Funny: The Daily Show last night did an absolutely fantastic Rob Corddry segment with Scott Richter; sheer genius. Apparently, Scott is a ‘high-volume email deployer’, and spam is all the fault of the USPS, or something.
Don’t miss it… here’s hoping Lisa Rein digitizes it!
Tags: daily, deployer, email, fault, funny, genius, night, segment, show, spam, usps
Hardware: This weblog is jinxed!!
That’s the only explanation I can come up with. The day before yesterday, I blogged about exploding monitors and various halt-and-catch-fire software instructions. Last night, my monitor made a popping noise, emitted a faint burning-plastic smell, and shrank the display into a thin stripe down the middle of the screen.
Great. It’s dead as a doornail — I’m working from Catherine’s iBook for now. Quite a step down from the lovely 21-inch CRT. Argh :(
BTW, needless to say, I wasn’t running any scary apps — not even Freedom: First Resistance — the only possible display-hosing culprits were Firebird, KDE, ExMH or gvim ;)
Tags: day, display, explanation, hardware, monitor, night, noise, smell, software, weblog, yesterday
SoCal: Wild fires are raging throughout Southern California.
Last night, I was reading J. G. Ballard’s Millenium People (thanks Lean, it’s great!) outside on the balcony, when the Santa Ana winds whipped up suddenly, blowing hot and dry and laden with ash — then the coyotes started howling.
It felt very much like the end of the world… freaky stuff.
Everything is covered in ash; the air smells of wood smoke; the sun is a minute cent-at-arm’s-length red disc; everything is lit in a very odd reddish-orange tint. And the nearest fire is 30 or so miles away. I’d hate to see what they’re like up close…
Somehow I missed all this in Australia… I hear Sydney was like this for a week over Christmas that year.
Some links:
Tags: ana, ash, balcony, boing, end, everything, millenium, night, santa, socal, wild
Wild fires are raging throughout Southern California.
Last night, I was reading J. G. Ballard’s Millenium People (thanks Lean, it’s great!) outside on the balcony, when the Santa Ana winds whipped up suddenly, blowing hot and dry and laden with ash — then the coyotes started howling.
It felt very much like the end of the world… freaky stuff.
Everything is covered in ash; the air smells of wood smoke; the sun is a minute cent-at-arm’s-length red disc; everything is lit in a very odd reddish-orange tint. And the nearest fire is 30 or so miles away. I’d hate to see what they’re like up close…
Somehow I missed all this in Australia… I hear Sydney was like this for a week over Christmas that year.
Some links:
Tags: ana, ash, balcony, boing, end, everything, millenium, night, santa, wild
Odd: Naga fireballs: Timing still a mystery for scientists (Bangkok Post):
Methane and phosphine, a mix of phosphorus and hydrogen, were found in waterways near the Mekong. These gaseous substances were believed to cause the fiery balls, researchers said, though they were not sure exactly how or why they occur. Plant and animal remains release methane as they break down which probably combines with chemical fertiliser, containing phosphorus nutrient, used on farms in the area, to cause the fireballs. The soil in the riverbed is rich with the element.
However, the occurrence of crimson balls also required energy and microbes, which researchers cannot explain.
Mr Saksit called inexplicable aspects of the display a miraculous event while Mr Pinit predicted the study would cause him more headaches. He still did not know why the fireballs tended to emerge only on the full moon night of the 11th lunar month every year.
Laos to ‘cash in’ on Naga fireballs (The Nation):
Authorities from Vientiane Municipality’s Pak Ngum district and the Lao National Authority have prepared sites along the banks of the Mekong River and its tributary, the Nam Ngum, for tourists to view the fireballs rising from the currents tomorrow night, an official said yesterday.
Pak Ngum, where the Nam Ngum river meets the Mekong, is located some 50 kilometres south of the Laotian capital and opposite Nong Khai’s Phon Pisai district. Although it has no hotels, residents are willing to provide home stays for tourists, said an official at the Pak Ngum district office.
Spam: CNET removes anti-spam software ‘made by spammers’ (The Reg). oops!
Tags: district, methane, mystery, naga, nam, ngum, night, odd, official, pak, timing
I was clearing out my mail last night, and came across a message that referenced a mail I sent a few years back; it’s a selection of feature requests I made at the start of development of Evolution, the GNOME mail reader/contact manager/Outlook clone. (Not sure if any got implemented BTW ;)
Since I still think some of these are killer ideas that would really improve email readers, and since the only copy is sitting in a mailing list archive, I’ll take a local copy here by posting it.
