Category: historical

I read this somewhere

Written by Barry Warsaw in historical on Mon 25 January 2010.

I read this somewhere:

When we opened the door to this wonderful place, we were stunned!
Literally.  Uncle Fledge had to be led in by the hand and seated in front
of the massive TV.  He'd never seen anything so big.  Grandma loved the
"hot" tub and even with her massive girth, it came up to her chin so she
could relax.  The little family of hamsters or weasels kept wanting to
join her, so that's what the broomstick is for (in case you're wondering).

Uncle Fledge is a skier but he loved the game room so much, he played for
36 hours straight until he got pokey finger.  Then Aunt Weebus dragged him
out to the slopes.  Good thing too because we were getting tired of White
Lion on the jukebox.  Uncle Fledge and Jimmie's favorite band, how did you
know?

Martha was kind of obsessed with the telescope but Billy brought his
laptop and then it was family YouTube time.  The view is spectacular
though.  Grandma loved watching the bears ice skate on the lake.  Never
seen that before she said.  The twins wanted me to add that the bunk beds
are fun, and the triplets loved having their own rooms.  Mom and Dad
retired to the jacuzzi for 8 hours, and little Moby had to keep refreshing
their champagne.  We loved the Bears Den and will definitely be back.

- The Kimmels, the Conans, the Boxxees, the Fledge Jrs & Srs, Phil, Sarah,
  Monk, Billy, Jimmy, Sandy Candy & Mandy, Uncle F. Aunt W, Grandma, Tina,
  Mallory, Frank, Stu, Mack T, Mack F, Tug, Willy and "Beans".

Pain

Written by Barry Warsaw in historical on Mon 21 April 2003.

This is a repost from my earlier blog. I totally disavow everything my younger self said. He doesn't know what he's talking about.

There's a Star Trek (original series) episode that I dimly remember. I think it's the one with the rotating stoner light on the ceiling in the penal colony, but I'm not sure. I don't know what's sadder: that I used to be able to name each episode before the first commercial break, or that my memory is so far gone, that I no longer can.

Anyway, I think while Kirk's in the chair transfixed by "the colors, dude!" a man in the next room utters the single word: Pain. And Kirk feels the pain.

I'm thinking of this because I'm doing a CVS merge from the trunk of the Mailman tree into the 2.1 maintenance branch. That perverse little guy who invented CVS has just uttered "Pain" as I stare transfixed at all the pretty colors in my XEmacs buffer. And it hurts like someone knifed open your balls (which has happened to me, but that's probably too much information, huh?).

Why is this so painful? Well, part of the reason is that there are CVS id strings in the files that really shouldn't be there. They just cause conflicts for no good reason. Yeah, I know about -kv, but I know it about the same way I know the Star Trek episode, so it doesn't help me much.

The other reason is worse: there are tons of files that aren't in English and that I didn't write. Because Mailman is internationalized, there are a raft of files containing text in everything from Italian to Japanese, and now (tickling my ethnic pride nose hairs) Polish too. Now, for my own sanity, I'm trying to move to …

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Young Again

Written by Barry Warsaw in historical on Fri 04 April 2003.

This is a repost from my earlier blog. I totally disavow everything my younger self said. He doesn't know what he's talking about.

So I'm blogging. All the kids are doing it and it seems like a great way to rant and vent in a write-only forum. I feel like I did the first time I recompiled my Linux kernel. Once again I can put off my mid-life crisis without having to waste money on a fast car or have a divorce-inducing affair with the babysitter. Blogging is much less likely to have an impact on anybody else in the world, and that's probably a good thing.

Thanks to my colleague Jeremy Hylton for finding a nice Elisp blogging tool which makes it really easy to write these things. Expect a lot of content early on, followed by long periods of inactivity. But no one's reading this anyway, so who cares?

The main thing I've been doing lately is immersing myself in graphical IMAP based mail reading clients. I've been a VM user for years, preferring of course the One True of the One True Editors. But lately I've been disappointed with VM, primarily because of its lack of true remote IMAP support. I use at least 3 different desktop machines (Linux and MacOSX -- I'm Windows free!) regularly, as well as my laptop in various locations, and tunneling XEmacs over SSH is just not cutting it. VM has some support for IMAP but only by sucking all your mail over from the server to the local client, and that just defeats the whole purpose. I might as well burn a DVD with my gig of 20 year old email so I have it with me at all times.

I started out by using Apple's Mail application for OSX. I'm a …

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