This goes back a long time. A long time ago I didn’t access the internet at home (ya this happened), and had to go to my father’s office to do as much, this involved a weekend excursion every Saturday, when I did stuff on the ‘net. This of course is in sharp contrast from now, when I can’t get away from the net even if I tried, what with being paid to check e-mails, and being graded with abilities to crawl the ‘net. So basically, compared to the me a long time ago, I am currently a ‘net demon, or a ‘net daemon, depending on how well you like CS puns. But ya that being said, back then it was OK for me to not answer e-mails for large swaths of time, something about not getting to them often enough. Fast forward a few years, and I had a ‘net connection, albeit a slow one, at home, and I could answer e-mails day and night should I chose to, I however eventually went into this lazy state where I never really did, it just wasn’t worth the effort if I didn’t really need to. This changed when I met a few people from my past, realized not receiving responses usually sucked, and began meticulously replying every e-mail which could be replied to, at my peak, any e-mail sent to me, was generally replied to within the next 6 hours.
Fast e-mail replies are a good thing, I enjoy them, however they don’t always work out. Receiving over 20 repliable e-mail messages a day, pretty much means every time I am sitting at a computer, and check my e-mail, I am guaranteed to have at least one new e-mail looking for attention. And post being a TA for a course which is actually hard for some people, and which has actual issues with pretty much everything, getting e-mails and replying to e-mails is as much a job as anything else. Well folks, what’s my job, remains my job, that being said, I am anouncing an end to my previous e-mail policy. I will reply to almost every e-mail I can send a reply to, if I can’t, I won’t. Pretty much everyone knows that an e-mail like “Hi, I bought a new _” can’t be replied to in very much detail, and it will sit in my mailbox for a while beofre getting replied. I know this is a bad thing, I expect replies to my e-mails, instant ones at that, but honestly not many people send those out, and I really don’t want to think of replies to certain e-mails when I receive them.
In other news, I just got done with writing stuff out about public-key cryptography and the stuff that goes with it. Observations on doing so, and from past attempts at reading cryptographic algorithms seems to indicate that abstract algebra seems to help with most of this stuff, which makes me wonder why the CS department isn’t passing all CS concentrators through abstract algebra, because honestly writing out slides which explain abstract algebra at a lightening quick pace isn’t very simple, and I am honestly not that good at it. Another observation invoves the fact that I had to, in one way or the other, refer to the JCE, something I wasn’t very happy about, because I really don’t know that much about it, and it is another one of those Java things that uses strings in weird ways. But more so than just a design resentment, some of my dislike for JCE is far more deep seated, and stems from an inability to use it in the past, especially because it was placed under highly restrective export control regulations, and I really wasn’t in a country where they allowed the use of JCE. Now this should not be a problem, because I understand some of their reasons for doing so, but it still makes me wonder about how many things I do not really want to place on slides or other things because of personal dislike, and whether this is even fair to anyone. Key Eschrow mechanisms for instance, is a topic I feel should be on any cryptography lecture, not only because it is important, but because at one point in time, there were multiple countries considering its use, so that people could be assured privacy, and yet law enforcement would not be hindered. I am not sure how this works in the current scenario.
I am staying in Providence for Spring Break, which is another 3 weeks away, I really want time to do stuff, and most people I know are heading home for the break, which sort of makes sense.
Ze Panda
. I need to watch more Gilbert and Sullivan, as a recent viewing of the Pirates of Penzance, proved. This was meant to be a huge, elaborate entry, but I just got back from the housing lottery, and this gets posted up there.