Truer Words - A Journal

Replying to Email

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 16:41:20 GMT

Daring Fireball (John Gruber) has been talking about email reply styles, lately, and now lots of other people are, too. (Including me!)

What I haven't yet seen mentioned is that "top posters" are notorious for only replying to one part — possibly even just one line or sentence — in a longer email. Many times over the years I have written a long-ish message to a client, explaining how I would do something (and for how much), only to receive back a copy of my entire message with a question at the top like, "How would that part work, exactly?" or "Could you send me a sketch of how you think that part would look?"

See, I've sent a message with twelve paragraphs explaining the overall flow of an application, and the question I get back could refer to almost any of it.

Even better (worse) is that my original message probably included a few questions which have gone completely unanswered.

That, to me, is the biggest benefit of the inline-reply style. You have to pay attention to what you're doing! You start your reply by quoting the entire message. As you go through the original message, you delete the stuff which needs no reply and which isn't needed for context, and then insert your own comments immediately after the relevant parts that remain. Since most email programs show different levels of quoting in different colors, it's very easy to follow the conversation.

Recently someone sent me a "breath of fresh air." It was another software developer, and we've been talking about me helping him out with the next version of his (only) application. Our conversation has stretched out over three months, but we're both sticklers for the inline-reply style so reading back through these email messages is just wonderful. Trying to have a conversation like this with a "top-poster" (someone who always quotes everything that came before, and only puts replies at the top) would be awkward, if not impossible.

Unfortunately, some email clients make inline-replying a little difficult. Gmail, MobileMail (Apple's Mail on the iPhone), and Outlook/Entourage are all good (bad) examples. They can all make very "pretty" email with bolds, colors, fonts, links and pictures, but those things are secondary (or tertiary) to good communication. At the opposite end of the spectrum are apps like Mailsmith, which *can't* create fancy-schmancy bold/colored/linked/imaged messages, but which provide tools to make inline-replying even easier than it is already. (There are other apps like that, but Mailsmith is the one I use. Claris Emailer was another great example of this type of app, back in its day.)

Buffaloed

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 21:04:34 GMT

I have enough trouble with lousy grammar, so I really didn't need to see this:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

... especially as it is a grammatically correct sentence. That's just crazy talk.

The Picker of English Nits

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 07 May 2007 17:58:49 GMT

The crazy overuse of the word "get" is still bugging me, though having reread this old conversation on that topic was thrilling. We once conversed most intelligently here on Truer Words!

Months ago I told Brian Andresen that a new corruption of English was bothering me, and then he started to hear it and I'm pleased to report that, for a time, it bothered him almost as much as it did me.

Which corruption is that? Rather than just state it, I'll offer a hint. The clue is here. Try and find it by rereading this message very carefully. I'll give a gold star to the first person to describe it.

Even NPR, that bastion of Good English, has committed this faux pas on a regular basis in the last half year.

Yes, Greg, I know that you believe there is no such thing as Good or Proper English. That may or may not be true, but the definition of Poor or Improper English is (In My Opinion) when choice of phrasing is senseless.

Maybe I'm an old-fogey-conservative-English-professor type, but (again, IMO) not all Improper English should become accepted just because it's common.

Done Waiting

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 07 May 2007 16:35:33 GMT

Corinne brought Lauren to the doctor's office for her two month checkup.

The appointment was at 10:40, and they arrived on time.

They waited a long time to be brought back to the examination room. At Noon, after Lauren had been screaming for a half hour because the nurse had undressed her (to weigh her) and left her that way, after being "spat up on" (vomited on) profusely because Lauren was so worked up, after cleaing up two more puddles of puke on the examining table... after all that and nothing else becuase the doctor hadn't been in yet and there were still other patients ahead of them (based on the numbers they'd hung on the doors), Corinne gave up. She dressed the baby, told the receptionist that she was done waiting and "yes, I'll call to reschedule," and left.

Good for her. Lauren is healthy (the spitting up is normal, don't worry), and at least we have her weight: 10 pounds 13 ounces (up from 6 pounds 15 at birth, two months ago).

The doctor's office called twice in the last week to remind us that Lauren's appointment was today. That was nice of them, but it should have been the other way around.

