I got up this morning with hundreds of messages in my inbox, and re-sorted them to the correct folders. My monkeyplexer program, which sorts stuff into the correct folders automatically, has been running out of control. I developed it for a version of CRM114 that's now totally obsolete, but the file formats and interfaces have all changed. I've taken a poke at bringing the program up to speed with later versions, but it's just not bad enough to deal with. Also, the horrendous interface of crm114 is just too ugly to imagine. Blech. Instead, I took the opportunity to unsubscribe from about 25 mailing lists that I no longer read and that go from my inbox to an overstuffed folder to a trashcan two weeks later. Hopefully this will take some of the pressure off of the monkeyplexer until I get time to either a) move to something easier and bayesian like ifile or b) upgrade monkeyplexer.
tags: crm114 email monkeyplexer folders mailing lists sorting
My mom, the rattlesnake magnet
So, my Mom got bit by a rattlesnake yesterday morning. She'd taken a baby car seat out of my Dad's car the night before to put it in her car, but it was too late and dark so she left it in the driveway to install in the morning. Apparently when she tried to install it the next day, a rattler had snuck in there to sleep and nailed her on the arm. (My folks live on a pretty big lot in Los Altos Hills, and there's a lot of wildlife, of the fuzzy and also scaly nature.)
She got to Stanford Hospital just fine, and she's had 4 rounds of anti-venom. She's hurting but they think it's going to be all right.
The strange part of the story is that this is the second time she's been bitten by a snake. I'm not sure how she's survived the process twice, but I'm pretty amazed that it happened twice at all.
Waiting for news, here in Montreal... a little nerve wracking.
tags: mom rattlesnake bite los altos hills
Peer-to-peer, broadcast style
I read through TechCrunch that three major studios will be distributing shows via P2P in the coming months.
That's all well and good, but if it's a for-pay system (content costs $0.99 and up), why should you have to contribute any bandwidth into a peer-to-peer system? For a dollar a pop, these should be easy, high-performance HTTP downloads, not shaggy and unreliable p2p stuff. I contribute my upstream bandwidth to Free Software and Open Content, not to re-forwarding something I had to pay for.
tags: p2p tv techcrunch for pay
Stimulus and response
Thanks to Matt for forwarding this excellent summary of blogs.
tags: blogs matt malex microbes
While on the subject
Our home mail server went on the fritz while we were in California, and it was a serious pain in the keester. I had to redirect all our mail redirects from our home server (bad.dynu.ca) to Gmail. The home server's back in business now, but I hadn't changed the email stuff back yet... and today I decided not to.
I've re-pointed mail for our business, Wikitravel, and personal domains to the old Wikitravel server at iWeb (the same server this site runs on). I think that's probably the best thing for us to have a "home" server that's not at home; we really need to be able to get to our stuff from the road.
It's been good so far; most of the domains were pretty easy. It's been the ones I'd forgotten about that are a hassle. Like, say, bad-people-of-the-future.san-francisco.ca.us. Damn, man. The geographical .us domains used to be one of my favorite things. Now they're not so much.
tags: mail server move .us iweb gmail
Second wife
So, I guess I'd finished some work yesterday, and I was feeling pretty good about it, because after dinner I decided to spend a little illicit "me" time. And with me, that usually ends up being a game.
I'd heard a lot about Second Life, and I was especially impressed by some of the important appearances in the world, like Larry Lessig and Mia Garlick of Creative Commons.
But I also have a terribly addictive personality, which is exemplified by the large pile of coffee cups on my desk, but also by the way I go completely crazy over video games. I just don't play them that often any more, because they suck up huge parts of my life, and in the end I've just moved a few bits around. So I try to steer clear.
So the fact that there doesn't seem to be much to do in SL -- no level-ups, no territory to conquer -- is kind of an advantage for it. So I gave SL a try last night. I had to use one of our laptops, since the Linux alpha of their client doesn't work on Ubuntu (as far as I can tell).
I'll say this: it's awfully nice for graphics, and the world is incredibly built out. But I felt a little bit like a hobo in Vegas -- everything was about casinos and strip clubs and huge fancy houses and cars and planes that I couldn't afford. SL is pretty famous for charging for every little thing, and building an impressive dual-world economy. It seems to have worked pretty well -- there's lots of chasing after the lucre in SL. It was awfully good on the eye-candy, but I felt like Neo in the Matrix: all I could see was dollar signs behind the colors.
When I told Maj this morning why I was up till 2AM last night, she gave me a serious scowl. I'm pretty sure my SL days are over... mostly. After all, there's a theory that MMORGs are the reason why we haven't met any aliens -- that any sufficiently advanced culture is going to get sucked into pretend worlds like SL and not go out and explore the universe.
tags: second life mmorpg games vr cc