Back in 2003 I started tracking some numbers on my email use patterns, especially related to replies. I ran those old scripts on my 2004 mail and the numbers look pretty similar:

• Of the 3236 emails I sent during 2004, 2094 of them were replies
• My five most common response times in minutes were:

• ten minutes: 40 times
• thireen minutes: 36 times
• sixteen minutes: 36 times
• twelve minutes: 35 times
• eleven minutes: 33 times

• My mean response times was 22.36 minutes
• My longest response time was 58.4 days.

The only really meaningful number there is the median response time and comparing it to 2003, I'm a lot faster in general.

I've switched from a mailing list driven system to a wiki based one for this UnBlog. It's less weird than the mailing list setup was, but it's not exactly moveable type either. It offers RSS feeds and subscriptions, though through entirely different mechanisms than the list did. I think I've moved everything over well enough that there are no dead links into the old space. I ended up using my WikiChump thing modified to handle attachments and create comment pages to populate the data.

I try to maintain good password practices -- total random gibberish, never use the same password for two things, change them monthly --, and the EBP lite from http://mandylionlabs.com/ certainly helps.

Last night, at about 3am I was doing my monthly password change and somehow I typed one password wrong in exactly the same way three times. Today when I tried to add my ssh private key it just wouldn't unlock. I tried the "right" password 10 or so times and no luck. I then started trying slight variants on the password: fingers shifted, missed shift key, similar looking characters, etc. After 30 or so of those tries with no luck it was time to script.

I went ahead and aggregated the survey results related to this previous entry about starting a social club:

https://ry4an.org/unblog/msg00076.html

The results can be found at:

https://ry4an.org/oldenburg/survey/

Sadly, I've been forced to conclude that there's just no way to start something like I'd hoped for without a good year's worth of operating expenses in the bank. You need members to gather dues, need dues to open the club, and need the club to gather members.

It's time once again for that marriage of mathematics and paranoia that is a cryptographic key signing. I'm organizing another for Thursday, January 20th, 2005. Details can be found at: https://ry4an.org/keysigning/ Results from my last key signing can be found at: http://ry4an.org/keysigning/visualize/

If all that's gibberish to you, check you my much better explanation last time I did one of these: https://ry4an.org/unblog/msg00026.html

Thanks once again to the ACM for letting us use their room.

I've got the entries and current scores posted for the Dead Pool at http://sarinity.com/deadpool/ . Thanks to those who entered. I was planning on hitting everyone up to join at the Halloween party, but then I got distracted and forgot. O'well six people, two of whom already have points, is good enough.

Best of luck to the entrants,

I eat pretzels like Darwin would have. It's a constant survival of the fittest competition. I select two pretzels, eat whichever is most flawed, select another, re-test, and just keep going from there. At the end I've got the best pretzel of the whole bag left, which I then eat.

Admittedly it's not an actual test of the pretzels' fitness to survive -- the pretzels with inferior qualities aren't dying off due to failure to feed themselves and attract mates. Really it's just their ability to conform to my invented notion of the master pretzel, but if you go around saying you eat pretzels like Hitler people back away slowly.

On Tuesday some friends and I were talking about how we immaturely approached alcohol back in the dorms, and I was thinking it would be fun to take out a full (or half) page ad in the student paper, The Minnesota Daily, like this:

WE LIVED IN THE DORMS. WE DRANK.

WE COULDN'T HOLD OUR LIQUOR.

Thank you, Resident Hall Facilities Staff, for your

service above and beyond the call of duty. We're sorry.

I code for a hobby and a profession, but usually it's only the hobby stuff I can release here. However I'm happy to say and proud to announce that Onion Networks, my employer, has okay-ed the release of AntFlow, a tool I largely wrote.

AntFlow adds hot folder triggers and workflow functionality to the ever popular Ant build tool. It's a great fit and a right good bit of code, so check it out at http://antflow.onionnetworks.com/ .

My Halloween costume this year came out pretty well. I went as Alex from Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange during his brainwashing. I made the head piece from scrap metal, some syringes, galvanized steel wire, rubber tubing, and a lot of rivets. The actual actor was temporarily blinded during the filming of that scene, but I went less hard-core on the eye restraints and the only after effects I've got are some bruising and puffiness. All in all better than I was hoping for. See the attached image for a photo. Thanks to the Kromhout clan for the photo.