# So two days ago I put the site mentioned below up, as a sort of public service. Got a few dozen hits the first day, and something like 50k yesterday, so it's good to know that I'm helping people stay informed about the state of the world. There's also another similar site out there, in case you need independent verification or don't believe me.
The funniest thing about this all is that I was talking about it with Katie last night as we were going to sleep & so my last thoughts before drifting off were all along the lines of What if the world really DOES just blip out of existence? I should've done more with my life! Maybe I should put some underwear on, just in case! Not the most pleasant pre-sleep thoughts, of course. And then, around 4am, not one but TWO of our smoke detectors started giving off that annoying once a minute PLEASE CHANGE MY BATTERIES beep-beep-beep. Of course, given that I'm usually a dope when I wake up anyway, and my final thoughts before I drifted off, I woke up with something along the lines of
» This is an awesome article about bicyclists and the laws of the road.
# So last night some asshole recruiter sent out a mass email to 400+ people about some Ruby on Rails position. Unfortunately, said asshole didn't know how to use BCC in his email client, thus allowing some other idiot to "Reply All" asking about the positions.
If you've ever had this happen to you before, you know what comes next -- some dickhead(s) let the guy know that he shouldn't use "Reply All" when there's a humongous list of CC'd names -- but of course, in order to let everyone know how cool/helpful/smart they are, they ALSO do it via a "Reply All." Generally things would end there (aside from the inevitable random "Please remove me from this list!" email), but NO! For some reason, people seem to think it's "fun" to continue sending emails to random strangers and have tried to turn it into some sort of mailing list. As of right now, about 13 hours after the original email, there are something like 70 replies to the thread. Why? Nobody's said anything particularly enlightening or funny, and yet it only took six mails into it for someone to declare it "epic." Hell, there's already a (soon-to-be-deleted, I'm sure) Wikipedia article [note: in the time it took me to write this, it got axed] about it, and someone expanded it into a Google Group for some reason.
Whatever, I don't care about the emails (it's not that hard to mute a conversation in Gmail), but to me, this all reeks of people trying their hardest to create some sort of meme that they can then claim to have been an original part of -- they're thinking that in six months, when everyone's referring to that dude who sent out that mass email one time, they can all say "oh yeah, I was on that list!" (I mean, someone declared it a "social phenomenon" in one of his emails, and I think he was being serious). But there's nothing particularly interesting about the whole thing -- I get ~360k results for "ruby on rails mailing list" on Google, so it's not like the world was clamoring for such a list, much less one made up of random people united by their inability to refrain from hitting "Reply All."
Update: closing in on 100 messages now, hooray. Blech, I say.
# Back from a week of vacation in that noted tropical destination of Cleveland, Ohio. On the plus side, being away from the house has re-motivated me to get some projects around here done. This is good, because after the amazingly long (but now finished!) patio project, I was worried I'd never want to do anything house-wise again.
# A comment by Snarkout prompted me to check out how my old Time-Warner 401k was doing:
.. hey, shitty! I would've been better off withdrawing it all and burying it in a jar in the backyard. Or maybe I'll go with Snark's suggestion, investing in Beanie Baby futures.
# Holy shit, we're almost finished with the patio.
» Joe Posnanski (well, a reader of his) asks, "Which Molina brother are you?" I was kinda hoping one of the answers would end up being Alfred Molina, but fun nonetheless.
» This video perfectly captures what it was like working in the cubicle farm at AOL. Except, minus the Nerf. And the fun.
» Popdose gives props to Superdrag in the latest installment of their Lost in the 90's series -- this is one of those bands that I totally didn't care about when they were out, but now I really dig their poppy goodness.
# In my last post, I said something along the lines of, "if I don't update for a whole year, I suck." That was in August, ergo I suck. To combat this, I've removed the dates from my entries on this iteration, ha.