(no subject)

Insomnia's a real pain. I was up waaay late last night, and by rights I should be dead tired. Every month after my Perlmongers meeting I am always wired, though, whether or not I go out for a beer, or go straight home.

Tomorrow's likely to be busy, with a few meetings with the Research Support group, plus some beginning-of-term lab fixin' to do, as well as getting started on new things my boss wants me to work on. So, I should head to bed just as soon as my valerian pills kick in (they're herbal, partly placebo, but they also do relax part of my brain so that if I want to sleep, I have a better chance of it).

I just saw Memento for the first time. Great film. Occasionally I feel like that character, though my short-term memory's not really the problem, it's my middle- to long-term ("oh, I said I'd do that last week? Three weeks in a row? Oops.") memory. Like the character, I've got a system; I take tons of (searchable) notes at work. But I also could stand to be a lot more organized and selective about my attention. ...For example, my web-browser here at home has eighteen tabs open. Watching the movie, I had a little deja-vu as he flipped through his Polaroids trying to figure out what he had just been doing. I do that, but with windows on the screen. And virtual terminals. And detatchable sessions. And tabs. And KVM switches. Yes, I could probably stand to keep a bit more focused.

To my credit, 14 of the 18 tabs were for a talk I just gave at my Perlmongers group, on maypole, a web-development and database framework that I don't know nearly enough about before Tuesday. In the process I got a simple web-app for work 85% or 90% finished. And now I know what questions to ask on the maypole mailing-list.

(By the way, if you're the same way about organizing dozens of computer windows, you, too, might have NADD. Read and rejoice, for forewarned is forearmed! *grin*)

And now, to sleep.

Helpful Spammers?

Has this ever happened to you?

Jay, an acquaintance/friend from Ottawa, just emailed me out of the blue. He got an email from "me" with a virus .zip attachment. He sent me a nicely ironic note and we've taken the chance to catch up a bit. I'm glad he did, I've been meaning to get back in touch, like, forever.

The chance of this sort of spam happening is less random than just any two people on the internet; I've gotten a number of similar emails from other perl programmers, who presumably put their name and address in one or more places where it was grabbed by spambots. I find myself wondering whether other communities of a few thousand people have had the same thing happen to them- politicians, activists, newspeople; anybody who is a public member of a group and has to have their email address publicly accessable.

Of course the obvious direction the virus-writers should take this is sending FROM one group to another whose members are more likely to want to open the unsolicited attachment, such as politicians to newspeople, newspeople to activists, activists to... wait, nobody wants to receive unsolicited attachments from activists. (1)

I've yet to receive an email with a snippet of interesting looking perl code as a teaser, with a .zip attachment; which leads me to think the senders don't care a bit about the specific domain of the "sender" or recipient. Whoever figures out that one is gonna catch themselves lots of marks, I'm sure.

(1) Except maybe other activists.