Worth noting that the reason it came up was a quick mail exchange with Kaitlin ‘Duck’ Sherwood, who’s the queen of email usability, and will be working on the OSAF’s Chandler PIM (and mail) application. Not only had she read the CHI’96 paper in question, she noted it as a ‘profound influence’! Cool — and bodes well for Chandler!
Kaitlin also replied with some excellent plans for folder-overview presentation; I can’t wait to see the results in Chandler, personally. If you want an idea of this stuff, her page on the Perfect Email Client lives here.
Quick top tip: filtering or colorizing messages based how you’re addressed in the headers is immediately beneficial. Quoting Ducky:
My pet view also color-codes messages based on how you were addressed.
- to me and only me
- to me and other people
- cc me and only me
- cc me and other people
- bcc me
Most people who have implemented the above techniques (you can do itwith either Outlook or Eudora, though it’s somewhat painful to set up) tell me they’ve saved between 25% and 50% of their prior email time.
She’s right, too!
From: Justin Mason (spam-protected)
Date: Fri, 02 Jun 2000 12:11:56 +0100
Subject: CHI’96 paper on mail usability and some thoughts
Hi guys,
Dunno if you’ve seen this, it’s a good paper on email usability and some recommendations to improve same…
http://www.acm.org/sigchi/chi96/proceedings/papers/Whittaker/sw_txt.htm
Basically it says:
(I personally would add “as a reference bookshelf” as well in my case);
inbox it’s off the radar and soon forgotten about; and folder names are hard to pick and remember;
for an ongoing discussion, resulting in inbox bloat and an interleaved stack of messages from threads filling up the inbox;
of the “main” window and are lost in the noise.
to fix these:
the visual impact of inbox bloat and sorts 3. and 4.
with 1. (that’s the plan isn’t it!)
vfolders should deal with 2.
A few ideas I came up with myself during reading it:
the colours as a way of differentiating “todo low-priority”, “todo high-pri”, “support mails”, “pals chatting”, etc. This worked very well as a way to scan a lot of mails and immediately work out the rough categorisation without having to read and parse the from and subject. (unfortunately the code stopped working in the next ver of ExMH and my Tk knowledge wasn’t good enough to fix it!) Helps with problem 4 and aids scanning.
“read” and “deleted” (ie. not there anymore). I would like to see another state, “saved_as_context”, which would be similar to deleted; ie. the mail would not be visible to the user at all. However, if another mail came in that referenced the “saved_as_context” mail, it would be possible (probably through hitting a “view context thread” button) to see all of that new msg’s context mails. This sorts out problem 3 in a nice way IMHO. BTW it may even be better to use “saved_as_context” instead of “deleted”, ie. keep deleted msgs around for possible context use, and purge them periodically.
would help deal with problem 1 as well — e.g. changing a mail from “Re: help” to “How to fix the latest Outlook worm” is obviously handy for future visual message retrieval ;)
in the PIM interface; ie. right-click on mail, select “add to to-do list”, and that mail (and/or thread!) would be visible in the To-Do PIM interface in some way (even just as a “see this mail” link a la the “note” attached to Palm To-Do list items). It’d also be cool if this went both ways so the To-Do list position/priority of a mail was visible in the inbox view.
Anyway, these are some ideas I thought I’d throw in. I’m pretty excited by the possibilities of Evolution, and I’m looking forward to trying it out; after reading that paper, I just had to share ;)
BTW I haven’t used MS Outlook, so forgive me if Outlook sorts out these problems and I just didn’t notice — ditto for Evolution too, I haven’t had the time to get it compiling yet! ;)
–j.
Tags: copy, email, list, mail, message, night, outlook, paper, selection, usability
Thank ghod this is one experience of SE Asia I missed. I came across this blog through some random blog-hopping last night; it’s two farang tourists blogging their backpacking trip through the region. All great fun until they both catch Dengue fever:
Dengue is commonly called ‘break bone fever’, and I found out why at about 2 AM on the train. I woke up with a 102 fever, in the most intense pain I can recall having in years. Everything hurt, but especially my back and legs. Harper later described the sensation as one of having someone scrape your bones with a knife, and that sounds about right.
Jesus. I am so thankful I missed out on that particular aspect (a mild bout of food poisoning with a fever of 104 was all I had to put up with!)
