Deef's Net

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.

This has been a weird week for me.

On the one hand, the number of mailings sent this week comes in at #7 for all time, which is not bad at all for a summer week (being closed last week certainly helped).

On the other hand, I was barely involved in any of them. I did proofreading on roughly two mailings (one of which was a postcard, so that barely counts), and I only read a few others because I happened to be walking by the staging area while they were there, and I was curious what their writers were up to. For the majority, my only involvement was putting together the invoices, and trying to suppress the “did you remember to…” urge.

This is going to take some getting used to. Over the past few years, I’ve read literally thousands of prayer letters (it’s a neat job), and my days have been more or less defined by what shows up on my work list. Monday’s the busy proofreading day, Tuesday’s the heavy output day, Wednesday-Friday show declining amounts of work and are therefore the best days for meetings, and so on.

Now, rather than doing all the work myself, my task is to make sure Kevin has everything he needs (training, supplies, background knowledge, environment, etc.) to do the work. Beyond that, which doesn’t take as long — particularly on Mondays — I need to figure out what to do with myself.

Not that there’s any shortage of other things to do, and not that I’m just twiddling my thumbs, by any means.

But my schedule is much less defined than it was even a month ago, when I was still involved in some sense with every letter, even if I wasn’t doing most of the work then, either. And I didn’t view it as being very defined even when I was doing all the work. So I need to be careful to enforce some level of discipline that isn’t being forced on me by the work itself. Otherwise, it’ll be too easy to fritter away time on things that I don’t really care about.

Loosely, I want to be dividing my available (work) time into the following main areas:

1. New product development. I have a ton of ideas of things to implement, and need to choose and create one that will help fund the creation of the others.

2. Existing product enhancement. There are areas of the mailing service that could be improved, and in some areas, there’s a lot of room for improvement. There are also a number of things that I need to change from the operator’s perspective so that Kevin doesn’t need access to some of the arcane and obscure knowledge in my head that I only know because I wrote the code that he’s using, particularly when it comes to importing mailing lists (very powerful code; not so user-friendly).

3. CCC involvement. Beyond being keeper of the checkbook, enforcer of the budget, and discoverer of really obscure financial policy oddities, I’d like to get a little more involved with people again. I miss that. Now that the class of ‘08 has graduated, I don’t really know any of the students. How time flies! I only tend to connect with a few students in a given class anyway, and it was a bit of a shock to be going to a thesis presentation for someone I clearly remember staying up all night with during C&R her freshman year, playing cards outside Mid Mass while making sure nobody ran off with the tent.

4. Infrastructure. The process of ensuring that nothing is going to break under load, that everything is reasonably secure, and that people who work for me can enjoy doing so. This is less of a pressing concern than it has been in the past, now that cash flow isn’t a nail-biting issue, but it still needs time and attention.

5. Other stuff. I want to work on some skills and areas that I haven’t given much attention in ages. More on that some other time, perhaps.

That’s what I want to be doing. Now I just need to figure out how to structure my time to be most effective in doing so. And get used to the idea of not being completely up on the missionary endeavors of several hundred people.

Perl is an insane language. I love it.

I’m guessing that there are very few languages that can be made to interpret rod logic, as shown by Damian Conway during the opening night’s keynote (or Latin, or Klingon, to highlight other talks he’s done), nor are there all that many languages that let you write positronic variables that let you return results before you’ve calculated them (same talk).

But even if you discount the things you can do with filters, how many languages let you do something like this:

*{";\n"} = sub { print something }

In case you’re not familiar with some of the lesser used Perl syntax rules, that says “make a function called ‘semicolon newline’ and have it print ‘something’ whenever it’s called.”

That will probably result in a “so what” response from the non-techies reading this, but it should cause a certain tightening of the stomach and a feeling of low-level despair to any programmers reading this, possibly with a little jaw-dropping, once they realize what it means. (Hint: What is at the end of every statement in most languages?) And maybe some anti-Perl flaming for even allowing such a thing (don’t worry, it gets worse — for the C/C++ programmers out there, you can also name a function “\0”). But you can write Fortran in any language.

Back in 2004, I attended a tutorial called Perl Best Practices. This year, I attended Perl Worst Practices. Damian C. commented that we must be the smartest, cleverest people at the conference to have convinced our bosses to let us attend a three-hour tutorial with that title. I’m not sure what that says for me. Other talks included Perl Security and The Twilight Perl (showing that things that should be syntactically impossible really aren’t).