The worst is that Corinne and Lauren missed much of Ravi's fourth birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese.

The source of the problem here is the state insurance for children (called, "Husky" or something like that). The doctors don't make much profit from it, so they double or triple book (schedule two or three patients per doctor at the same time). It's a known problem that has been written about in the newspapers. Apparently nothing is being done to correct it, although many of the pediatricians in the area don't even accept "Husky" appointments anymore.

Totally Maxed Out

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 02 May 2007 18:30:04 GMT

I haven't posted an update in a while for the most common excuse of all: I've been way too busy living a life to have the time to write about it.

It's really just an issue of priorities. Trying to earn a living, sharing the job of raising a beautiful baby girl, visiting her parents once or twice weekly, teaching midweek Bible class, talking to the parents for fifteen minutes each every day that they aren't visited, riding my bike at least three or four times per week, etc., etc., etc... these things have all taken priority over any writing whatsoever.

Midweek class will no longer be my responsibility in two or three more weeks. That will free up about four hours of my time... but this is time for which other responsibilities are already begging. Sigh.

I like being busy, but I don't like living at maximum capacity all the time.

Update: None of the above precludes my taking a day off here and there for "planned events" such as bike rides with friends. Whether or not I've ever met those friends. ;-) But obviously if the event is never planned, I can't take the day off...

Firefox? Isn't That a Movie?

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 19:11:32 GMT

One of my clients has recently signed up for an online shopping cart system to work with his catalog (which is based on Conversant).

When a customer buys something through this shopping cart system, they're shown a confirmation page with a link back to a specific page on the vendor's site. That's totally standard.

The link appears to use JavaScript to submit a form which POSTs the sale's data (minus the truly private info like credit card number) back to a page on the vendor's site. Still pretty common (except their implementation doesn't actually work).

They claim that it only works in IE. Not in Firefox, not in Safari, not in Opera. Why worry about those, they're just a small percentage of the marketplace, right?

I'm sorry, but those people are morons.

Without even testing it, I can tell you that they're wrong: it doesn't work in ANY browser, not even IE. How do I know? The link just runs the script, and the script just causes the browser to navigate to the vendor's thankyou page: it never does anything with the form at all.

The form is all hidden fields, looking something like this:

<form action="url/of/thank-you/page" name="postData">
<input type="hidden" name="firstName" value="Seth" />
etc., etc., etc.

The form's action is pointing to the correct URL... but the form is never used. The script looks like this:

function submitForm()
{
	window.location.href="url/of/thank-you/page";
	return true;
}

If you understood the above, then you know how easy it would be to fix:

function submitForm()
{
	document.forms.postData.submit();
	return true;
}

Sigh. (Even easier: do away with the javascript entirely, and replace the link with an actual submit button.)

Chat with Brian Regarding Lexers and Parser Generators

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 18:10:30 GMT

(I'm sure with that subject, everybody's just dying to read this one...)

I had a (third) chat with Brian Andresen today about Lexers and Parser Generators, a type of software that's working overtime to suck worse than most email clients.

Brian Andresen 11:06:49

remember we were looking for Unicode-savvy parsing tools a while back?

Seth Dillingham 11:06:59

I do

Brian Andresen 11:07:04

I'm looking for new parser-generator tools for my project at work

came across this: http://www.devincook.com/goldparser/about/why-use-gold.htm

Seth Dillingham 11:09:23

oh man, very interesting

Brian Andresen 11:09:51

I suspect that the author is more mindful of capability than performance

still, I plan to download it and try a small grammar with GOLD

I'll also try out ANTLR (again) and ACCENT (http://accent.compilertools.net/)

(why do all of these tools use all-caps names? dunno.)

Seth Dillingham 11:11:18

ANTLR is an acronym, I don't know about the rest

not that it matters much

Brian Andresen 11:11:40

yeah

Seth Dillingham 11:12:00

I know ANTLR made some more progress, but I haven't played with it.

heh. Check out the first News Item on the ANTLR home page

Brian Andresen 11:12:59

bah, GOLD is Win32-only.

Seth Dillingham 11:13:07

Grr.

This whole class of software is a joke.

Brian Andresen 11:13:24

2009?! we're going to have to wait a long time for that next beta.

