Category Archives: Personal

My e-mail account at work, to which all other email is funneled, is very seriously messed up.

Three facts:

1. A student tells me she's been 'e-mailing me all semester' and justifiably complains that I didn't answer. I try to answer student email as top priority, but have no recollection of any of the email. Nor is any of it in my extensive saved mail file.

2. An invitation to a major conference I'd really like to go to was e-mailed to me several weeks ago, I never got it, and they assumed I was not interested. I heard about it by accident yesterday.

3. Today, email both to and from me is taking random numbers of extra hours to turn up, sometimes in double digits. If it does turn up.

Some Observations:

● Numbers one and two may be due to my roll-your-own procmail spam filters. But I'm getting well over a thousand spams a day and have to do something. I've asked the law school to upgrade the Unix box to a version of Perl that's less than four years old so I can install something like Spam Assassin, and they are working on it. No ETA, and if experience is any guide they'll roll it out about a week before (or after) it's obsolete.

● Number three, the random delays, is new. Here is a fragment from a sample header:

Received: from spitfire.law.miami.edu (localhost [127.0.0.1])
by spitfire.law.miami.edu (Postfix) with ESMTP id D9F065C7118
for ; Wed, 16 Jun 2004 08:01:02 -0400 (EDT)
Received: from smarty.dreamhost.com (smarty.dreamhost.com [66.33.216.24])
by spitfire.law.miami.edu (Postfix) with ESMTP id CB0005CA84D
for ; Tue, 15 Jun 2004 21:48:43 -0400 (EDT)

How can there be a ten hour gap between receipt and delivery on the same machine??? Update: the school sent around a voice mail message which says we're being subjected to “a targeted spam attack” which I take to mean a DDOS attack.

● I may need to find a new, commercial email host or change to gmail.

● WHAT ELSE HAVE I BEEN MISSING?????

● And last but not least, how come no one picks up the phone anymore if e-mail isn't being answered?

If all goes according to schedule, shortly after 9am tomorrow morning I'll be appearing on a West Palm Beach radio talk show hosted by Johnny Trumpet (!) on WPBR, 1340 AM. WPBR has an Internet feed accessible from their homepage so if you want to hear me talk about the torture memos, this is your chance.

I've done a few talk show call-in appearances over the years, but oddly almost none in Florida. I think this must be the first one in years.

Brad DeLong points to an essay by John Perry called structured procrastination. Who would have imagined there was such a nice name for one of the organizing principles of my life.

I'm off to Cambridge (MA) today. Tomorrow I speak at one event and probably listen in on another. I had thought to try to look up old friends, or newer friends, but it turns out that today is shot for socializing because I have to be on an 8pm conference call this evening, which pretty much messes up any chance of serious dinner plans.

But if anyone reading this knows me already and is interested in a late evening post-conference call beer in the general vicinity of Harvard Yard / Harvard Law School this evening, please drop me an email, ideally with a phone number. I land in Boston around 3, should make it to the hotel by 4, and they swear they have high speed internet in every room so I should get the message. (They better, as it turns out I have a lot of work to do before that 8pm call.)

Suggestions as to where to grab a quick, decent, solitary pre-call bite in that area also gratefully welcomed. Although I get up there ever few years, I really don't know my way around Cambridge (MA) at all. Cambridge (UK), that's another story.

When an academic says s/he is looking for a chair, you might naturally assume that s/he seeks promotion. Once you become a full professor, there is no promotion other than administration, perks, money or prestige. A desire to avoid administration being one of the things that often attracts people to the Ivory Tower, academics who are not content with their lot and don't want to be Deans usually go hunting for perks, money, or prestige. And the thing in academe that wraps them up in one package is a “Chair” — a title and usually some perks or money.

As it happens, however, I'm not looking for that sort of chair (not that I'd reject it if it came looking for me) — and a good thing it is too, as we only have two chairs here at UM and they are earmarked for lateral hires. No, I'm looking for the sort of chair you sit in.

I have a very nice desk chair. Or rather I had one. One day I came home and the back was broken. (Not broken as in in two pieces, but broken in that the main support snapped and it no longer stays upright when you lean back.) The children deny everything. There is no dog or other large pet. It is vaguely conceivable that I leaned back once too hard or once too often and broke it myself, although I sort of think this is the kind of thing even I might notice about my environment. In any case, there seems no point finding anyone to blame. The chair is broken. I need a new one.

Due to past bouts with carpal tunnel, I have fairly particular ergonomic requirements. I suppose I could get another chair like the one I had before, but it isn't sold in stores, being marketed by mildly sleazy salespeople who sell to the 'physically challenged'. I'd prefer not to deal with them. And the back wasn't the first part to fail; various knobs and stuff whose purpose I never fully understood have fallen off over the years. It was a nice chair, but didn't seem worth the huge sum I paid for it.

So, in the next day or two, I'm going downtown to do some trial sitting.

Tonight is the first night of Passover. What better time to try to remove an anti-Semitic link from first place in the Google results for Jew by linking to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew. (For more info about what's going on see the explanation at normblog.)

Update: I wonder if google is smart enough not to count links that include links to the search result?