Bits and pieces

[firstfrost]

• MH is officially unsupported now, but for the moment it still works. I still defend it, though - much like defending the virtues of zephyr to a previous uberboss who figured that preferring zephyr to jabber was just due to fear of change. (Okay, I admit, I do have a lot of resistance to change, but - class help!). As a card carrying member of the Creaky Old Mail Client Fan Club, I felt compelled to write a hack for sad Debathena RMAIL users. Which goes through MH. Hah.
• Summer is not my season, and the days that the N42 AC went on hiatus were NOT APPRECIATED. The living room at home does manage to stay cooler than outside, and I seem to be okay at a high room temperature when I can monopolize a fan, but I splatted myself in not even that much sun at Artbeat, and had to later go into emergency headache mitigation mode and punted on justom's Cyrano. (Other than that, though, yay for dim sum and script reading for desireearmfeldt's birthday, even if she had the poor judgement to be born in a stupid hot month.).
• I did finish a junior project, a string bag to be stored in my laptop bag for post-work grocery shopping: I haven't done much crochet, but I do appreciate its virtues for structural projects. Probably the thing I find most disconcerting is that my knitting instincts are to pack a project into the bag on the needles - but keeping the hook on the one lonely loop when you put it away is tough! I assume real crocheters take the hook out first - do you make the final loop bigger before packing it?
• I'm fascinated by the sentence-opener "yeah, no", and I've been trying to work out its meaning from context. Now, I *say* it, and it doesn't confuse me when people say it, but that doesn't mean I could tell you the exact difference in meaning (or, more like tone) between a sentence that starts with "yeah, no" and the same sentence without those words. I think the thing that fascinates me most is, in fact, that I am trying to figure out the meaning of something that I already seem to know - I just don't know how to articulate it. The best that I could come up with was "agreement and expansion" - that is, "I agree with that, but want to add this additional bit as well", but I'm not sure that's right. I also wondered whether it was a local idiom (like "frob" and the MIT variant of "hosed"), but now that I've Googled for it, it seems to have been noticed/analyzed in Australia first. Ooh, here is some discussion with a Professor of Linguistics, in which he says it's used in three ways: "The literal agrees before adding another point, the abstract defuses a comment and the textual lets the speaker go back to an earlier point." I am pleased that I seem to have nailed the "literal" definition, even if I missed the other two.

Comments

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

jason237 and I got interested in this a while ago and spent some time dissecting it. The way I see it used most frequently is is "yeah (I understand what you're saying and I agree that) no (that's wrong/appalling)".

[shumashi.livejournal.com]

I think I tend to use "yeah" to mean "I heard you," and don't always mean I actually agree. Just a listening flavor word, like "uh-huh."

[navrins]

I agree with both of the above. That is, "Yeah, no, not $statement" sometimes means, "Yes, I agree with you that not $statement," and other times means, "I hear and understand what you're saying, but I think $otherstatement." $otherstatement usually implies $statement, but sometimes it's a significant change of subject:

"I don't want Chinese food."
"Yeah, no, we have to figure out how we're going to support MH users!" (with the implied "it doesn't matter what we want for lunch; this other thing is more important.")

[eric-the-ted.livejournal.com]

No more MH??? But... but... I don't want to join the 21st century!

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Yeah, no, me neither. :)

It does seem that the population of MH users (and the population of RMAIL users even more so) is nearly entirely cruft, so they're not the people whose opinions drive policy. :-\

[chengesu.livejournal.com]

I'll happily join your "old geezers who prefer MH" club. I was only recently forced away from xmh by the retiring of the sun dialups, so now I use exmh. Sure, I'm resisting change, but it's familar, simple, and fast.

Also, you kids, get off my lawn!

[kelkyag]

Yes, when dropping a crochet project I pull the last loop a bit bigger and drop it in my bag sans hook. Or just drop it in the bag as is, and the worst that happens is I have to pull out and redo a few stitches, and dig the hook up from the bottom of the bag.

I really should give up rmail, but I don't want to find and reformat all my mail files all over the place.