Seth Dillingham 11:14:09

But the news is in past tense! I think they're probably just thousands of timezones ahead of us. That would explain it.

Brian Andresen 11:14:17

heh

yeah, there's not much out there that's free. I've found a bunch of commercial tools, but none of them have even inspired me to request a trial version

Seth Dillingham 11:24:57

again, I see that ANTLR's C++ target is dormant. http://www.antlr.org:8080/pipermail/antlr-interest/2007-January/019001.html

Brian Andresen 11:25:11

that's very relevant, thank you

Seth Dillingham 11:25:32

Looking at this stuff never makes me happy. :-(

Brian Andresen 11:25:40

no kiddin'

well, that just left me with a grand total of zero tools to investigate. lame.

Seth Dillingham 11:26:18

I think, "I could devote a ton of my time to learning the issues and helping to fix these problems. Or I could make a living and have a life, and make do with what I already have."

Brian Andresen 11:26:31

yep

Seth Dillingham 11:26:58

But it still makes me nuts. My work could really benefit from a good, Unicode-savvy parser generator.

with a C++ target

Brian Andresen 11:28:01

yeah. the thing that got me started on this (for Agilent) was how poorly designed lex/yacc (and flex/bison) are for providing code to be part of a larger project

they were designed for making a standalone executable that doesn't need to do much more beyond the parsing, it seems

Seth Dillingham 11:28:56

they're specifically for feeding a compiler, right?

Brian Andresen 11:29:22

our simulator already has six lex/yacc-based parsers in the code, and we end up having to mangle the yy___ symbols and other globals to even just make it link

Seth Dillingham 11:29:57

(a particular kind of compiler/builder, I mean)

Brian Andresen 11:30:06

yeah

Seth Dillingham 11:30:17

Hey, do you mind if I post this conversation on [tw]? I'll hide your handle.

Brian Andresen 11:31:36

oh right, and my other gripe was memory management. Suppose we're parsing through a line and allocating memory for various things as we go. Then we hit a syntax error. There are ways to design the rules to do error recovery, but designing the rules to allow error recovery to clean up all allocated memory is not obvious at all.

go for it

Seth Dillingham 11:32:48

thanks

Old Ma Bell: Memory is the First to Go

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 18:57:19 GMT

Macrobyte's business phone line went dead yesterday, for no apparent reason. Really dead. No dial tone, no buzz or hiss, no 'presence', no nothing no how.

I'm a forgetful type, so the first thing I checked was our last bill. It just came in, and we're not overdue, so that's not it.

Now, I don't use the phone all that often — most of my clients just write to me — so this wasn't a big emergency. A little later I was back working, having procrastinated on this minor annoyance.

This morning I tried to make a phone call (oh, yeah... that's why I pay for this line!), but of course it was still dead. So I grabbed a phone and went out to the box on the side of the house to test the line. Great signal on the house phone, no signal on the business phone. This officially pushes the problem into AT&T's lap.

Keep in mind that there are no longer any actual people working at AT&T. Ma Bell is just a big network of computers and phones. And she's a big OLD network.

When I called (from the home phone), I spoke with a computer, running the latest AI/VSR. At first, it wanted yesses and nos, and I was bored. Then it wanted the phone number that was having trouble. I entered my office phone line, and it said there was no record of this number, and that new customers should call a different line.

Hmm. Did the old lady forget about my phone number? Is that why my line died?

(Wait, sorry, it's not fair to call it an old lady. She has a fancy-new-3D logo, with transparency!!)

So, I tried again, and this time told it I was having trouble with my home line.

It asked me to describe the problem in plain english! No longer bored (in fact, I considered playing with it for a minute, but I have work to do and wanted my phone back…), I said, "My phone line is not working."

After just a couple more questions, it had figured out that I wasn't actually talking about my home line. "Please enter the number for the phone that is not working." I did, and it ran some line tests while playing some lovely muzak.

(Paraphrasing...) "Our line tests are complete, and a repair ticket has been opened. Your line will be repaired by... Thursday, February First, 2007, at... Six Thirty PM."

I believe AT&T is actually run by the Lawnmower Man. That's fine, I guess, but we all know he can't affect the physical world (remember the bomb...). If this is an actual problem with my phone line, and not just a memory lapse on Ma Bell's part, who is going to fix it!?

