Sometime in August,
I said I would watch the
Inbox Zero
talk later on that day. Well, I finally did today. And I'm ready to mass-murder
my (now not so) fat inbox folder and start from scratch, and becoming a good
boy.
In fact, I've been on probation for a few weeks. While I wasn't watching
the talk (which is pretty insightful and fun, and
useful if you also
have these horrid mail handling problems) I did roll up my sleeves a few times
and worked on reducing the problem. After a few rounds of fighting, things
were looking slightly better. I deleted TONS of spam which still was sitting
in there. I deleted entire threads of list mail which for some reason wasn't
being filtered properly. I archived a lot of random, misc email. I even replied
to some job offers, for a change. I fixed my
.procmailrc a little
to get rid of lots of useless stuff that appears in my mail. It got better,
but not entirely better.
I went from the 6600~ which was probably the figure when I said Enough!
to around 2580. It's still a lot, and I can still get rid of a lot more with
easy pattern searches in mutt. The good news is that, for the first time in
ages, the number of emails in the mailbox has stayed stable for more
than a month. I tell you: I'm proud!
So
Merlin gets asked in the talk
what to do when you've been a naughty boy for a long time, and you've ended
up with this HUGE mailbox you can't handle anymore. His answer was what some
people suggested in blog comments: put it aside, start from zero. Merlin calls
it mail-DMZ, and that's probably what I'll do in a few hours, admittedly with
a sentiment of guilt deep in my chest. And from that point, I'll have my
mailbox be a TODO list. Delete. Defer. Delegate. Respond. Do. Simple!
Other
Planet Debian participants like
joeyh
commented
that something that really helps is reducing the number of times you poll
for email. For me, that means
set daemon 1800 # Pool every 30 minutes
when it was 5 minutes before. I hope I won't find myself issuing
awaken commands often...
I remember when, more than five years ago, having more than 100 mails made
me feel bad and go cleanup. After some vacation, it went up to 150. Then
Christmas came along, 300, until I found myself nearing 7000 last summer.
Before moving my junk to a demilitarised mailbox, I'm having some fun
replying to some email. The first one in my mailbox is from a member of a
Catalan "Mallach" family.
From: Conchita Broquetas <familia_mallach_broquetas@yahoo.es>
Subject: Hola!
To: jordi@sindominio.net
Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 16:55:17 +0200 (CEST)
who discovered there was a "Jordi Mallach" other than his brother in the
Internet. Apparently we had an exchange on where our families came from
(Mallach is all but a common surname... anywhere, and my family has always
wondered where it came from).
So that's more than 6 years ago. I think I'd love to get a reply to some
email sent by me years ago which has been sitting for years in a mailbox,
because "I need to reply to this sometime". I think the Mallach-Broquetas are
getting one tonight.
If you think I'm dumping random thoughts on a vim buffer, it's probably
due to me feeling sad today. Sorry, but I feel like typing, and I don't have
a typewriter with me. Speaking of sad, nothing beats the next email which
sat for some
dramatic 6 months in my messy inbox until I found out in
the worst of the possible scenarios. Let's go back to late February, 2004,
when I had no job, and I didn't have a clue on what to do with my life.
From: Mark Shuttleworth <mark@hbd.com>
Subject: New project to discuss
To: Jordi Mallach <jordi@debian.org>
Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 18:33:51 +0000
[...]
I'm hiring a team of debian developers to work full time on a new
distribution based on Debian. We're making internationalisation a prime
focus, together with Python and regular release management. I've discussed
it with a number of Debian leaders and they're all very positive about it.
[...]
I'm not sure if I totally missed it as it came in, or I skimmed through it
and thought WTF?! Dude on crack or I just forgot I need to reply to this
email , but I'd swear it was the former. Not long after,
no-name-yet.com popped up, the rumours
started spreading around Debian channels. Luckily, I got a job at
LliureX two months later, where I worked
during the following 2 years, but that's another story. I guess it was July
or so when
Ubuntu was made public, and
Mark and his secret team organised a conference (blog entries
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]),
just before the
Warty release, and I was invited to it, for
the same reasons I got that email.
During that conference, probably because Mark sent me some email and I
applied a filter to get to it, I found the lost email, and felt like digging
a hole to hide for a LONG while. I couldn't believe the incredible opportunity
I had missed. I went to Mark and said "hey, you're not going to believe this",
and he did look quite surprised about someone being such an idiot.
I wonder if I should reply to his email today...
The last five days I've spent at the combined Debian Edu, FAI and CDD meeting in 
Yesterday I was going through the plugins and widgets, if there are any updates or such. I realized again, that updating of plugins (and maybe searching for the relocated download source) makes me mad. Also testing and switching back is annoying much.
Note: red underlined links are clickable
Since I now have a business licence so I can actually charge people if they ask me questions about computers, I need to occasionally send a letter to the tax office. This means that I finally need a printer. Since I expect to be using it for about 50 pages a year, I don't really see the point in spending too much money on it, but I expect it to work those few times I actually need it. The ability to print documents that remain readable for ten years is important, so it's probably laser or thermal transfer; colour printing isn't important to me.
I've had a pretty bad experience with a Lexmark Optra E (squeaky noise, crumpled envelopes, feed not working, collecting dust in the mechanics due to being top-fed).
So, I'm interested in printer stories.