Recently in Personal Category

Slogans + Geeks can be a fun combination when it comes to word plays. Two of my favorites have to do with Windows.

First, there’s Help Desk, which is a long-running web comic about a fictional, capitalistic, anti-consumer company called Ubersoft that markets an operating system known as Nifty Doorways. Their slogan? “Let us show you the door.” I think it captures the spirit of the fictional company perfectly, as portrayed in the comic.

For a real life, non-parody example, there’s the Samba project, which makes an emulation package of sorts that lets Linux computers make files and printers available (among other things) to Windows users as though the Linux computers were Windows computers themselves.

Their slogan: “Opening windows to a wider world.” Wonderful.

I’m going through the settings of a hard-core E-Mail program, and came across this lovely setting:

Copy To Address to From if it is Us

There’s a line that doesn’t parse easily.

At a hotel, after a day of eventful travel and 3.5 hours of sleep the night before, it’s (almost) needless to say that I’d been asleep for some time:

Phone: Ring, Ring, Ring

Me: <urg> Hello?

Phone: <cheery voice> Hi, is this Bob?

Me: Umm, no?

Phone: Oh. Is this room 202?

Me: No, it isn’t.

Phone: Oh, sorry. <click>

A couple of notes to keep in mind:

1. If you’re meeting passengers coming in on an international flight, and you’re thinking that the waiting/meeting area outside customs on concourse J is a sensible place to meet your inbound international party when the info screen says they’ll be arriving at concourse J, you’re half right (it is a sensible place) and half wrong (there’s a pretty good chance your party will arrive two floors below and you’ll miss them, if they’re coming from Canada).

2. If you want to catch a shuttle to the hotel where your party is staying, after realizing that they’re long gone, and you’re thinking one of the dozen or so shelters marked “Hotel Shuttle” would be a sensible place to wait for one, you’re half right (it is a sensible place) and completely wrong (not a single airport shuttle actually stops at any of them). The proper approach is to go to the departures area, watch for the shuttle from the appropriate hotel, and then stand in front of it so it either has to hit you or let you on (the former would take more time to deal with, so they tend to stop).

This public service announcement has been brought to you by someone who spent way too much time not meeting his party at the airport today.

Oh, and one more thing that’s actually somewhat useful — if you want to get from Fort Lauderdale to Miami airport, and if you ask a hotel concierge, they’ll recommend a private sedan for $90 one-way. Go Shuttle quotes $120 one-way. If you persevere, you might get a taxi for $60 one-way. Don’t do any of these. Instead, take the commuter rail for $3.75 airport-to-airport, or $6.25 for a same-day round-trip ticket.

I just saw the following signature, from someone who’s not caught up in the whole paperless-will-save-the-world craze:

Notice: It is totally OK to print this email. Paper is a biodegradable, renewable, sustainable product made from trees. Growing and harvesting trees provides jobs for millions of men and women, and working forests are good for the environment, providing clean air, clean water, wildlife habitat and carbon storage. When you don’t need it anymore, be sure to put it in a bin designated for recycling, and it will come back to us as new paper or paperboard!

Ever since before we bought our new house a couple of months ago, it was looking like the road leading up to it was going to be one of the more… let’s say interesting aspects of home ownership in this particular location. Parts of it are quite steep, including a fairly sharp kink, and it becomes a dirt road partway through.

It’s better than some of the other roads or driveways we were considering, though, and it ended up not being a deal-breaker (a conveniently-timed blizzard let me check that out before we bought). It’s maintained by the town, unlike the adventure-ridden driveways of a few houses we were looking at, and the town appears to be good at maintaining it.

Well, mud season officially started on Saturday, and my word for the road was “Wheeee!” The road has a posted limit of 6 tons for the next couple of months, but I think the town is somewhat generous. I probably would’ve posted the limit at about 50lbs, because that’s more or less all it takes to deform the road. A vehicle over six tons would probably never be seen again. Both Christine and I have all-wheel drive in our vehicles, and they’ve been getting a workout.

Today, it’s going to be even more fun, as the temperature is now right around freezing, and the road is covered by about six inches of snow, so you can’t see where the ruts are, but there’s a decent chance they’ll still be shifting underneath the snow.

Wheeeee!

I just opened my Comcast statement, and read the following (emphasis mine):

This bill reflects a change in the FCC Regulatory Fee from $0.06 to $0.07.

Change is good! We continue to work on updating your Comcast bill to make it simple and easy to find important information. Please look forward to changes coming soon.

I think this falls under the category of “copy-editing would have been helpful”.

January

• Backed out of building a house with a separate floor/apartment for the business, when it became clear that it wouldn’t be able to happen in the timeframe necessary.

• Decided to stop actively holding back growth in the business, and instead to pursue growing and hiring employees.

• Started volunteering as the financial administrator for the local CCC group.

