Month: October 2006

Categories
Miscellanea

Armchair philosophy and email sigs

I’m not a big fan of email signatures, although I used to be. I recall one day deciding that ‘real’ mail didn’t generally have such things, and so I wouldn’t put one in my email.

That’s not a very good reason, but on reflection it seems odd to add a ‘standard’ thought to every message, no matter what its tone and content are.

I am, however a fan of the simple philosophy to be found in them. One of the last I had, that I recall, is:

You are unique. Just like everyone else.
Reading ‘Beautiful Evidence‘ just now, I have come across something I’d put in my next sig, if I ever have one again. Purporting to be the conclusion of an omnibus/meta survey of all social science papers, the quoted paper summarises our knowledge of human behaviour:
(1) Some do, some don’t. (2) The differences aren’t very great. (3) It’s more complicated than that.
Of course, it breaks the etiquette of keeping an email sig to two lines or less. Good job I don’t have one :-)

Categories
Gay

Football crazy

This weekend has been very football themed. Saturday started with a longstanding appointment to see Brentford vs Bristol City with the Bristol fans (I claim to support Coventry, but well, I do seem to see a lot of Bristol, thanks to Andy). That morphed into a very enjoyable pub crawl centered around the England game, and I got to meet the charming chairman of the London Titans.

Andy’s regularly trying to get me to come along and watch them, and I’ve enjoyed it whenever I go. So on Sunday I turned up at the Old Deer Park to watch them play GFC Bournemouth. 3-9 is not the best result of course, but the Titans are a new team, and visibly improving every time I see them.

If someone had told me five years ago that coming out would increase the amount of football I followed, I think I would have laughed. It is, after all, a sport not noted for its friendliness to openly gay folk.

Categories
Digital Archive

Building Blocks

The digital archive has got off to a slow start. I took a significant step today (it was raining!), by getting a revision control system running to host the software I’ll need to write. My chosen system – Subversion – was not available in a ready to install form for Mac OS X, at least not as a server.

This article seemed to be the best advice, but even it appears to contain a few red herrings, and I certainly didn’t want to install XCode on my shiny, minimalist, OS X Server installation.

So over the last few months I’ve been creating a binary distribution of Subversion, Apache v2 and the various config bits needed to get the https version of Subversion’s server protocol running. Today, it finally went live, and started hosting its first project – a distributable version of the scripts I’ve written to do this. Watch this space – mcaleely.com might be about to host its first new software project in years! Don’t hold your breath though, considering my current rate of productivity.