A few weeks ago, I went to dinner with a coworker of mine, George. George is the most serious connoisseur of sushi that I’ve ever met (not counting sushi chefs themselves). We just went to the sushi place across the street, but George has developed a relationship with one of the chefs there, and that transformed the experience into something different. For one thing, this was the first time I saw someone hand-annotate the a la carte sushi menu to request a combination of sashimi, sushi, and hand rolls. Plus, we wrote in a sushi roll that wasn’t on the menu. A whole new world! Afterwards, George and I discussed our various theories of what consisted of levels, or dividing lines between various sushi eaters. First, I present my general theory of sushi diner progression:

My new toy arrived about a week ahead of schedule:

(It is the thing on the bottom. Above it is the old toy that this thing is replacing). I apologize for the horrible photo. I’ll try to get a better one when I can photograph during the day. Well, at least a less gloomy day. Anyway, I bought a Tivo Series 3 to replace my aging (6+ years old!) series 1 TiVo. Of course, my series 1 still works and I was still using it, but I became gripped by The Fear, so I’ve gone ahead and replaced it. It is probably mostly that I’ve switched from a series 1, which hasn’t had a software update in 5 years, but I love this new Tivo. I don’t have it hooked up the digital cable yet, however, so there is more exploration of this thing to do.

… like I did, by accident. I had gotten a wee bit behind on paying my cable bill. This might be because I’m on the cusp of canceling the service, but that doesn’t really matter. So, I go to my online bank and pay my now 60-day overdue cable bill via the online bill pay feature. Ah, the perils of online bill pay. Somehow, instead of paying Comcast $204.98, I pay them $20498.00. No doubt a typo, but who can say for certain? Of course, I actually have enough money in this account to actually pay this, although just barely.

On a mailing list that I’m on, a funny argument about the wisdom of anycast DNS service has erupted. Now, I’m certainly no expert on anycast, but I can see a small kernel of truth buried in the FUD of the doubters.

Anycasting can lead to a false sense of resiliancy.

For example, 2 anycast clouds with 6 instances each is less resilient than 12 separate unicast instances. This is because, from the point of view of the DNS client, there are only two nameservers to contact, and if both go down, the client is hosed. Two failures in the unicast case don’t lead to any noticeable problem. This isn’t the same as saying that anycasting doesn’t, in general, improve the situation. But it isn’t a substitute for advertising more than, say, two nameservers.

So, I’ve been using my new, simple, email productivity plan for a few months now. And… it works at work, but not so much at home. At least not yet. My inbox at work is basically clear. It isn’t empty, but since I don’t have different categories for “to do now” and “will need to pay attention to in the future”, that is OK. But the home inbox has tasks that sit there an languish. I just don’t read email the same way at home. Plus, at work it is basically reasonable to assume that almost all of my tasks will be represented as email. At home, almost nothing is. At home, what I really need is a paper-based inbox. And, oh yeah, I need to actually try to clear it.

If you are like me and have been made retarded by Emacs, you might miss the standard Emacs bindings in FireFox and/or Thunderbird. Well, never fear, there is a way to fix it. While it is pretty easy to fix on Linux, it is a wee bit of a pain-in-the-ass on OS X. So, to save some of you some time, here is themodified toolkit.jar for Firefox 1.5.0.2. Here is how you use it: