Category: Geekery

I’ve written a few times in the past about idiots who get their monthly email reminders from my Mailman mailing lists and then write to me personally to unsubscribe instead of following the instructions in that email reminder.

For the last couple of months, somebody has been doing that, with a pissy “this is the [N]th request” just as a topper. I write back with “That email you got a few hours ago contains 3 different ways of unsubscribing yourself from the list, and nowhere is “writing a pissy email to the server administrator” listed as a viable option”. Unfortunately, in this case it turns out that the email address the guy is writing me from bounces. And it’s not subscribed to any of my mailing lists. So even if I wanted to unsubscribe him, I can’t.

So I guess I’ll just wait to see what “N” he gets to before he gets really mad. Not that I’ll be able to do anything about it. Or care, for that matter.

Time was, I was an enthusiastic Linux geek, proselytizing, apologizing, saying “well, it doesn’t now, but somebody will write something to do that”, overlooking the visual horror of the clashes of look and feel and user experience of all the disparate programs written on all the disparate X11 widget sets (yes, I could tell the difference between Xt and Xm at a glance), actually not laughing in people’s faces when they said that Gimp was better than Photoshop, ignoring the fact that Richard Stallman is a smelly looney who eats his toe jam in publc, etc. But over the years, two things have happened:

• I care more about user experience than I do about raw computing power
• I don’t apologize for my computers any more

Or to quote Three Dead Trolls In A Baggie “yeah, well I’ve got a girlfriend and things to get done.”

So I use Linux on my servers, and I think it’s a great OS for servers. I even contribute to open source products here and there. I hardly ever use it as a desktop any more, although it was my daily work desktop a year ago, and it was fine for work where video and audio didn’t matter. I’m just not anything like the “freetard” I used to be. Which is why I recognize the type so readily. And when somebody sends me something like this, and thinks it says something about how iPad is nothing new, I can instantly recognize the scent of crazy. Especially since it was sent to me in response to my saying that I hope HP hurries up with the Palm WebOS-based tablet because I like the user experience (UX) of WebOS better than I like iOS.

I’m sorry, but if you think somebody who is debating the subtle differences in UX between WebOS and iOS is going to like a hefty laptop with the keyboard broken off, running Windows XP or Linux, with no multi-touch, a stylus and a battery life that’s probably measured in minutes, you have greatly misunderstood the question. Or the purpose of a tablet. Or the meaning of life.

… or a flawless migration. Apparently the new IPs for my servers on on the SpamHaus SBL list. This is a major problem as several of the people on the mailing lists I run (including my xcski.com address) use SBL to bounce email.

Hopefully I can get it delisted soon.

I’ve shutdown all three domUs on the old server and brought them up on the new server. So far, I’ve fixed a small issue with MySQL not starting up, which kept some of the web sites from starting up. But email appears to be flowing, the blog is up, news is up. Now to go through all the other services that should be running and make sure they are.