Blerp

Big reshuffling of office space in progress at ITA this week. I've been upgraded to a nicer cube on the 7th floor, though sadly am surrounded by strangers. On the third hand, it's pretty quiet here, as I'm no longer sitting next to company-knowledge gurus and their attendant conversation vortices.

Something's messed up with my network drop; they did a good job transferring random crap I had on my desk, but I think someone pocketed my internets. I have asked Dan to put in a requisition for some new ones. If I don't get any by 4 or so I'm goin home. Yes, I am billing for this.

At least I'm getting some self-improvement in, reading Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices in the meantime. daerr bought a couple copies for the office last year and I've always meant to get into it. I'm about halfway through now, and am finding it brilliant.

I think that Conway may be my favorite technical author. It was another of his books taught me object-oriented programming many years ago. His presentations have a reputation for being especially wacky, but his writing sublimates his sense of humor into subtlety, making the text uniformly informative and engaging. Contrast this with the lame, chunky-style humor perpetrated by way too many tech book authors who think that they're the next Larry Wall. Including, sometimes, Larry Wall. (Also including myself; I'm a little embarrassed now by the excesses of "humor" in Perl & XML).

I may go to an MIT entrepreneur workshop thing with Jared tonight. I haven't been to one since before Origins, and all the adventures that Volity Games has had in the meantime would give me a real change in perspective. I dunno though.

Top-posting Considered Harmful

I'm starting to fear that Jeopardy-style quoting is so prevalent now that many people just stop reading as soon as they see their own name in an email.

For example, imagine an email reply that was shaped like exactly like this blog post, with a preamble paragraph like this before I got into actually responding to what you said, which I shall begin to do by pulling a quote from your original message.

On Tuesday, Nov 14, 2006 at 12:01 PM, You wrote:
>
> Hey jmac. Did you know that I like cheese?
>
> It's so delicious. I can't eat enough of it. I wish I had some.
> :(

And here's my response to your dilemma, perhaps telling you where you can find some cheese right around the corner, but you won't read this far because you see the "On Tuesday..." line with all the quoting underneath, and figure that everything afterwards is just a copy of the mail thread so far. But you'd be wrong. No cheese for you.

This has started to cause some real problems, for me, I think. It's annoying but there's little I can do, other than never begin with a preamble if I'm going to do any quote-interleaving. (Leading with a quote never seems to confuse anyone.)