Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Low-energy days the past two days. Enough pain to be uncomfortable, but not enough to count as really noteworthy given my usual pain levels; just really slow-moving, low-energy, allow the cat to pin me to the chair by falling asleep on me, put off what I can get away with putting off -days. Behind on LJ reading. Behind on email. Only a little bit behind on dishes.

But I made it to rehearsals for both groups this week (neither one on time, but I got there). And I did manage to keep my electricity from being turned off. Now I just need to manage to pay my phone bill and scrape together enough loose change to buy enough gas to get me to gigs this weekend.

Thrir Venstri Foetr will be performing at Marching Through Time in Glen Dale, Maryland both days this weekend. We're scheduled for 2:00 PM and 4:20 PM, but you'll really want to get there earlier and take in the various military demonstrations and camps.

I had an interesting experience a few hours ago, trying to teach a skill I really wasn't sure how to teach. I was trying to teach a bodhran player how to play a snare drum, and there's something about how to hold and move the sticks that I couldn't figure out how to communicate. I got part of a clue shortly after she left, and hope I'll get another chance sometime so I can find out whether my idea works. (I can do it right, and I could see what she was doing wrong, but I had trouble describing the two.) Since an important bit of my self-image is "teacher", I do want to know that I can figure out how to teach this.

(I think a certain amount of it is a trust/confidence thing. You have to be able to trust that the stick will bounce the right way, because if you try to control it too much, it won't. Which means that even after I communicate this, it'll take practice for the feel to become natural enough to trust without thinking about it. I remember how the mechanics of how to hold the sticks was taught to me, but this is more of an approach to movement than a grip problem.)

Hmm. Now I find myself wondering what playing a drum kit in Lunar gravity would be like. Or microgravity. Have any astronauts taken stick-percussion instruments up?

"I will deal with this the same way I dealt with the bulk of my adolescence: by pretending it is not happening." -- Jeff Vogel, The Story of the Toddler

The person I complained about a few days ago did write back. He said that he did not attach images. (Okay, maybe he didn't mean to, but they wound up attached anyhow, unless someone cracked my password and edited my mail spool after his message arrived, just to make him look bad.)

Unfortunately he also had the gall to write:

"but as a point of information - a whole new generation of internet users have begun using this thing called the world wide web... amazing as it may seem, these people regularly communicate with each other sending and receiving text, music, pictures and video."

At this point it appears (as far as I can tell from this end of the wire) that the initial problem was his use of a web browser instead of a proper mail client, and that his browser didn't do what he thought he was telling it to do. But his responding that he "did not do that" and assuming I'm net.clueless, without bothering to check whether or not he'd actually sent what he thought he'd sent, rather bothered me. If he didn't do it, why do I have one GIF and one JPG attached to his message?

I really shouldn't have to send a 158K message including the original attachments to someone in order to convince him that he did in fact send me attachments. I suppose he doesn't think I can tell the difference between a URL and an attachment, or that I can't tell how large a message is? (It's not like I'm seeing pictures and assuming they're attachments -- I'm using a text-only mail reader. I see more than a thousand lines of base-64 crap and know it's not just a URL.)

But if that's what it takes ...

... Let's just hope it's enough, and that he believes me now when I tell him that Netscape did not do what he thought it was doing. He said he couldn't possibly have sent a message that large because it would have taken all day to send the 3000 copies. My guess is that he's connecting to an MTA operated by his ISP, and only one copy of the message ever went out from his computer, exploding to 3000 copies at his ISP's mail server. (Thank goodness he did use Bcc for most of the list, though I'm still wondering why so many addresses were posted in the clear.)

Things like this are why I think it's important to try to convey at least some part of How The Net Works to people, not just "you push this button and mail goes out". End-users do not have to be network gurus, but it might be good to understand that there's a water heater in the basement which can be temporarily exhausted and which has a pilot light which can usually be ignored but occasionally needs re-lighting, rather than only "this is the hot-water tap, and it turns this way".