А что, если город весь
грязью облить,
и лужи по дорогам
разбрызгать?
Может быть греться будет
в моей -
рука твоя, нежно,
и мирно...
А если мне небо
о ливне просить?
Чтоб морем дороги
покрылись...
Может согреть я
сумею тогда,
и руки, и сердце,
и мысли...
One day I got tired of writing,
my metaphors lost all their grace,
all I could say has been written,
there's no room for me in this place.
Ideas have lost their coherence,
I couldn't keep track of my rhymes,
there's no room for me in this place,
I'm losing control of my mind.
My friends and my mirrors keep shouting
"there's no room for you in this place!"
I feel I should write my last ending
with gravity's earthly embrace.
***
There's no room for me in this place,
I walk in the darkness and sigh;
abandoned constructions are scarce,
I guess it's a bad day to fly.
Aaah... email signatures... We know that 90% of the total email traffic is spam. I bet that 2/3 of the remaining 10% are signatures. That, my dear reader, is a very modest estimate.
Take a better look, there are 4 references to the company's name, the address is mentioned twice, the company slogan is also mentioned twice.
The message itself is one line long: "Urgent!". I could write a story focused just on this "urgent" thing, but this is not the story for which I asked you to visit me today.
There is one 3 KB attachment for the logo in the signature. Another 37 KB attachment is an HTML file that contains the same message.
The diagram below illustrates how much information from the entire data-set is actually useful. Note that I had to use a very powerful electronic microscope and zoom the picture 500 times, because at normal scales you cannot see any useful data.
Here's where the numbers come from:
You might say that I am just nitpicking, that I should not care about several kilobytes in an age where people routinely exchange HD-rips of movies that vary between 4 and 50 GB; in an age in which a mobile phone has 100 times the space of my first computer; in an age in which my Internet connection is fast enough to send in a minute all the stuff my dial-up modem would send in a year...
Alright, assuming that we don't care about bandwidth and traffic - this is technical mumbo-jumbo, with time progress will make these resources even cheaper.
There is another resource which is quite modest, which gets scarcer with time - a person's attention span. Take another look at the diagram. Why, oh why must I see all of that, when I need is just one single line?
Here's an idea for software developers who make mail clients and other email-related tools.
Append a signature only when you send someone an email for the first time.
Indeed - it is great that I'll know about all your phone numbers and emails and addresses. I don't need to be reminded about that every time you contact me. If I lose that information, I will ask you to send it.
Here's some more trivia:
I noticed that these fancy signatures are strongly correlated with non-technical people. The less involved you are with engineering, the more likely you are to have such an über-signature.
Here's a stamp that has to be attached to emails with such signatures:
p.s. I bet Leonardo Da Vinci ended his emails with a simple "Regards, Leonardo" and he preferred plain-text to HTML.
An interesting thing happened to me a few days ago. I was browsing the web and studying our competitors and their offers - business as usual.
I bumped into several companies that promise to recover deleted SMS - just like one of Dekart's programs does (Dekart is my employer). Being one of the people behind the product, and having conducted all sorts of recovery experiments - I know that not any deleted SMS can be restored. There are many factors that influence your chance of success and I won't discuss them here (see this video if you're interested).
After reading the promo-materials written with a great deal of self-confidence, I asked myself whether they can do something our software cannot, so I wrote an email to several companies, asking if they could help me with my problem - an accidentally deleted SMS, which contained very very important information.
I would like to highlight one of the responses:
As I read it, I realize that it is very familiar; in fact - I am looking at my own text! Take a look at the original article that explains how SMS recovery works (it's OK, it has pictures :-).
I highlighted two spots in 'their' response, that's not something I would write. I checked that in my article - yep, my version was different:
It would have been nice if they told me about "see for yourself", but alas, that's business as usual ;-)
p.s. SIM Manager is the best way to read the SIM card and recover deleted texts from it, have no doubts about it. Even the competition relies on our competence to get their act together, see for yourself :-)
I was looking forward to going to a university. When I was about to graduate high school, I visited some of the institutions in the area with a friend (hi Max!) and interviewed students and teachers.
After a careful examination, we agreed that the Technical University of Moldova was the best place. We met some people who gave competent answers to our questions (in contrast, someone in ULIM was always offering elusive responses), we spoke to some students who seemed interesting to us (in contrast, many of those we met at USM displayed a complete lack of interest in their studies). ASEM - we didn't even go there (pun intended :-).
Yes, yes, it was a very small sample, totally non-scientific, and I am sure there are good teachers and bad teachers everywhere. But hey, at least we tried.
ULIM appeared very new - they had an awesome library, great lighting, it was clean and the rooms were user-friendly. Winters at ULIM are probably mild :-)
USM - an old building, they had a few rooms with a lot of computers in them, the furniture didn't appear to be comfortable.
UTM - the lowest density of girls (maybe there was something wrong with the girl-o-meter?), ironically - the lowest density of computers too. The building looked older than ULIM, but newer than USM. Winters at UTM can be rough.
I remember the day we went to UTM. Max called the secretariat, we had to be there at a certain time. When we got to the university, we found the person Max interacted with and were told to wait. That person was doamna Valentina. The reason I mention it is because, according to Max, the phone conversation didn't go very smooth - there was a minor clash. I don't remember the exact words, but at a certain point he raised his voice and expressed his dissatisfaction with the way she provided the information. It is easy to express that when you're not talking to someone who is in front of you.
I suspect that she thought it was me on the phone the other day. A few moments later her brain was probably executing malloc( sizeof( BLACKLIST_ENTRY )). That's how we became friends.
The decision was made, and there were just a few more things to take care of - choose a department, get some paperwork done, sign-up, [take the entrance exam] - ta-da!
My sister and I took all the needed documents and went to the headquarters, to perform operation N-roll.
I had several options:
I also knew about FAF (Filiera AngloFona) - the place where people study computer science in English. That was awesome, that's where I had to be.
I think the name sounds quite silly. The 'phone' suffix gives it a French-sounding flavour...
We asked around and learned about the procedure for enrolling in FAF. You had to go to the computer-science department, then pass an additional filter - that's how one becomes a FAFfer.
Since I had that diploma, it would have been better if I could go to "informatics and applied modern languages" and then transfer to FAF. We asked the person in charge about it, he said that such transfers are not possible. Just to be sure, we double-checked this and asked the same question in other words during our conversation. The response was the same.
That gave me no choice, but take the hard and interesting way. A few days later, I successfully failed my mathematics exam, not scoring as many points as all those math-gurus out there.
The semester started, I met my new colleagues, the classes were interesting. A week or two later, I passed the "FAF filter" and became a FAFfer, along with a number of other people. New social connections were being established. On the very first day of my FAFdom, I learned that 2 of my new colleagues transferred to FAF from "informatics and applied languages". A while later, 2 more students made the same type of transfer.
***
I often met that fat-assed schmuck at the university. He didn't recognize me, of course. I bumped into him yesterday too, he didn't recognize me again, probably because I was wearing the hat of a teacher.
Maybe one day I'll get to fire him :-)