Dengue fever is endemic to many parts of the region, even Bangkok , the capital city of Thailand. It gets a lot less attention than malaria, since it’s not fatal in the vast majority of cases (unless you get the rarer haemorrhagic version), but it is excruciating by all accounts, and I’ve met quite a few travellers who’ve met someone who caught it. Unfortunately there’s not much you can do to avoid it but slather on the DEET, cover up, and hope for the best.
Tags: blog, dengue, experience, farang, fever, ghod, night, region, someone, trip
last night RTE showed Chavez - Inside The Coup, a documentary about the 2-day coup d’etat in Venezuela in April 2002 which overthrew Hugo Chavez, and was then in turn overthrown in a popular uprising.
It was incredible. The team had amazing access to Chavez and the presidential palace while the 2-day coup and mass protests went on. The cameras are right there while Chavez is taken into custody by the generals, carries on rolling through the censorship of the media, through the street protests and shotgun-blasting riot police, and then catches the loyal-to-Chavez presidential guard retaking the palace from the inside.
Finally, it follows the negotiations to get Chavez returned from custody etc.; his cabinet are right there, on screen, talking to the generals on the phone while you watch and listen. Incredible footage, right from the thick of it.
As far as I could tell, it’s called Chavez - Inside The Coup, and is by Power Pictures, Irish lads from Galway, no less.
I’ve never seen anything like it. If you get a chance, don’t miss it.
Tags: april, coup, custody, day, documentary, etat, night, overthrew, palace, rte
Kim Jong Il Unfolds Into Giant Robot (Onion). Met up with Paddy Benson last night for a few drinks, and he let me into the secret that The Onion is, once again, officially funny:
‘If we add Kim Jong Il’s transformation into a giant robot to his already defiant isolationist stance and his country’s known nuclear capability, the diplomatic terrain definitely becomes more rocky,’ U.S. envoy James Kelly said. ‘Kim has made it clear that, if sufficiently threatened, he will not hesitate to use nuclear weapons or his arm-mounted HyperBazooka.’
‘We are also forced to consider the possibility that Kim may attempt to robo-meld with other members of the Axis of Evil, forming a MegaMecha-Optima-Robosoldier. Kim would make a powerful right arm – or even a torso — for such a mechanism.’
Wotcher Paddy!
Tags: giant, jong, kim, met, night, onion, robot, secret, transformation, unfolds
(ish!): The management of Sydney’s Taronga Zoo has mooted “manual stimulation” of Kibabu the gorilla, in order to grab some monkey semen for artificial insemination.
“I believe it’s done in Europe”, they say (maybe they’re harking back to the days of Weimar Berlin). Zookeepers, being the ones who’d get their hands dirty (so to speak), are — understandably — not too keen.
It now looks like something called “electro-ejaculation” will be used instead… sounds painful. (Link from forteana.)
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2002 07:04:12 +1000
From: Peter Darben (spam-protected)
Subject: Gorilla Wankers
—– (from The Age (Melbourne) 31.10.02)
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/10/30/1035683478852.html
Gorilla tactics rejected
October 31 2002 By Phillip Cornford
Kibabu the gorilla’s inability to produce offspring has become an embarrassing industrial issue for Taronga Zoo in Sydney.
The zoo management’s proposal for an artificial insemination program using manual stimulation of the sedated gorilla was vetoed by zookeepers.
“It was too bloody dangerous,” a zookeeper said last night. “What if he woke up?”
Red-faced Taronga officials last night confirmed the masturbation program was proposed last May, but said there had been no further attempt to employ it. “I believe it’s done in Europe,” a spokesman said. “There’s been a lot of discussion on how to get semen from Kibabu for artificial insemination.”
Instead, Kibabu - whose harem numbers five females - will probably be stimulated by an electrical device, a process called electro-ejaculation. Kibabu’s failure emerged yesterday as about 350 zoo staff planned to stop work at 2pm tomorrow to discuss workplace agreement issues, including wages, working hours, stress and job-related risks.
—–
peter
Tags: gorilla, insemination, kibabu, management, night, program, semen, stimulation, taronga, zoo
The weblog of Justin Mason; incoherent ramblings about Apache SpamAssassin, anti-spam, perl, software development, and the web, from an Irish software developer.
The opinions expressed on this web site are my personal opinions, and do not in any way represent those of my employer.