What’s neat about Perl’s insanity is that it let’s you do practically whatever you want. Even if you shouldn’t. Even if 99.999% of the time it’s a monumentally dumb idea. And that allows best practices to be developed and codified over time, rather than being limitations imposed by the language (there is that 0.001% where it’s the perfect solution, and saves you days of writing workarounds). This is increasingly becoming a defining point of the Perl community, once you get away from the people who treat Perl like stereotypical PHP.

Learning some of these crazy tricks, while hopefully not the sort of thing you’d ever use in production, gives you a better understanding of the language. If nothing else, that can be really helpful for debugging, or if you ever have to maintain someone else’s code (or code that you’ve written more than six months ago).

Because, once you’ve spent three hours going through SelfGOL statement by statement, there’s probably not much that an inexperienced or undisciplined coder can do to scare you.

Outside of the Perl world, one of my goals for the conference was to get a better understanding of Ruby, since it’s getting a lot of attention. Well, I tried to be open-minded, but even the presenter reinforced that it’s still a relatively new and untried language that’s going through a fair bit of change as it’s maturing, and the syntax didn’t seem all that better when considering code to line noise.

The “fair bit of change” description is especially true for Ruby’s frameworks. Not that Perl doesn’t have its own problems with frameworks (it does, and I may write some thoughts on that at some point, since they’re mostly not safe to use, either), but Rails is probably the main selling point that Ruby has, to the point of being synonymous to a lot of people, and it’s still very much a moving target, without enough of an emphasis on backwards compatibility.

That makes it a very bad choice for any program that you want to stick around for a while, unless you’re willing to invest a lot of your energy in keeping up with the changes to your underlying framework, rather than enhancing your own code (that’s my big problem with Drupal as well, despite my really wanting to like it).

But lest I be accused of having a bias against anything that isn’t Perl, I did come out of the conference with an interest in learning more about the Mozilla framework, along with a renewed desire to help in at least QA with that project, with the hope of eventually getting to know it well enough to write some client software using its tools. And I went to a good session that did an introductory overview of C, since that’s a definite area of weakness in my skill set at the moment. I probably should have attended a Python session as well, but there are only so many timeslots available. Maybe I can set that as a goal for next time.

All in all, I think I was only in one session that was particularly bad. Otherwise, there was a huge range of quality, but I didn’t find myself wishing I had gone to a different session instead. So that was definitely a win.

More on speakers and presentation styles next time.

Part 1 was a generic overview of my experience at OSCON this year. In short, I had been looking forward to this conference for about three years, and I wasn’t disappointed.

An event like this would probably be an anthropologist’s or sociologist’s dream study. Get over a thousand mostly highly focused, technical people, 80%+ of whom are introverted, statistically speaking, all with a fairly narrow similar interest, and put them all in one place to see what happens. It’s a lot of fun.

What happens is that a large number of them open up. They’re finally among people who understand them. They have conversations with complete strangers, almost like they were extroverted. (It helps that there are some extroverted people to act as catalysts.) They have that common understanding with these people that they lack with “normal” people, defined as roughly 99% of the rest of the world.

If you think I might be exaggerating, consider this — how many conferences have a “People” track, wherein many of the sessions in that track are related to how to get along with and interact with other people? (And some of them, based on overheard feedback, included practices that many would consider pretty fundamental, like, oh, say, the importance of showering.) That’s how bad geeks can be, in general.

One of the better talks that I did end up attending in that track (while speaker-following) had as one of its titles “Hacking Wetware.” For the uninitiated, “wetware” == “humans”. Oh, and hacking can be more or less defined as “getting to understand at a fundamental level,” not as “breaking in and destroying” or “doing evil things”.

Among other things, including using The Sims as its overarching point of reference, it featured the gem of explaining the stereotypical greeting using the TCP three-way handshake:

• Hi, how are you doing? (SYN)
• Good (ACK), and you? (SYN)
• Good, thanks for asking. (ACK)

It’s great because it lines up so perfectly with the point of the greeting — you really don’t care how people are doing, you’re just establishing communication. I admit, I poke fun at people rather often by either changing or abbreviating line two, and watching them completely miss it. Though, the best one I witnessed was actually done by Christine at a restaurant, when she answered “Wet” (it was raining outside), to which the hapless greeter replied “I’m so glad to hear it. I’m fine.”