Update: Just a few hours later, the phone is working again. Did the old lady simply "remember" me?

TextMate’s Undo, and the New Editor Wars

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 17:18:05 GMT

Erik Barzeski on TextMate’s Undo

Recently I conducted another of these experiments. I got so far as trying to modify one of the files in the theme I use on this site. I typed a line or two, uploaded the changes, and realized I'd edited the wrong file. I hit cmd-Z to undo and… yeah. TextMate users know what I found. Undo only "undoes" one character at a time.

I love it. Why do I love it? Check out this snippet from a chat I had with Greg back in July:

Seth:

You had seven items. BBEdit can already do 6.5 of them, almost exactly the same way that TM does it. BBEdit's problem is that they don't present their features very well.

Greg:

y.

Seth:

Actually, 5.5 of them. Their prefs are certainly more complex than TM's. They can reduce them, but they can't eliminate them.

Greg:

i'm not surprised

Seth:

I can't stand TM's undo feature, though. Undoing one character at a time is nuts.

Seth:

At least you can hold it down for fast repeat.

All that just to point out that I've felt exactly the same way for a long time.

There's way more to this story, though. Erik's post touched off another battle in the editor wars, which have raged for decades. Unfortunately for Erik, it doesn't seem that he knew people would get so fired up about it. (See the comments on Erik's page.)

Allan, TextMate's creator, responded there on the site. As did a zillion other people. Back and forth, back and forth. Someone named MJD said:

Something that really turns me off TextMate is the way Allan Odgaard is constantly attacks BBEdit, Barebones, and Rich Siegel. There is no need for it. Especially the attacks on Rich. Try standing on the merits of your own program rather than belittling another.

Allan and his friend Jacob Rus both denied that Allan has attacked BBEdit, Bare Bones, or Rich.

Has anybody read Allan's weblog's version of an acceptance speech for his Apple Design Award? You could say this is his definitive link, it's where he tells the story of winning the award — an award which is a huge honor for any mac developer. In it, he points to a picture of himself that also happens to include a man getting sick, and he says, "no, the guy getting sick is not Mr. Siegel."

I know of plenty of other little bashes on BBEdit, Bare Bones, and Rich. Some published, some not, but that comment in his weblog post is probably the most telling. It looks to this outsider like Allan wants TextMate to succeed almost as much as he wants BBEdit to fail and Rich to be hurt somehow.

Allan: the mac platform is doing well, but the developer community is still pretty small. You have to assume that if you say something, it's going to be quoted and re-quoted. Is your business plan really based around mocking Rich, claiming that Bare Bones is just a sales-oriented company that contracts out all the hard work, and poking fun at other independent developers?

OK, I'm tired of this battle already. It's time for this code monkey to climb back into his tree and finish the next language module.

(Note: please see the BBEdit Disclaimer.)

Misbehavin' Firefox

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 16:26:16 GMT

Firefox is being really obnoxious this morning (actually, this started at about 11:00 last night). It refuses to run!

I run both the Firefox 2 alpha called BonEcho (nightly builds) and Firefox 1.5.0.4 (release vesion). I run them with separate profiles, so they can run at the same time. The only extension in 1.5 is the Venkman, but BonEcho has a bunch of developer-related plugins installed.

As of last night, neither of them will finish launching. The profile manager opens first so I can choose a profile. After choosing a profile the main browser window opens with nothing in it: just a blank title bar and a big white window. Then comes the SPOD. After five minutes, my MBP's fan was running at full blast: clearly, Firefox had it's foot on the gas but was stuck in the mud and going nowhere fast.

Both versions of Firefox do exactly the same thing. Yet, they work fine if I start up with a new profile.

I don't WANT to use a new profile. All of my login info, bookmarks, history, etc., etc., etc. are in the old profiles! Yes, I know how to migrate them, but that's a pain in the butt!

(I had to resort to posting this through Safari... which has already crashed on me once. Good thing I actually did the writing in BBEdit!)

