Good Housekeeping

Ah, the chance to sneak in a dual-purpose subject line! This turned out
to be a more detailed message than I had intended, but I don't really say
much here anymore, so I guess it averages out.

FIRST: For archives fans, the web site (http://www.roughdraft.org) is
updated -- in the JDS section -- with traffic through August. My full-
text index is rebuilding now. (But see below for cool tips on another
way of searching.)

We have a lot of messages! We are gradually creeping toward the limit of
disk storage I rent to house the list and its "roughdraft.org" domain.

(Our sprawling b-fish ranch is 300 megabytes in size; additional chunks
of 100 megabyte increments can be had, but are rather expensive, so I've
been avoiding expansion, even though I know we are inevitably running out
of room. The present cost is about $125/month to keep this circus up and
running, and I try to keep expenses in check. This #$%^# ailing economy
is causing many of us in NYC to tighten our belts a bit, though we all
fervently hope that prosperity is just around the corner.)

This is not intended to cause angst ... nor to panhandle for spare change
... and in fact, if capacity genuinely becomes an issue, I have already
taken steps to allow me to quickly migrate "roughdraft.org" onto a system
that (seriously!) sits atop the fireplace in the living room. It has
lots of disk space and is actually faster than several systems that
support "roughdraft" now. But unlike the present deal, there's no
redundancy, no automated backup, no 24 x 7 nurturing, so it's a trade-off
I will only make after careful and cautious analysis. It will mean more
support work for me, so we'll see what works best. But it's encouraging
to see that we are growing at a nice rate.

I mention all this as a curiosity and amusement. The bananafish
"historical record" is pretty detailed, perhaps obsessively so (!), and
it pleases me that we have an archive available to newcomers, old-timers,
and browsers who are not even subscribed.

I promised a cool alternate way of searching the archives.

We are thoroughly indexed on google.com: This means anyone can do complex
searches against the archives, with infinitely more precision and power
than I can provide on my wimpy search page. As an example, I decided to
find a very old message I wrote about Hemingway and Salinger, in which I
specifically compared Hemingway's Nick Adams with the Seymour of "A
Perfect Day for Bananafish." I did this search on google.com:

    +Hemingway +Hearted +Seymour +O'Connor site:roughdraft.org

Google makes it easy to cut to the chase. That last element is the most
crucial in terms of getting to OUR stuff. With the "site:" command, you
essentially turn Google into a custom "roughdraft.org" index, forcing it
to limit search results to "roughdraft.org" only. As for the other
search terms, adding a "+" in front of a word means that it is REQUIRED
in the results. And those of you who like Boolean pretzel logic probably
know that Google interprets spaces between words as "AND."

Of course I am eccentric, so I find it delightful to go back and browse
in years past, particularly to savor past messages from old friends who,
for one or another reason, have quit the list....

Now, I must take this opportunity to repeat an earlier plea. If you send
mail to the list, please do two very simple steps.

Request one: turn off HTML-style mail, which forces messages to be more
than twice as long as they otherwise would need to be, such that HTML
messages appear as this:

    ONE MESSAGE, CONTAINING:

    (a) your mail as text;

    (b) your mail in HTML,
        which, with formatting,
        is usually much longer
        than plain text is.

Request two: When you reply to someone else's message, PLEASE take a
moment to cut out those parts of the prior message not directly relevant
to your answer. Too many people write brief replies, where, following
their new message, we get wholesale chunks of one or more prior messages.

With mail software that is either primitive or fancy, it's not such a
difficult maneuver to slice out the old lines of message(s) that do not
have explicit bearing on what you are saying. It's a good neighbor
policy, and it will help me keep disk use under control. Just pay
attention before you hit the SEND button.

*

SECOND: I said at the top that there were two parts to this mail. The
other "housekeeping" item is: on eBay, I just snagged a copy of an
original February, 1948, Good Housekeeping magazine that features the
uncollected "A Girl I Knew." I have a bleary photocopy from years ago,
excavated at a library, but I'm delighted to have obtained an actual
original magazine. It hasn't arrived yet in the mail, but I expect it
any day. OK, OK, it's not Kim's very impressive report of the $15,000
pair of JDS letters, but I love immersing myself in a postwar magazine,
with all its evocative advertisements and ephemera.

I know I've worn out my welcome by now, and must depart. So, go forth
and enjoy the archive, and try out some creative Google searches!

Cheers,

--tim

-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
Received on Thu Oct 16 02:45:15 2003