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a man slumped on his desk, from 'The Sleep of Reason Produces
      Monsters'

Oblomovka

Currently:

Coding underwater

Part of my job is keeping up with a narrow subset of news. Being offline from Twitter has been strange for that: I hear news when people tell me. It’s a bit like when you come out of the swimming pool, and your ears are still full of water. I can still hear, but it’s muffled, at a distance. (“Now you have people to read Twitter for you,” says Liz consolingly.)

The lack of Facebook I haven’t noticed so much, but it was Twitter that was making me anxious. I’m already dealing with the consequences of a couple of minor twitter skirmishes second-hand. I can’t work out whether it’s easier to be calming, or whether I’m just a hypocrite for giving advice from the sidelines. Oddly, my continuing Tumblr habit is still pretty calming. Tumblr can get red hot for internecine warfare — I think possibly for the same porous private/public boundaries, contextless reblogging and hot-potato passing that Twitter enables — but I’ve adopted a somewhat lower level of people to follow, a distance away from my own circles. They’re not far away from the frontlines, and you occasionally hear a burst of gunfire, but in general it is quieter there.

I’m taking the time to continue to do digital maintenance. I moved a bunch of very ancient mailspools into somewhere less vulnerable. The earliest is from August 1997; I still remember my annoyance when I lost the rest of them by failing to pick up my backup CDs from Wired when I left.

Looking through them, I wasn’t surprised that the volume was smaller (despite feeling overwhelming at the time). But even the subject lines seem shorter, look:

(Apologies for any privacy squick for anyone listed. Hey, it’s all meta-data, right?)

I blame wider screens. Of course what I should do now is actually do some data-mining of subject lines (and email sizes) and see how they’ve grown over time. ACTUAL CODE AND DATA.

Talking of code, here’s something I did for yesterday’s post. My vision of writing online always had some element of code mixed with words. It was part of what fascinated me about the the Dynabook. Back when it would sound funny rather than horrid, I would always say that I preferred my fiction with code examples.

So in yesterday’s blog post, there’s a tiny piece of code. It just randomly shuffles the multiple links to tone argument definitions, because I didn’t want to privilege one version of the story over another. If I’d had more time I would have worked out a way to make it a bit more visible, but as it is it ate about an hour of my time, which is why I’m not eagerly diving headfirst into learning email parsing and MATLAB right now. But I do want to try and integrate code into my writing more. Paul Ford can’t have all the fun!

I was pleased that I could just stick the code into my blog post, like it was just so much more HTML. My Javascript is rusty, so it took me a while to make it sufficiently self-contained. Here’s the code:

The main function does something called a Fisher-Yates shuffle, which I’d never heard about until I’d googled for how to do a shuffle in Javascript and found Frank Mitchell’s only way to shuffle an array in Javascript. Like everyone else, I code by googling these days.

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petit disclaimer:
My employer has enough opinions of its own, without having to have mine too.