Recently, GozRita unveiled the names of our two Falleretes majors for 2008's Falles festivities. All the free newspapers did some extensive coverage, with reports on who they are and what they do.

Qué Valencia interviewed the little Fallera major, and then posted this:

Little Victoria learns Valencian

So, Victoria Blázquez speaks English and Valencian "nearly perfectly". Great! I think having newspapers treat Valencian as if it were just another foreign language that students are forced to learn is a great example of the dark future our language will face in just a few generations.

Sometime in August, I said I would watch the Inbox Zero talk later on that day. Well, I finally did today. And I'm ready to mass-murder my (now not so) fat inbox folder and start from scratch, and becoming a good boy.

In fact, I've been on probation for a few weeks. While I wasn't watching the talk (which is pretty insightful and fun, and useful if you also have these horrid mail handling problems) I did roll up my sleeves a few times and worked on reducing the problem. After a few rounds of fighting, things were looking slightly better. I deleted TONS of spam which still was sitting in there. I deleted entire threads of list mail which for some reason wasn't being filtered properly. I archived a lot of random, misc email. I even replied to some job offers, for a change. I fixed my .procmailrc a little to get rid of lots of useless stuff that appears in my mail. It got better, but not entirely better.

I went from the 6600~ which was probably the figure when I said “Enough!” to around 2580. It's still a lot, and I can still get rid of a lot more with easy pattern searches in mutt. The good news is that, for the first time in ages, the number of emails in the mailbox has stayed stable for more than a month. I tell you: I'm proud!

So Merlin gets asked in the talk what to do when you've been a naughty boy for a long time, and you've ended up with this HUGE mailbox you can't handle anymore. His answer was what some people suggested in blog comments: put it aside, start from zero. Merlin calls it mail-DMZ, and that's probably what I'll do in a few hours, admittedly with a sentiment of guilt deep in my chest. And from that point, I'll have my mailbox be a TODO list. Delete. Defer. Delegate. Respond. Do. Simple!

Other Planet Debian participants like joeyh commented that something that really helps is reducing the number of times you poll for email. For me, that means

set daemon      1800            # Pool every 30 minutes

when it was 5 minutes before. I hope I won't find myself issuing awaken commands often...

I remember when, more than five years ago, having more than 100 mails made me feel bad and go cleanup. After some vacation, it went up to 150. Then Christmas came along, 300, until I found myself nearing 7000 last summer.

Before moving my junk to a demilitarised mailbox, I'm having some fun replying to some email. The first one in my mailbox is from a member of a Catalan "Mallach" family.

From: Conchita Broquetas <familia_mallach_broquetas@yahoo.es>
Subject: Hola!
To: jordi@sindominio.net
Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 16:55:17 +0200 (CEST)

who discovered there was a "Jordi Mallach" other than his brother in the Internet. Apparently we had an exchange on where our families came from (Mallach is all but a common surname... anywhere, and my family has always wondered where it came from).

So that's more than 6 years ago. I think I'd love to get a reply to some email sent by me years ago which has been sitting for years in a mailbox, because "I need to reply to this sometime". I think the Mallach-Broquetas are getting one tonight.

If you think I'm dumping random thoughts on a vim buffer, it's probably due to me feeling sad today. Sorry, but I feel like typing, and I don't have a typewriter with me. Speaking of sad, nothing beats the next email which sat for some dramatic 6 months in my messy inbox until I found out in the worst of the possible scenarios. Let's go back to late February, 2004, when I had no job, and I didn't have a clue on what to do with my life.

From: Mark Shuttleworth <mark@hbd.com>
Subject: New project to discuss
To: Jordi Mallach <jordi@debian.org>
Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 18:33:51 +0000

[...]
I'm hiring a team of debian developers to work full time on a new
distribution based on Debian. We're making internationalisation a prime
focus, together with Python and regular release management. I've discussed
it with a number of Debian leaders and they're all very positive about it.
[...]

I'm not sure if I totally missed it as it came in, or I skimmed through it and thought ”WTF?! Dude on crack” or I just forgot “I need to reply to this email”, but I'd swear it was the former. Not long after, no-name-yet.com popped up, the rumours started spreading around Debian channels. Luckily, I got a job at LliureX two months later, where I worked during the following 2½ years, but that's another story. I guess it was July or so when Ubuntu was made public, and Mark and his secret team organised a conference (blog entries [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]), just before the Warty release, and I was invited to it, for the same reasons I got that email.

During that conference, probably because Mark sent me some email and I applied a filter to get to it, I found the lost email, and felt like digging a hole to hide for a LONG while. I couldn't believe the incredible opportunity I had missed. I went to Mark and said "hey, you're not going to believe this", and he did look quite surprised about someone being such an idiot.

