Parcel tracking is such a rewarding hobby. It’s a bit like trainspotting, but with a present to open at the end of it. Seeing it arrive at each port makes me feel like Edmond Dantes’ pal papa Morrel, the kindly merchant in Comte de Monte-Cristo, poring over the shipping news each morning for the fate of the Phareon.

Hmm, Shipping News is of course also a novel by E. Annie Proulx, punning on shipping the news. Quite clever really. And the obligatory film of it taught me how to write a headline too:

Publisher: Now, have a look outside, what do you see?
Protagonist: HORIZON FILLS WITH DARK CLOUDS?
Publisher: no, no, no. IMMINENT STORM THREATENS VILLAGE.
Protagonist: But what if no storm comes?
Publisher: VILLAGE SPARED FROM DEADLY STORM.

My parcel arrives in ten minutes! bisous

I greatly enjoyed reading Ten Lessons I wish I had been Taught by the late mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota just now. On aging he quipped:

“If your papers are no good, they will say, “What did you expect? He is a fixture!” and if an occasional paper of yours is found to be interesting, they will say, “What did you expect? He has been working at this all his life!“

A very pleasing wee bon mot, and with a structure that automatically made me think of the fight in Of Mice & Men. I couldn’t recall more than the gist of Steinbeck’s “damned if you do” passage so I had a quick skim through and found:

“Never did seem right to me. S’pose Curley jumps a big guy an’ licks him. Ever’body says what a game guy Curley is. And s’pose he does the same thing and gets licked. Then ever’body says the big guy oughtta pick somebody his own size, and maybe they gang up on the big guy. Never did seem right to me.”

A quick google reveals that “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” is a rather old idea, and was first penned in a rant about the bible by Lorenzo Dow, American evangelist (d. 1834):

“You can and you can’t - you shall and you shan’t - You will and you won’t - And you will be damned if you do - And you will be damned if you don’t.”

Very well said. Reminds me of The Zutons - You Will You Won’t, you do you don’t.

Gian-Carlo Rota → Steinbeck → Lorenzo Dow → The Zutons

hmm, friday mind-a-wandering. bisousss

A couple of days ago I posted about short email addresses you can say over the phone, noting that Gmail usernames have a 6-character minimum. It later dawned on me that there’s a whole new revenue stream hidden in there. Google could sell all those 3,4,5 letter email addresses, each tied to a pro-account offering with a monthly cost.

How many short usernames are there?
3 letter addresses: 46656
4 letter addresses: 1679616
5 letter addresses: 60466176

So ~62m possible 3,4,5 letter alphanumeric names. At a guess, let’s say that 2m are desirable. Handily enough, Gmail has a few hundred million users, so getting 2m to sign up for a pro account with their choice of short username shouldn’t be too difficult. They could pop some other features in the pro account I’m sure, like increased storage. But the hook? defs that shortname.

And the cost? $10 a month. So $10*12months*2m users… oooh just a nice wee $240m/year. Quite good really.

Theres nothing worse than trying to relay your email address down the phone one letter at a time “…i…a…s” “ok so that’s, i,a,f” “no, s” “f?” “india, alpha, sierra”, sighhh. So firstname.lastname just ain’t workin’ for me, they’re too long. I wanted a new short address just for using over the phone.

Gmail addresses have to be 6 characters or more, so first I tried some shorter versions of my name, but hmm, all taken. I tried various initials and numbers too, but numbers? it looked all eww and spammy.

So I went through the letters of my name looking for patterns, and settled on MMGRGR [at] gmail.com …it’s Matthias McGReGoR, both sequential and repeating …yum. Aaaand it should save a good minute or two each time I say it. Quite good really.

ps. email me