Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Got word that another employee is coming back to work soon. That just leaves one part timer whose parents aren't letting her out of the house.

Shippo fluff stats email is weird again. It says my boxes travelled 23 miles in April... to reach 9 states. That's so far off that it doesn't even make sense as a per shipment mean. It could /maybe/ be a median distance, but I think they're just making numbers up instead of bothering to do the sums.

Another event I normally teach at got cancelled.

Started playing Gris last night (it's on sale). I don't expect it'll have a lot of replay value for me, but I'm enjoying it so far. I've gotten far enough in that it's building dramatic tension but doing it without presenting the player with risk of punishment (no death traps, no game overs, failed attempts at solving the puzzles don't require tons of backtracking).

Just ordered a bunch of coffee. Things that aren't on the offering list now but will be going up over the next couple weeks as the coffees arrive and I figure out how I'm roasting them include coffees from Costa Rica, Yemen, and Java, those last 2 will also get a Mocha Java Blend.

What's the cat getting into?

Office supply delivery came with a coupon for $100 off a case of wine, which seems like an odd thing to include with index cards and shipping labels, but whatever.

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.