Blog, not BCC

A friend of mine recently got hired to create an adult evening class on email etiquette. Always interested in offering my thoughts, I offered this suggestion for a rule of email ettiquette:

Do not include someone on a BCC list unless you are regularly sending them personal emails and the topic of your BCCed email is something they are DIRECTLY interested in.

Doing otherwise comes off to many people as if you are SPAMMING them. It feels impersonal. It can also be a nuisance to some people. They may not complain because they don’t want to risk damaging their relationship with you.

There are good alternatives.

You can address the email directly to the person. You can add a line at the top explaining that you thought the subject might interest him/her. You can use his/her name in that introductory line. This method has a personal touch. This method will make person will feel as if you are making an effort to stay in touch and be their friend.

If the alternative above is too much work you can set up a blog. Blogs are made for people who regularly want to tell people about what is on their mind. Blogs are free. Blogs are easy. If you can set up and use a web based email account, you will not have any trouble using a blog. Blogs are that easy. Blogs also come with RSS ( Really Simple Syndication ) built in. RSS updates people when a blog they subscribe to is updated. They can choose to see these updates in an RSS reader. They can also get these updates on a web page like their MSN, Google, or MyYahoo account pages. The important point is that with RSS they see updates of your thoughts when they choose to see them, not when you BCC them.

Blogs have the added benefit of making your insights available to the whole world as they will be published on the web. If you want something more private you can get a blog through a free service like LiveJournal.com where you can set who sees and who does not see your posts.

I’m not criticizing anyone with this post. I used to be a bit compulsive with BCC lists myself. Luckily I had some brave and tactful friends educate me to the fact such emails are not always appreciated.

If you are regularly in contact with a person and write on subjects that are of direct interest to them you are fine. If not, one of the two alternatives above will turn what feels like a spam into what feels like a warm gesture to stay in touch and preserve a friendship.

PETA: Artifical Meat: $1 Million Dollar Prize

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wants to pay a million dollars for fake meat — even if it has caused a “near civil war” within the organization.

The organization said it would announce plans on Monday for a $1 million prize to the “first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012.”

snip….

New Harvest, a nonprofit organization formed to promote the field, says on its Web site, “Because meat substitutes are produced under controlled conditions impossible to maintain in traditional animal farms, they can be safer, more nutritious, less polluting and more humane than conventional meat.”

Jason Matheny, a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University who formed New Harvest, said the idea of a prize for researchers was promising. Citing the example of the Ansari X Prize, a competition that produced the first privately financed human spacecraft, Mr. Matheny said, “they inspire more dollars spent on a research problem than the prize represents.”

Full Article

Over 10 billion animals a year in the US are killed for meat. Vegans are less than a fraction of a single percentage point of the US population. The population of the US isn’t going vegan anytime soon. This research reward has the potential to save billions of animals the horrors of the factory farm, while still letting orgs like PETA hammer away at the AR and Animal Welfare philosophies on other fronts.

This is a very practical move that gives something to everyone, a “win-win” situation.

Money well spent!

Got my first MP3 player!

I got my first MP3 player!

The SanDisk Sansa m260 MP3 Player 4GB is completely GNU/Linux friendly. It is basically a sophisticated USB drive. You can move files on and off of it using whatever file management tools you use for anything else. It only took me about 5 min to install an extension on Ubuntu so that Sound Juicer would rip into MP3 instead of OGG files. Another 5 minutes to install EasyTag so that I could edit the ID3 tags MP3 players use to read and ( more importantly ) list MP3 files.

The controls are very easy to learn, you can get 85% there with 10 min of playing around. Nice size read out with no glare. Controls are nice and big for people who have real hands ( think about that Apple engineers! ).

It has a built in microphone. I can make recordings. I can listen to FM radio. It even has a stop watch mode. I wish I would have gotten an MP3 player sooner. I was so amazed that this thing that looks like a desk toy given away at a business conference has the sound and feature set of expensive stereo systems that typically take over a corner of a room. I’ve used Sony Walkman’s in the past and portable CD players. This MP3 player is so much less awkward. Wow.

All of this and it only cost me about $50. I got it refurbished. The Sansa m260 was over $200 new. Life is good if you can wait until you have the latest technology.

I remember a few years ago I wanted a key chain USB drive when they were new. There were so many choices I procrastinated about buying one. They went from $200, down to about $70, and I finally got a 1 GB USB key chain drive for *FREE* as part of a tech store promotional.

Sometimes it pays to wait.

I’m sure someday MP3 players will be found in boxes of Cracker Jacks 🙂