Information Research Weblog: 'gender' vs 'sex', and the English Language

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 21:34:34 GMT

In the Information Research Weblog, Tom Wilson has written a little about use of the terms 'gender' and 'sex', and the suffering their misuse has caused to the English language:

The Style Manual for the journal has the following entry:

gender

use sex when referring to male/female categories in data analysis. 'Gender identifies the relations between women and men. Gender relations vary from place to place and over time; they often change in response to altering circumstances. (Sex, by contrast, identifies the biological difference between women and men, which does not change.)' http://www.dfid.gov.uk/aboutdfid/files/glossary_g.htm

I wish that I could persuade all journal editors to adopt this stance, perhaps the poor old English language would then not need to suffer quite so much.

Anyone who knows me knows that I enjoy this sort of language nit-picking.

With that nit picked, though, let me pick a bone with Tom's comments. Two bones, in fact.

First, did Tom stop to think for even a second about whether or not the English language deserves to have its suffering alleviated?! English is a rebellious, lawless, and nearly unfathomable language. It knows no rules, only (as I've told Flip many times) 'general tendencies.' I'm not disposed to doing it any favors.

Second, did Tom ever ask the English language if it likes be anthropomorphized that way? What if it prefers to think of itself as an inanimate!?

David Baron: The danger of extensions (in Firefox)

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 16:04:13 GMT

David Baron is a key developer behind Mozilla and Firefox. Yesterday he posted something about Firefox extensions that carries a message similar to something I was going to post today. He said,

I've been concerned for a while about the quality of Firefox extensions, and I'd like to explain why.

To start, I think one of the original motivations for having an extensions system in Firefox was to reduce demands for feature additions that are only used by a small number of people or are experimental. I have no problem with this. What I'm concerned about is that extensions are being promoted to large numbers of users as one of the advantages of Firefox. I think this may come back to haunt the Mozilla community.

I'm under the impression that extensions are used quite commonly, perhaps even beyond the more technical users of Firefox. This means that problems with extensions change user perception of quality of Mozilla products as a whole. But extensions are not of the same quality as the applications they extend.

There's more, but that's enough to give you the gist of it. Basically, he's saying that Firefox extensions are likely to become a huge problem, if they're not already. He emphasizes one reason: the lack of deep and wide testing that the actual Mozilla code base receives.

You see, the Mozilla organization(s) and the user community promote extensions as the solution to everybody's needs. Firefox itself is kept lean, and users can install extensions to meet their needs in areas that aren't served by the default features of the browser. Unfortunately, most of these extensions are not written by the most experienced core developers (like David himself), but rather can be written by anybody, and the only testing they really get is by the people who install them.

I ran into a big problem with this last week. My biggest client reported that some major, AJAX-based features on their internal web site (built in Conversant) stopped working sometime last week, in Firefox. They still worked in Safari, and IE on Windows, but he couldn't get them to work in Firefox on the mac. (Which is where I do all of my first-round testing...)

He had installed a bunch of extensions. Extensions are promoted by Mozilla, and they offer loads of useful features, so why not? Right? Well, at my urging he removed all of his extensions, and the problem went away.

That's right: browser extensions were breaking web pages.

I don't know that David's wish for more extensive testing of plugins will really work or is realistic. There are too many extensions and too many possible combinations.

What we need is for the user community to be told, repeatedly, that Firefox extensions cause problems. They're great, but if you find a bug in a web site or the browser you should disable them and try again. In that way, they're like Haxies on the Mac: they're fun and useful, but use them at your own risk, and always assume that they might be the culprit behind any problem. (Extensions can change almost any behavior or service of the browser, and Haxies can do the same on the Mac.)

PMC Funding Review

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 16:35:00 GMT

June has been my worst month for Google Adsense revenue since I signed up last year. As of this moment, June was worth $8.35. May was worth only $8.85. April was worth $17.38. March was $22.59.

My overall traffic is up, with or without all the extra crawler traffic and spam-referrers. So the problem is not "lack of guests."

Let's see. How about sales through Amazon? Most pages on the site include links to Amazon on the right of the page, and all of the regular readers know that buying stuff from Amazon through links on this site are a great way to help me raise money for the PMC without costing them an extra penny. Hmm... revenue for June, to date: $1.29. Nope, that's not going to help very much. May was $11.50, that's a little better. (Just 521 more more months like that and I'll reach my $6,000 goal! Woo hoo!) April wasn't bad: $38.14.