[bluepapercup]

Yep. Another vote for "pull the loop really big and drop in bag without the hook in".

:)

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Reformatting is a little tedious, but with emacs macros it's not so bad. More like a project for an afternoon than a project for a week. Also note, it's the incorporation of new mail that breaks; you should still be able to look at existing archives indefinitely.

[mathhobbit.livejournal.com]

I've migrated to pine and can share the conversion macro for the archives if you like. (Not fast, but simple.)

I pull the loop bigger and leave the hook in it. The hook usually manages to wiggle free, but sometimes it doesn't!

zephyr

[hr-macgirl.livejournal.com]

I miss zephyr. IM that worked via tty or GUI.

MacZephyr also prodded Eudora to check mail. No need to obsessively force mail client to check manually. I still rely on zephyr via tty to tell me when new mail arrives, even though this means I've had to leave my mailbox "split" between IMAP & Exchange, while everyone else in my department has done away with IMAP.

I'd be curious to know which former über-boss objected to zephyr.

Another argument about Jabber: nobody really knows who runs it! Unless it was part of the recent reorganization, Jabber falls under ISDA's purview. (ISDA? who?)

Re: zephyr

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Zephyr, IMAP, and Eudora - all unloved now. :}

It was one of the "group lunch with Jerry" things where he was expressing some disdain for zephyr and pine, as antiquated and un-GUI; I enthused about zephyr, and did get him to come back to my cube, where I demonstrated asking questions to -c help and getting nigh-instant answers, as a benefit. Okay, I did pick questions that I knew people could answer.

Re: zephyr

[hr-macgirl.livejournal.com]

Is this where I say I do not miss Jerry??

I was part of the group interviewing prospective VP candidates, and I remember clearly Larry Benedict saying that they weren't looking for someone with vision. Well they surely got that lack of vision from Jerry!

For me, though, my reluctance began at the interview session where Jerry claimed to be a loyal and involved alum. I had with me a report that indicated just how UNinvolved with MIT he had been. I know that people can tend to exaggerate during interviews, but he staked his whole candidacy on it.

Jerry would have never gotten fhe job today. Terry Stone would have seen to that.

[desireearmfeldt]

I apologize on behalf of July.

(After dinner, we were discussing whether this year's July stretch of heat is unusual for historical July in Boston. We did not actually look it up, though presumably one could... I always *think* both July and August are usually "hot all the time," but I think I also always turn out to be wrong. :) )

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

I think this is a hotter summer than usual - more familiar to me in July is hot stretches alternating with nicer days, and there have been fewer of the nicer days.

(Last year, June was in the 50s for a long time! This year, June was warm...)

Here's a widget that does comparative temperatures, including by state:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/cag3.html
and it confirms my feeling that this summer is hotter (well, June was hotter - July isn't done), and that last year was generally a colder summer (June and July apparently were; August not as much).

[desireearmfeldt]

Well, last summer had the June of all rain all the time that did a number on the local farms, so I readily believe it was unusually cool...

[twitch124.livejournal.com]

I'm still using MH, too. It was my first email program and I don't want to let go of it.

[jdbakermn.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I'm familiar with a different "Yeah, no" than is being discussed here. Mine tends to be more along the lines of "Yeah (I understand what you're saying and one might *think* that, but...), no (you're sadly deluded), $explanation_of_what_is_really_going_on".

[ironrat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this is basically my understanding of it, as well. "Valid points/evidence, wrong conclusion."

[brilit.livejournal.com]

I occasionally have ranted at people who talk about how great all these new instant message things are, like twitter and all that. We had the same thing (actually better!) 20+ years ago in zephyr!

A comment on the yeah, no

[(Anonymous)]

I tend to use it sarcastically; seeming to agree then immediately disagreeing. I've also heard the 'yeah' part used as 'language filler' sort of the way valley girls put 'like' in front of everything. e.g. In response to the comment "stripes and polka-dots go together" you could equally use "like, no!" and "yeah, no" though the first one would be more passionate, and the second would be more sarcastic and delivered in a flat tone of voice.