Slow email

I sent an email to a colleague at another University, and after exactly half an hour received this warning:

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.
A message that you sent has not yet been delivered to one or more of its recipients after more than 95016 hours on the queue on mrelay-e-ext.lmu.ac.uk.

I calculated that the delay was about 10.8 years, and was intrigued by the strange delay. I asked our own tech people and they thought it was rather funny, too, trying to deliver a message for almost 11 years - then they suggested that perhaps it was a bug in the system of the destination email server after the annual Summer time change. What kind of programmers or systems designers would forget that daylight saving time occurs every year?

Google Wave

I was invited into Google Wave today by a colleague. It loks neat, with some nice friendly videos to introduce the service (meaning I cannot really see the intros on the train or in the lounge at home, where others are sitting).

I am not sure I am ready for this. I am already maintaining profiles in Google Blog, LinkedIn, Facebook, Academia.edu and the University profile webpage, not to mention the Virtual Learning Environment (Blackboard) where every programme and course that I teach on gives me a space for my personal profile... Most importantly, I want to keep my academic CV up to date in order to respond promptly to requests for information about recent activities.

All of these profiles are completely exclusive and independent of each other. And I am successfully using blogs for research supervision and research collaboration, so I do not feel that there is a problem to which Google Wave offers a solution. I want to wait until there is a bit more cross-platform integration. Is there any sign of some intelligent interfaces between all of these different services so that each can take structured information from the other? Isn't that what meta-tags were supposed to enable?

First week back

The first full week back at work has been a time for tidying up. Hundred of e-mails that I've read and not answered, and thousands of files on my computer that have been cluttering up my workspace for too long. I have spent several hours a day revisiting these old e-mails, deleting anything that is not absolutely necessary. Some e-mails I had kept thinking that I would get around to taking some action on them later, when there is time. But now I have to acknowledge to myself that there won't be time. One consequence of sorting through them all was finally finishing off a major paper jointly-authored with Stephen Gruneberg, on Performance-based contracting. Finally we can get this submitted. I still have two book chapters and a couple of journal papers to finish, as well. One book chapter I had committed to has disappeared. The editor of that book decided that it was going to take too long to wait for me, so he asked someone else instead, and now has the chapter he needs. In terms of tidying up my computer, I have got in quite a mess with trying to syncrhonize the documents on the various computers that I use. Every time I synchronize two of the computers with each other, all the files I had deleted from one are resinstated unless I deleted them from the other! I have ended up with four different locations for all my document files, so I was finding it impossible to lose and files that I had tried to delete. The solution? Make an "old documents" folder on all four computers, and then move anything I want from there to a fresh new documents folder, which can be synchronized across all locations. Now I can pick up everything I need from a sub-folder, and then remember to delete the whol sub-folder in all four locations. All this for data security. It is remarkable how difficult it is to maintain a usable and robust backup regime with computers.