Anyway, back to geek-watching. My flight to OSCON was a somewhat poorly thought-through one-stop flight from Manchester to Portland with a layover in Philadelphia. Timing-wise, it worked well, but I hadn’t thought about the fact that Philadelphia is further from Portland than Manchester, which made for a really long second flight.

While in Philadelphia, it occurred to me that there was a decent chance that I might be able to spot other people who would be going to OSCON. So the game became how to spot them. (I did this last year for the National Postal Forum. There was a whole group of postal service employees on my flight.)

An observation that I made some time ago with regard to Christian conferences is that you can usually tell by what t-shirts people are wearing. Christians know that they’re not going to face much of any persecution while at such a conference, so they tend to wear all their religious stuff there. (This isn’t just a religious thing — you wouldn’t walk into a bar in Boston wearing a Yankees cap and jersey without expecting some persecution, and possibly higher prices.)

So, one person made it easy. He was wearing a t-shirt that asked “What’s your uptime?” Easy tell.

Looking at another person, I got the sense that he was a geek, but initially wasn’t sure. Right demeanor, right dress, right luggage, but nothing definite. It wasn’t until we both got on the same train to get to our (same) hotel that I noticed the subtle giveaway — he had a glider from Conway’s Game of Life sewn on his messenger bag. There’s no mistaking that, but only if you’re “in”. Turns out he’s a Perl geek, too, based on the sessions we were both in.

Back to sociology. The other thing that was amusing (and which I practiced a fair bit) was that you can completely ignore people and it’s perfectly fine. As was noted while the speaker was talking about the three-way handshake, idle chit-chat isn’t a strong point of geeks, since many don’t see the point (it’s a pragmatic thing). On the other hand, you could dive right into one of the topics of the day and that was also fine. Never mind that you hadn’t introduced yourself.

One thing I didn’t practice was the habit of a lot of people in the audience to spend the entire session on their laptops. Some were live-blogging the sessions, some were chatting on IRC about the speaker (there was apparently at least one instance of buzzword-bingo during a keynote), and who knows what others were doing. It wasn’t particularly distracting, so it’s not a complaint. Since I didn’t know anyone at the conference, I didn’t have any incentive to join in. Plus, my goal was to focus on the content of the talks, along with how it was being presented.

Let’s see, conference topics are the next thing to cover, but I’ll save that for next time.

O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention is now over for 2008, and I now have the rest of the day to relax, rest, and reflect before my flight tomorrow.

I ended up doing a lot of reflecting, so in the interest of not publishing a novel in one chapter, I broke this post up into several parts, and will post them more or less daily (if I remember) over the next few days.

Christine commented that I’ve effectively been off the grid this week, and that’s been mostly true. I’ve handled a few E-Mails, mostly customer-related, but otherwise I’ve been a lot less available than even the last time I was here.

That’s mildly odd, because I’ve also been a good bit less social this time around (last time I hung out a lot with the PostgreSQL folks; this time, other than an evening with the Mozilla QA people and a Birds-of-a-Feather session on open source in churches and missions, I barely spoke with anyone).

On the other hand, I was personally paying for this conference, whereas the last one was paid for by my former employer, so I had a lot more incentive to squeeze every penny of value out of the conference that I could. Not that I was slacking off the last time, by any stretch. Which is exactly why I’ve gotten a few “Hello?” E-Mails this week, I suppose.

I don’t think I learned as much this time as I did last time, on an absolute scale. That doesn’t really surprise me — I knew a lot less last time, and I’ve spent the past four years working on expanding on what I picked up from that conference. But the sessions at this conference did do a lot to fill in gaps and refine my knowledge, and would have been worth it for that reason alone.

One thing I learned last time was that it can be a better use of time to follow certain speakers around than just picking sessions off the chart based on topic. Quite simply, this is because some speakers can make any topic a worthwhile learning experience, while other speakers haven’t spent enough time learning about speaking to be able to effectively present even an interesting topic.

That was borne out this time as well. After the first day of the conference, I decided to follow Paul Fenwick of Perl Training Australia, to the extent that I watched him give the same talk twice. He was probably the best presenter at the conference this year, at least that I saw. His presentation style is fairly similar to Damian Conway’s (another person on my “follow” list).