February

• Found office space at 30 Airport Road, which, in addition to being in a great location and having most of the amenities I wanted, required only minimal construction to be usable. Some friends got together and painted the whole thing for me over the course of a weekend, as well.

• Moved from our house in West Lebanon to an apartment in Lebanon. Great view, convenient location, and decent noise isolation.

March

• Started work in the new office. What space! It’s three times the size of the largest of the other three offices I’d been in, and hopefully won’t get outgrown for at least a few years.

• Hired two people part-time on a trial basis through the summer. Lots of training and learning.

April

• Added lighting to my repertoire of production services, now that I have somewhere to store the lights and stands.

• Helped with a missionary training conference. The sound mixer in the chapel of the conference center was from 1978!

• Did some coding for very nearly the first time this year. Wow, that was much too long a gap, but it means that having employees was starting to have the desired effect of freeing up some of my time. Indeed, looking at my Changelog at the end of the year, 40% of the file (which goes back to 2004) was written between April and December 2008, and that doesn’t count work done on other services this year.

May

• Ended up not being nearly as busy as in prior years. I never did figure out why, though I think it might have been as simple as people spreading out their mailings over a longer period of time, since June stayed busier later than normal.

• End-of-school-year concerts and banquets still happened, and the lighting went well.

• Changed the rate structure for prayer letters and introduced service levels, which meant that I’d no longer be reading every single letter.

• Discovered that the office suite next to mine was going to be vacant shortly. I’d been hoping that this would happen, but not for about two years, when I’d be in theory pushing the limits of my current space. My landlord offered to lease me the space at a huge discount for those two years, though, so we went ahead with that.

June

• Tried out a new, larger inserter. Looks good, but we couldn’t come to an agreement on lease terms, so it’s getting put off until 2009.

• Got some construction estimates on what it would take to turn the suite next door into several offices. Discovered that both the landlord and I were off by an order of magnitude on our original guesses! Construction ain’t cheap, even when the building is already in place. Suite #2 is therefore going to remain empty for a while longer until the business works up quite a bit more in savings.

• Started work on a new service, as well as a framework to allow me to take advantage of much of code that I’d already written for the prayer letter service.

July

• Decided to ask one of my employees to stay, and the other to leave. Ouch. Didn’t handle the latter well.

• Attended OSCON.

• Continued work on the new service, but eventually decided it was going in the wrong direction, and started over.

August

• Took first real, no-work vacation in four years. Didn’t check E-Mail all week. This is a definite benefit to having an employee.

• Kevin started working in a more permanent capacity, with the goal of taking on nearly all of the production work over the next couple of months (previously I had only had them doing post-production work).

• Got a new laptop, and successfully installed Ubuntu on it, surprisingly easily (I’d never had any success getting Linux to work on a laptop including all hardware components before, despite many attempts). Have been running Ubuntu as my non-work computer ever since.

September

• Dartmouth CCC started up again, which is always a busy time for me with surveys and other administrative stuff.

• Migrated from CVS to Mercurial for source control.

• Updated the survey code to run on the new framework while in the middle of Vermont with no Internet access, thanks to Mercurial and Ubuntu.

October

• Continued working on the new service on an intense schedule. After taking into account the flaws in the first iteration, things come together much more easily.

• Started looking at buying/building a house again, upon finding out that our apartment rent would be going up by over 8% if we stayed another year.

• Found a piece of land fairly conveniently placed in Lebanon. Offered asking price. Offer was turned down. Welcome back to the wonderful world of Upper Valley real estate.

November

• Bought a fair bit of equipment and furniture at an auction for a local printing company that had gone out of business. Made a quick trip to Newfoundland with one particularly large and heavy item intended for the Canadian office. That was fun.

• Almost bought a new modular house, but got nervous over a significant number of construction issues, and decided to back out. Looked at a few other houses without success, but eventually found one in Plainfield that looks like it’s going to work out. Also a new modular, small, but well laid-out for our needs, and it has a small barn.

• New service reached a demo-able state. Showed it to a few people at a conference, and got a better idea of what needs to be done before releasing it for public use.

• Began the end-of-year rush, roughly two weeks before Thanksgiving. The auction purchases are already coming in handy!

December

• What a rush! Lots of work (33% more than 2007), but having Kevin and Christine meant that nearly all of it got done within our timeline goals, which represented a huge improvement over 2007. The particularly-large mailing that derailed us in 2007 didn’t affect our turnaround times at all this time around.

• Handled audio and lighting for Christmas concerts. One was particularly complex, but came off well, and was very enjoyable (even if I did end up getting sick due to lack of sleep preparing for it).

• Ended the year with an enjoyable week of programming some significant enhancements into the PLS software that will make it much easier for us to handle complex mailings in the future, based on lessons learned during this end-of-year season.

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.