RANDOM THOUGHTS #248

Steve Cole's thoughts on ADB and the future of the SFU.
 

1. Maybe once a month I go scan through the blogs the company has posted. One of the things I have noticed is the occasional typo in my own blogs, which means Jean missed something, but that makes me feel good, because she really doesn't need to be doing triple proofreading of stuff we give away. We need to focus on things that make the money to keep the company healthy.
   

2. I also noticed that Jean and Steve Petrick are always posting blogs I didn't know about. Sometimes I wish I had known before they were posted (and stopped them) but the reality is that I can't check/approve everything. I have too much to do and if they give me something to read, they will get it back in 3d6 days. And that's a logarithmic scale, meaning they might get it back in three months or not at all. They really got tired of waiting for me to check stuff, I guess. I feel like I let them down, but if I stopped working on new products to check their blogs before they post, we'd get fewer new products done.
       

3. I have been doing "my day" for 20+ years and posting it for nearly that long. Every now and then, something inspires me to reorganize it, and that happened in October. I mentioned to Jean that I wanted to delete a particular item from each day but that the way to make sure nobody noticed it was missing was to reorganize the whole thing without deleting anything else. Jean said that she had long thought (and so had Leanna and a lot of customers) that there was a bunch of stuff on there that just didn't need to be there (such as what I had for lunch). I pointed out that some things had to be recorded because my doctor wanted me to, and Jean said, "put them into another diary," and I said, "I don't want to keep two diaries." While she ranted about how much she didn't like me posting what I had for lunch and that I should shut up and keep two diaries, one public and one private, I came up with a better solution, that is, to keep one diary but to move the private parts to the end of each day, put them on the screen in a different color to remind me what they were, and when I "cut and pasted" each day into the BBS I would just not copy the purple part. Jean readily agreed and joyfully pointed out no end of ideas for things to move to the non-posted section. Some of those made sense, some I didn't want to move (and some of those I moved anyway just to get Jean to stop pestering me). When I got everything reorganized, I started going through the non-posted part asking myself "why am I recording that?" One such item was the amount of spam, some fairly useless numbers that are tedious to record (since every time I delete spam I have to count it and add it to the number from a couple of hours ago). My doctor wanted me to record the weather each day (to keep my brain from rotting, I think) but she didn't want to see the records so I quit keeping those records. Nobody (not even me) cared what time I finished the daily web crawl so that went away. For years I have recorded the subject to Ann Coulter's weekly column, but liberals hate me for doing that and conservatives already read it, so it moved to the private area and became a simple "delete when done" note rather than a "insert summary of editorial" item. In the end, about a third of the work of doing My Day disappeared and everyone is better for it. I can more easily record truly private things that I need to track in the non-posted section, and (since I expect everyone to read the posted part) it's less than half as big and far less boring.