Dr Nic

I’ve been offline (read: access to dialup only, which is close enough to offline) and discovered today I had 950+ RSS articles to read. Amongst them, was Coty Rosenblath’s link-blog (often includes Ruby related links) and his “Five things” article. At the end, in little font, was my name.

Thusly tagged, here are five things you don’t know about me:

1. My wife was my next door neighbour (the “girl next door”).
   I lived in a house of four single males. The previous tenants were a pair of females, who had moved next door at the request of the landlord who owned both properties. The two females never got their mail redirected, so it kept piling up at our house. They were attractive, fun females. Of the four men in the house, I was the only one that took their mail over to them. I got to marry on of them.
2. I was the last person out of a burning building
   I lived in a residential dorm during my first three years at university. After a big party, a girl left her bedspread on her heater and then spent the night in someone else’s room. The bedspread caught on fire and her bedroom - on the top floor of the building - and the fire spread into the roof and destroyed all the top floor bedrooms. My room was on the floor below, but I was unconscious enough from the effects of the fire to not hear the alarms. Nice firemen found me asked me to leave. I got my picture in the newspaper leaving the building.
3. I picked up the shortened name ‘Nic’ during university
   First year students in our university residential dorm are given hand-drawn nameplates for their doors by the older students. There were too ‘Nicholas’s on the one floor. The other one got ‘Nick’, and I got ‘Nic’. I liked it a lot after looking at the nameplate for a whole year.
4. I have an attention span of about two weeks for new projects
   My parents picked this up first: every two weeks I’d bring home books from the library on a new topic, or future career path. The librarian said “there is no one else in the school who reads so many non-fiction books”. As an adult, a short-term, intense focus on new interests/projects, means I learn and explore many things. But if its not finished within two weeks, then it might never get done. For example, I have 20+ blog articles and many open-source projects that I’ve started but never released.
5. I love pizzas
   A pizza is a wonderful format for consuming other meats and vegetables. I want to buy a pizza stone for the oven so it toasts the bottom of the base. Yummy.

Here endeth the lesson.

Five people I’d like to learn more about: Yehuda Katz, Carlos Eduado, Erik Kastner, Richard White, and Peter Cooper.

Tally-ho.

Does anyone know to whom I address and send this letter?

Dear Gmail,

Thank you for Gmail. I love it and would hug it if it were a teddy bear and no one was looking.

Recently, some Asian-origin spammers have included me in their lists. A while back, it was some Russian spammers, or thereabouts.

If the contents of my emails don’t fit into the basic English ASCII set of characters, plus some of those European characters with the cute accents on the tops, then the email probably isn’t one I can read, thus spam or not, I’m just not that interested.

I doubt I’m alone in my mono-linguistic capabilities either.

Either help me filter out foreign language spam, or let me translate it and then with confidence I can say “No I don’t want a chinese nor russian penis enlarger, but thanks for asking”.

Yours sincerely,
Dr Nic

First there was email. Time passed. Then there was Gmail.

I’m not writing to convince non-Gmail users to use Gmail. I’m writing show this screen shot of Hosted Gmail in action. It’s a beta mail hosting service on top of the beta gmail service, so assuming beta < 1, therefore beta*beta < beta; ergo, it may be worse than gmail alone. But I’m prepared for any possible punishment. Gmail is just that wonderful.

The hosting solution may seem redundant for people who’ve setup email forwarding from their non-gmail accounts to gmail, but Hosted Gmail would seem a cleaner solution, with unlimited potential. Currently that potential begins with allowing the management of additional users. Its a start.

Dr Nic’s Wish: Hosted Gmail to provide “public” access to each others’ emails within your domain (or subgroups) so that knowledge that accumulates within email boxes can be shared more easily.

Dr Nic’s History: when I first learnt Ruby on Rails, the first thing I did was build a Gmail clone. This was pre-RJS days and before I discovered TrimPath, so the Javascript usage was clunky, and it sent a lot of HTML back to the browser instead of JSON data. But it was lovely.

Gmail Hosted: https://www.google.com/hosted