used to read but don’t any more, but didn’t want to unsubscribe for whatever reason). Which works out to be just under 60 per day that wound up in my Inbox.

That said, I was almost completely off of E-Mail for a week, and it was summer, which tends to be slower, so I’m not sure how representative that is of a normal month.

Looking at September, so far, I’ve received 2,375 E-Mails, 1,918 of which were filtered as spam, and 8 of which were filtered to trash. That works out to be nearly 90 E-Mails per day that ended up in my Inbox, and there are three hours left in the day.

Number of E-Mails isn’t a very good measure of how busy a person is, since the number doesn’t convey how much work is involved in a given E-Mail. I happen to get a lot of status E-Mails, which are just read-and-delete, so people who get far fewer E-Mails than me could very well have more work to do to keep up with them. And people who get far more E-Mails may be able to delete more of them without even reading them.

But it’s an interesting number, all the same.

In terms of outgoing mail, I sent 344 messages in August, or a little over 10/day, on average (with a week off — discounting those seven days, it jumps up to between 14 and 15 per day. This month, so far, I’ve sent a little over 20 E-Mails per day. This number has dropped rather significantly since I’m no longer the one sending most of the production-related mail for my business.

Again, there’s no measure there of whether they were twitter-sized or Pauline epistles, but it’s an interesting number to look at.

I think one of the best measurements of how well you’re conquering E-Mail overload is by the size of your Inbox. Ideally, it should be zero, at least every so often (once per day is a common recommendation). This doesn’t measure how busy you are with E-Mail, but it does tell how well you’re keeping up.

For me, I aim for an empty Inbox at least once a week, and am usually able to meet it (I keep track). That means that any E-Mail that comes in will have an answer within a week, even if that means saying “I can’t get to this now, but will get back to you at such-and-such time” and otherwise ending up on my to do list.

Current Inbox size: 10, with the earliest E-Mail received yesterday.