Brian's World

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My internet is going terribly slow.. and by internet, I’m referring to a distributed file access system.  I’m not sure why there is so little bandwidth tonight.  Maybe they broke some of the ethernet when they were building ECAV.  Or better yet, they’ve diverted some of my bandwidth to EMPAC, the new arts complex that will be opening in a few weeks here at RPI.

The beginning of this week was pretty busy between projects and homework assignments.  I completed my IED assignment, which was a shuttle arrival prediction system.  I think its pretty neat, but I’m a biased source of this information.  Ideally I’ll be opening the source up to others at some point (which includes an asterisk AGI / PHP implementation [complete with swift getting data]).  The goal of the project wasn’t to actually make all these neat implementations, but rather to make the system to generate the data.  How the actual minutes/second data is handled is something else.

This week also included a photo shoot with the Concerto team.  It took much longer than I would have liked to get the whole thing done.  Some people were too busy talking and looking elsewhere which I found somewhat embarassing.  Here we all are, a bunch of young adults, and we have difficulty quietly looking at a camera lense and smiling at the same time.  In defense of everyone who had trouble focusing their shifty vision, the camera lense was pretty large and I did have trouble identifying its center.  It probably isn’t a great idea to blurt out my girlfriends name when I’m getting my picture taken.  I will likely blush because thats what I do when I’m put on the spot.  I really wish I could control my blushing more, it happened today in PD1 when the instructor and I had a discussion about last spring’s town meeting with Dr. Jackson.  I just hope my face doesn’t look too terrible in whatever picture is chosen for whatever.

I’ve been sending email for quite some time, several years to be exact.  I don’t have the exact date of my first email, but it was very long ago.  Usually when I send email where the message contains question marks I get a response.  Sometimes I don’t even have to include the actual question marks and I can still get a response… and there are those time the rhetorical email get responded to.  For the past few weeks I’ve been on this stint where emails with or without question marks just flow in one direction out of my mailbox.  I can’t recall a longer period of time where my email hasn’t been getting much of any response for the ones I’m really looking for input on.  What will happen is pretty simple, I’ll start moving forward with stuff and then, when I’m just about to finish the implementation, everyone will start asking questions.  Not stupid questions, but questions that I would have liked to address when the email talking about my plan was sent out.

I’ve come to two possible conclusions.  Neither of them is very likely.

1.  Gmail is attaching a no-reply header of sorts, indicating to people that a response is unnecessary.  In GMail’s web interface, the reply box doesn’t even show up.  In “Mail” for those os x users, Apple applies a slight fading to the reply button so it doesn’t get as much of your attention.  While they still allow you to send a message, they’ve designed the interface so that you very easily skip over the reply button when you’re looking at your options.

2. My inbox looks at a new message when it arrives, and if it sees its in response to an email I send that didn’t merit a response, it bounces that email back to the sender, with a kind, “You didn’t have to respond to this message.  Next time use GMail, we’ll automatically prevent you from replying in the future.”

I look forward to GMail loosing its beta tag this year.

In the future, I am going to write some blogs about websites and how terrible some of them are.

Goodnight moon.