A mildly related observation is that you know you picked a good (or at least an esoteric) session on Perl when Larry Wall is in the audience. For any CCC people reading this, that would be roughly akin to you giving a talk on the Four Spiritual Laws and having Bill Bright sitting in the first or second row, watching and listening attentively. So, Tim Bunce (of DBI fame) made it onto my “follow” list after that session, too. His presentations weren’t of the same caliber as the other two (few are), but they were very useful.

Speaking of usefulness, I skipped nearly all of the keynotes, except when Damian C. and Paul F. were presenting. Maybe it’s that open source is more of a pragmatic consideration for me than it is an ideological one, though I suspect that at least some of the keynotes were paid advertising. In any case, they didn’t seem all that interesting, and I heard at least a few others (who did attend) say the same thing. This had the added benefit that it let me sleep in.

Oh, and speaking of sleep, having a conference in Portland, OR was really nice once I got here. It meant that an 8:30am start time was actually an 11:30am start time as far as my physiology is concerned, which is a much better time for a morning session for geeks to start, in my opinion.

And that’s probably enough for one post. Observations on geek anthropology, conference topics, and presentation styles will be coming up subsequently.

We’re moving, again. But not in the manner that we were originally planning.

Starting in November, our plan was to buy some land and build a house on it that would work for us, the business, and Christine’s future horses. We found the land, and put a deposit on it, but the house-building ended up not working out in our (admittedly short) timeframe, despite our builder’s original assurance that it was feasible. Fortunately, it became clear that he was being rather optimistic before we’d gone very far in the process, and we were able to back out of that plan without much financial investment.

Office Move

With that possibility off the table, the best option for my business was to lease some office space. I would’ve loved to not have to deal with that expense for a while longer yet so as to eliminate all of the business debt, but I think (now) that this is the better long-term plan.

As it turned out, the office space that worked out best for me is in the same area as the medical company where I used to work, which amuses me. It’s not the space for rent that’s directly across the road (which would have been quite something), but it’s only a couple minutes away.

That space should be big enough to last me at least three years. Since I have a three-year lease, that’ll be important. On the production side of things, it would take an incredible amount of growth (at least eightfold) before that space would become confining, assuming no major changes in my business model — I’ve left plenty of room for more and larger equipment, and upgraded the electrical to be able to handle the load. There’s also a lot more storage. It does lack a loading dock, which isn’t critical yet, but it probably would’ve been a deal-breaker if there had been any other space in the area with a dock that wasn’t an enormous warehouse (or run-down and with a rather loose definition of what constitutes a loading dock).

Once I hire a programmer or two, the space might become more problematic. In that scenario, it might be best for me to try and get some space elsewhere in the same building or the one next door, so as to provide more sound isolation than I could get in any layout where the programmer(s) is/are sharing walls with the production area. At least initially, though, I have an extra room that could very easily become an office for one or two programmers, and we can see how it works out, noise-wise. Part-time telecommuting might also be an option, or encouraging the programmers and production folks to work different hours.

Right now, the place is in the process of getting some electrical work, construction work, and painting done before I move in for the beginning of March. Everything seems to be going smoothly there (the electrical work is done, the construction’s moving along nicely, and the painting is in process), which is a welcome change from the house-building process. One of two Internet lines is already in place, the printer move is scheduled, and stuff is gradually getting moved over, so on the big move day, there shouldn’t be a whole lot to move.

(Oh, and if you happen to read a press release from the realtor about the space, don’t believe anything it says I said — I had no part in it. It’s a decent space, but the words I’m quoted as saying were completely made up, and the supposed strong points of the space were almost entirely the weak points, in my view. And the press release misspells my company name four or five times, though it does get it right once.)

Home Move

What with the office moving out of the house again, we no longer need a house anywhere near this big, so we started to look for smaller, cheaper places. Christine found some apartments that seem to be rather nicely maintained, decked out with amenities, and new (just built in 2004). We had a look at the complex, liked what we saw, and picked out one apartment design (out of four) that we wanted to pursue.