Sarcasm ahead...

This all makes sense, actually. All ad and Amazon revenue is being donated to the PMC, and the rest of my PMC fundraising is also way down. So of course, guests to [tw] would want to be very sparing with their ad clicks. I mean, it's just cancer. There are only so many clicks to go around, and it's not like Amazon sells anything besides books, right?

OK, enough with the sarcasm. I know that at least part of the problem is that I've talked a lot about my cycling but very little about the PMC.

If you want to help out, you can read about why I'm doing this, and then please go make a donation. Any amount from $10 to $1000 is wonderful!

(If you've donated in the past, but aren't this year, would you care to tell me why?)

Lest you think I'm not really serious about the PMC, here's a link that shows every message I've posted that mentions the PMC.

Blogshares Addiction and Suggestions

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 11 Jun 2005 19:05:26 GMT

I've written up a longish post on Blogshares (the fantasy stock trading game based on weblogs-as-companies), including my problem with it, and how I think the game could be improved.

Not that anybody asked for my opinion.

Stupid Stupid Stupid

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 21:57:35 GMT

This afternoon I spent an hour writing a story about yesterday (which was a very good day), only to have my browser crash and take all the writing with it.

Just a couple hours earlier, I had mentioned an idea to Greg (suggested by someone else) that would prevent this very problem, but I hadn't had time to implement it yet.

Oy!!!

Did You Ever See Wayne's World, Dave?

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 24 May 2005 23:13:32 GMT

Reading the first few paragraphs of Dave Winer's recent essay on blogging and podcasting, one has to wonder if he ever saw the movie whose reference so offended him:

Today we see good reasons why both Apple and Google should be blogging.

For Apple, there's quite a bit of confusion on the blogs after their announcement last night of a podcasting client to be built into iTunes. As the designer of the functionality they're adding, I say this is a good move.

But the blogs are also carrying Jobs's offensive and misguided charac- terization of podcasts as the "Wayne's World of radio." He got it backwards. Wayne's World is fiction, podcasting is real. Of course a baby boomer who owns a movie studio is likely to see it this way. We were brought up on television, our thinking is rooted in the centralized monoculture of the 20th century.

I would guess that anybody who saw the movie knows that Jobs was referring to the Wayne's World cable-access show within the movie, not the movie itself. It was a home-made television show, by the people and for the people. A nearly perfect way to describe podcasting.

Comcast Toys With Me

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 15:42:54 GMT

When my internet connection goes down on pure-coding days, I write more code because there are no distractions.

When my connection goes down on days that I'm trying to negotiate a deal with some clients (today), and trying to meet a deadline on the implementation of a new type of site for another client (also today), I don't accomplish much of anything.

My 'high-speed' Comcast connection has been on-again, off-again, all day today. I'm obviously not the only one: when I called tech support to find out where the problem was, their phone system was overloaded. After a bunch of half-delivered voice prompts in their phone tree, a recorded voice finally cut in to state that they are overloaded with calls right now.

What, Exactly, Are They Praying For?

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 02 Apr 2005 20:58:39 GMT

The news is just full of drama, isn't it? NPR rode the Terry Schiavo wave just like all the rest of the news hounds, which is a bit sickening. Minutes after she died, everybody started focusing on the Pope's "eminent" demise.

Whether you read, listen to, or watch the news, you'll alway receive the same message: Catholics everywhere are praying for the pope.

What are they praying for, exactly? That the old man would live longer? Eww. That he would die soon? That doesn't seem likely, though it would surely be a blessing at this point.

Today as I perused recent entries on Planet Mozilla, I found this post from Gervase Markham. At first skim, he seemed to be expressing my thoughts precisely.

On second read, I almost choked. The whole "unconditional" thing gives me the willies. The idea of once-forgiven-always-saved is too easy. There are no guarantees.

(Now that I'm done writing this, I've realized that I don't like posting this kind of thing as much as I used to. It feels like I'm violating my own privacy!)

Nit

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 14:28:36 GMT

A nit I needed to pick: I hate it when I say something on a mailing list (or here on my own site), but the person to whom I am addressing my comments refuses to respond to me directly, instead responding to my comments in a message to another person. Subtle? Perhaps. Fair? Probably not.