Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

My economic impact check arrived.

Still, I think I definitely picked the right people to look this over as there's been surprisingly little overlap in what different reviewers are flagging.

Over half of the people who have pre-publication access to my book have now sent their feedback. If I don't get the rest before mid-month I'm going to proceed without it as I'd like to have this done and out for sale.

The email asking if they can schedule a repeat class arrived about half an hour after another email advertising the now sold out class.

One of my employees dropped off a couple packs of bagels after hearing about my failure to acquire bagels on my most recent grocery run. That was entirely unexpected (and I don't have cream cheese for them), but nice of them to do. One pack is a flavor I haven't tried yet and the other is something that I already know I like.

My online workshop sold out so I've been asked if I can teach it again near the end of June. I've agreed to do that and expect this one to also sell out quickly.

Pretty sure this cemented an appreciation for well documented plain text protocols. The relative simplicity of POP3 meant I could learn how it worked and just fix things for myself instead of waiting for my ISP to realize they had a problem.

It was enough messages that it was faster to write a program to do it than to telnet to the mail server and run the commands manually (which I started with as proof of concept).

At the time, Eudora would do POP3 by first asking for the message list, then downloading all the messages, then deleting all the messages. If something broke before it finished deleting stuff from the server, there wasn't anything there to check what had already been downloaded so with thousands of copies of a large attachment clogging things up, that was problematic. Fortunately, LIST reports message size and the malware was all in a small range so I could just selectively DELE those.

Fun fact: this or a similar thing that spread around the same time was responsible for me writing my first email client. The combination of slow dial up, a server that dropped connections that otherwise would have been up for an excessively long time, and a particularly bad design decision in the Mac version of Eudora at the time meant reading the RFCs and writing something that could delete the malware without downloading it was the fastest way to restore my email.

https://it.slashdot.org/story/20/05/03/1449211/20-years-later-creator-of-worlds-first-major-computer-virus-located-in-manila

Time to pet the cat.

Found the bug in the shell script that I was up until 2AM trying to find.

RPG where the background music is played by your otherwise useless party members. Players are expected to ignore the plot and focus on finding the combination of place and party that results in their ideal soundtrack to study/relax to.

The cat has asked me to post a very important update:

*meow*

Grocery store was eerily empty tonight, had severe bagel deficiency.

YouTube: we can't pay until your channel earns at least $100.
Amazon Video: We've just transferred 1 cent to your bank account.

Went into work a little late today because the cat needed to sit on me.