I wonder if I should reply to his email today...

jordi@nubol:~$ countmail
SIX THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-FOUR!

SIX THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-FOUR MAIL MESSAGES!

HAHAHAHAHA!

I'll watch the talk this evening.

19:12 < Данило> jordim: btw, you should look up what 'dude' means in Serbian :)
19:13 < Данило> jordim: (old slang for 'boobs', but don't tell anyone I told 
                you that)

(danilo's name obfuscated in cyrillic so he can't blame me)

Update:

20:52 < kaol> jordi: dude, you fail at obfuscation

So last monday, the F1 team “Vodafone McLaren Mercedes <youraddhere>” unveiled their new car, new drivers and all the stuff in València. Many Valencians are still wanki^Wexcited about the event.

Our Great Leader Paco Camps and his Great Team of Consellers prepared a urban racing circuit emulating Monaco, so people could enjoy Fernando Alonso's driving skillz right next to their homes. To accomplish this, one of the most important arteries of the city was closed during 8 or more hours, during a working day, when transit is busiest. And better yet, 1,200,000€ of public money, our money, was spent to set up a show which basically was a huge advertisement of a private team.

This is València though, the land of “mosatros, més!”, and Valencians are pretty much happy with how their taxes are used, or how the city is quickly becoming a huge circus, after 12 (soon to be extended to 16) years of Partido Popular. I can't wait for the 32nd America's Cup!

If anything positive, this show may change the name of the bridge where the Pope did his stuff last Summer (at the time, it was closed to transit during 3 months). Until now popularly called “El Puente del Papa”, hopefully it'll morph to “El Puente de Alonso”, at least until the next show. If I need to choose between Ratzinger and Alonso, hey, give me Alonsomania!

Today I woke up with a strong determination to do some badly needed house cleaning. A series of rushed travels have left a few rooms full of stuff all over the place, after I emptied a bag or two to be able to pack on time.

Just before going to Tunisia, I decided my wallet was way too fat so I got rid of shopping receipts and other random shit I had in it. That included quite a few PGP keys from people I had been collecting in previous travels, and I had forgotten about.

So, armed with my willingness to get rid of all of those dust puppies, first thing I find in the living room is the pile of wallet papers, and my clever procrastinating mind apparently thought it was time to postpone real cleaning; instead I needed to sit down and sign all of those really old PGP keys.

Many of you reading this will have got a few emails from me this morning. It was about time! Some of the silly strips of paper dated back to the Open Source World Conference 2004 in Málaga, when a decent group of Debian Developers gathered in a really small hacking room and talked about some Debian topics.

Signing the keys has let me identify a few non-revoked ids which really should be, as the accounts are no longer valid, etc.; many others have greylisted me for a while and finally accepted my email. There was one mail recipient which may have gone a bit too far with the anti-spam policies, though:

9323170A74B     4007 Sun Jan 14 17:55:38  jordi@nubol.oskuro.net
(host mail-dtag.reichmann.net[62.104.43.214] said: 421 call 09001000057 for admin support (in reply to MAIL FROM command))
                                         alexander@schmehl.info

Alexander, I'm not doing calls to Germany to send your key, but I can resend if you want, once you open up your mail server... (my tries to knoepix.org also failed).

It seems I have misplaced a few keys from the Ubuntu Summit in Sydney, but I think I know where to find that sheet. More in 2 or 3 years!

PS: dust puppies are alive and well, they managed to survive yet another tough day.

Via Mako and Mika I learned about the discovery of a living close relative of GNOME's GEGL. Her name is GECS for obvious reasons, lives in China and she seems to be very happy with her blue daddy.

Cow or goat, equally cute!

(Brought to you by yet another shocking URL posted by mika)

Metro lines I have used:

Got at b3co.com!

Apple has announced a new battery recall program. Last time there was one affecting powerbooks, mine wasn't on the list, although I thought my battery was clearly overheating. This time, things are quite different.

This computer is eligible for the Battery Exchange Program.
This battery qualifies for the Battery Exchange Program.

The good news is I get a brand new battery. The bad news is that I don't know how much time it'll take.

Message 1

I am in Spain!
What a fine country.
+1310XXXXXXX
2006/07/16 18:10:18

Dear sender,
I'm happy about you being so enthusiastic about your visit to Spain. I would probably be able to share the moment with you if I had the slightest clue about your identity.
Have a great night at nearly 30°C,
Jordi

There are programs that get installed with defaults that annoy me day after day, but I never care to do anything to fix the configuration files across all the boxes where I use it.

For example, emacs in Debian creates stupid backup~ files by default, which after a while accumulate in my homedirs.

It's so cool when these backups I always grumble at save 2 hours of work, after misstyping “rm” instead of “less”...