Out of the small number of apartments that met the criteria we set, one just came open, so we decided to jump on it rather than wait and hope that one would be available when our lease is up (only one of the others is even up for renewal by then, so the odds weren’t good). That’s going to mean a little more double rent than we’d like, but there’s also the chance that our current place can get re-rented early, in which case we can end that lease sooner. There was also a discount on the new lease, what with this being a slow time of year.

Since utilities are going to be quite a bit cheaper for us in the new place, we’ve decided to move there sooner rather than later, which works out to be next Saturday, i.e. even before the office gets moved.

That’s going to make for a very busy couple of weeks, though it’s not as compressed as our last move, thankfully!

This is another in an occasional series of commentaries on various companies’ attempts to get me to give up the security of paper statements so that they can save money on postage and printing.

First it was the ability to hide your Christmas purchases from your spouse (who presumably doesn’t have your password to look at online statements, but would pore over your credit card statement if it came in the mail, looking for that one Amazon.com purchase that stood out).

Then they offered to plant a tree, which would make you feel better about all those poor, defenseless trees you killed by not switching to paperless statements earlier.

Then, shock of shocks, they offered a $5 statement credit (just once, I checked) if you switched to paperless statements. They clearly weren’t looking at my monthly totals when they came up with that offer.

But now, they’re really raising the stakes. If you switch to paperless statements by such and such a date, you’ll be entered to win one of three MINI Cooper cars, 3 outdoor adventures, 5 kitchen appliances, 10 bicycles, and 100 gift certificates for $100 to a store I’ve never heard of.

“It’s Time to Go Paperless. It’s the smart thing to do.”

Assuming I never get audited, or have a dispute over a bill. Until I’m offered a satisfactory solution for what would happen if the bank were to go out of business tomorrow, and six years down the road I have to produce a statement for the IRS, I’m not interested.

I’d also like to see some admission that they’re doing this solely out of their own interests, rather than making up excuses (or lying outright) about it being better for me. This one comes close (why else would they be spending all this money on prizes if they didn’t stand to gain a lot more?), but no cigar yet.

(Also, regarding the whole “smart” thing. This is also the bank that sends me an E-Mail every month telling me about how great it would be if I paid my bill online, apparently without noticing that I do.)

Last night, because Christine and I weren’t having much success coming up with an activity for our date night, we decided to list a bunch of old books (30, all told) on Amazon Marketplace.

We’d done this before, and have had good success selling them — it helps that we’re both coming from library backgrounds, and the idea of dog-earing a page makes us shudder, never mind the absurdity of taking a pen or a highlighter to a book.

Well, late August is apparently the time to be listing books, especially school books, because within five minutes of entering them, we got an E-Mail saying that one of them had sold.

Ten minutes later, so had another.

Less than an hour later, the unopened DVD set, which we expected to go first*, sold.

By morning, so had a fourth, and a fifth did before lunch.

We’re up to six sold books out of thirty in the first 24 hours. So, if you have any old school books that you want to sell, now’s the time to do it!

* Every year for the past few years, one of my relatives sends me a DVD set of a different popular TV show for Christmas. I appreciate the thought, but my total TV consumption for an entire year is usually less than what you’ll find on one of those DVD sets.

Last year, it was a season of Seinfeld, so I figured it might be worth listing on Amazon, and I’d get something else instead. To our surprise, it had sold by the next morning, and at a pretty good price. So, given that, we were curious if this set (of Everybody Loves Raymond) would go as quickly, since it wasn’t near Christmas any more.

Since I have my own servers, and am a network geek, I’ve had very little incentive to use a service like Gmail, or (shudder) Hotmail over the years. There’s something to be said about having 100GB of disk space, fully-scriptable filters, unlimited aliases, and so on.

But, one feature of the free webmail providers that I have wanted occasionally, lately, is the “Report as Spam” button for unwanted corporate mail. Not the random junk from zombie computers. I’m talking about the companies (like, for example, everyone’s favorite we-shoot-gerbils-out-of-cannons company from the .com era) who insist on sending me monthly E-Mails offering their current back-to-school promotions even though I haven’t ordered from them in over four years.

Not that I can’t (or don’t) filter most of it out, but it actually has ramifications when you hit that button on Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and others. And when companies find out that they’re suddenly getting a 25% or more bounce rate from an E-Mail campaign because a couple of these giant providers has blocked them, it should hopefully produce some changes in their marketing practices. Maybe they should go back to using gerbils.