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I wish there were a way to quickly search for recent diary
entries containing specific keywords. I can't keep up with
reading everything that shows up.
Debian-related
- licq -
Yes, the QT plugin crashes for some people. Unfortunately,
nobody can tell me exactly what configuration makes it
unstable. I still think it's a QT2.2 bug. The problem is,
of course, that it's impractical to try to reach everyone
who submitted a crash report every time the QT libraries
change. Worse, because it might be an interaction between
specific versions of QT and specific versions of libc...
And I can't get it to regularly crash on my own machine.
- iraf -
Has anyone ever actually gotten all of the IRAF binaries to
compile (and work) dynamically linked? Just to get it as
far as I have I've had to convert all of the relevant build
scripts into Makefiles so I could clean them up. Not to
mention the bajillion warnings that scroll by...
Spam-related
-
I had my first success in educating someone about
unsolicited mailings, today. The miscreant in this case was
gamers.com, which took
the list of everyone that had ever registered on their site
(and it's vaguely plausible that I might have done that
once, a very long time ago) and used that as their initial
subscription list when they decided to start a weekly
newsletter including the standard advertisements -- without,
of course, asking those people whether or not they wanted to
be receiving a weekly newsletter. To their credit, they did
have a very clean opt-out system in use, but I was still
annoyed enough to send them (polite, if firm) mail about it
and start documenting an intent to nominate for RBL.
Although my first e-mail got me only a form letter and a
personal unsubscription from all of their lists, the second
one got me a phone number of the fellow apparantly in charge
of coordinating the newsletters and such. We had a rather
productive talk where I trotted out the standard reasonings,
differences between opt-out, opt-in, and
verified/double-opt-in, possible solutions, and of course useful links to
descriptions of how to Do It Right(tm). It ended with a
sense of understanding of the positions on both sides, and a
promise to make sure that things improve. So my sense of
general hostility towards the universe has decreased
slightly today.
Personal
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I've run out of bookshelf space to keep all of my books.
I'm now down to double-stacking several shelves.
Unfortunately, I'm also out of wall space to add more
bookshelves.
The local university (LSU) might be about to offer me a sysadmin-type job, which would be good, since it would end a long stretch of unemployment. Pays less than I made at my last full-time job, but since that was in California and I'm now in Louisiana, there was no way to get around that. It would also put me back into regular contact with fairly well-educated people, which also stands a good chance of improving my mood.
Several people have diary entries complaining about Autumn depression. While I'm certainly depressed a lot, Autumn actually has a cheering effect on me. It's only about this time of year that the temperature and humidity down here get into the pleasant range. Unfortunately, I can't really come up with anywhere I'd want to go in this area to take advantage of it.