Cute, you don't like my message, so I'm bounced as not subscribed

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 15 November 2012 15:21:42 Duncan did opine:

> Gene Heskett posted on Thu, 15 Nov 2012 05:42:33 -0500 as excerpted:

[...]

> > And despite being retired from there for a decade and change, I was at
> > the annual Thanksgiving dinner yesterday, and will have an account
> > there until I fall over for the last time.  I helped Jim set that up
> > in '98 or '99. The iron under it has been updated  2 or 3 times, so
> > my traffic is far less than .1% of its capacity these days.  And of
> > course security patches have been applied.  The only time it was ever
> > hacked was when it was running on RH-6.0 with its duff bind, in '00
> > or '01. Jim and I cleaned that mess up by rebooting, and locking that
> > guy out, putting in the fixed bind, and we cleaned up his mess
> > without ever doing another reboot.
> 
> That's exactly why it pays for these guys to let you keep your email
> accounts, etc, around.  They know you well enough to know you're not
> going to be using it for spam or whatever, and maintaining that
> relationship can serve as a great insurance policy, when things go
> haywire.  Yeah, they could call in a pro and pay them big money to fix
> it, but the pro would have to either figure out the existing setup or
> start from scratch, thus taking more time, while you have all that stuff
> in your head and can fix it with a few hours of down time, as opposed to
> a few days, even if they pay you the same to do it as they'd pay the new
> pro.
> 
> Plus, if some big disaster hits (the hurricane that hit NY, for
> instance), those pros will be up to their ears trying to fix thousands
> of businesses, while once everyone's dug out and recovering, they can
> simply call you (if you weren't riding it out there to begin with).

In this case, Jim is good enough that barring a sale of the place (the 
owner is only 2 years younger than I), Jim is there for life.  He has 
learned I.T. very well.  He was a relatively fresh hire of 17yo when I 
walked in the door in late 1984 with a clear path laid out to bring a 
1950's ma & pa tv station at least into the 90's or later.  I think I did 
fairly well by 2002 when I took the Rolex & went home, considering the 
chewing gum and bailing wired mess I walked into.  Some of the problems I 
inherited from wannabe electricians weren't really fixed right until the 
digital conversion forced us to build a whole new rack room and 2 new 
control rooms.  Today the ratio of cat5 or better, to coax in the rack room 
is now about 4/1.  And trouble actually seems easier to find when it 
happens.
 
> > I am inclined to favor the idea that the server has a little known
> > timeout and that if I do not post for an extended period, its sort of
> > checking to see if I'm a bot or whatever.  It makes as much sense as
> > anything else offered.  The time between posts is because 99% of the
> > problems I see go by are problems I have never encountered, so I'd
> > likely be more of a hindrance.
> 
> Yeah, my theory, but it does seem one of the better ones given the
> evidence.
> 
It does make sense, Duncan.

> Of course my trouble with that 99% that I've never encountered is a bit
> different.  In many cases while I've not personally encountered it, I
> know something about the general case as I keep up with kernel news and
> follow a reasonable number of lists.  So I'm left with the choice of
> posting something rather general that may or may not help, or not
> posting.  But most of the time empathy wins, and I post anyway, simply
> because even if I've not had the same problem, I know from experience
> that just having someone to empathize and discuss theories with can
> help.  Plus, often I /can/ at least point someone toward a solution, or
> workaround if not a solution, where they hadn't the foggiest before.
> 
> And I see the problems and want to help as best I can, even if there's
> just a small chance it'll help, and/or it'll be only a bit of help.
> Sometimes I get criticized for that too, but I'll often wait a bit to
> see if anyone else with a closer experience answers, and if nobody else
> has answered, I figure at bare minimum, my answer lets them know that
> others are at least /seeing/ the post.
> 
> But I've started actively resisting the reply impulse on kmail, because
> I don't have much good to say about the new akonadified version and I
> switched to something else.  So I've started deliberately letting
> others take the lead there, and only reply with kmail alternatives if
> it looks like kmail's simply not working for them any more and there's
> a reasonable chance they'd be willing to switch to something else,
> given the choice and a bit of guidance as to /what/ else to switch to.
> 
> At least konqueror, while I don't use it much anymore because the devs
> themselves apparently only consider it a "toy browser", I can still keep
> around without it dragging in all sorts of unwanted semantic-desktop
> dependencies that slow kde down even when run-time turned off, if kde's
> even just built with them in the first place.  Unfortunately that's just
> not possible with pretty much anything kdepim related, these days.

I've stayed with kmail as much because if I changed, I'd have to re-write a 
half a page long list of scripts I use with it.  The older version I get 
with the 10.04.4 LTS install has one, what I call a very annoying bug, the 
longer it runs, the slower it gets, until about the 3rd day of uptime the 
lags get on my nerves and I exit it from the menu exit, and restart it 
again about 30 seconds later.  My scripts rarely notice its gone for that 
30 secs.  And the speed is back.  I'd file a bug but to the kde people its 
old code and won't fix.

Cheers, Gene
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> is up!
I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six.  Mother took me to
see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.
		-- Shirley Temple
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